Linux: Xorg vs. Wayland

I find this discussion strange. I use wayland. I’ve done so far over a year by now. In fact, I’ve used wayland on the Laptop before this one as well (Gnome DE, Arch Linux, before that Ubuntu). I can capture my screen and had none of the issues stated here, half of which are not wayland related (power, hibernation etc.).

The two things that are missing for my workflow are global hotkeys so that I can mute discord without having to alt tab to the window, and a bit more reliable copy-paste (though that may also be a separate issue, basically CTRL+C doesn’t always work the first time). Meanwhile Wayland in exchange gives me great 3-finger-gestures (I tried the ones on X, they did not reach the same quality) and a smoother visual experience in general, both of which have a vastly higher impact on my workflow than global hotkeys and minor copypasta issues.

So to speak of Wayland being a downgrade doesn’t quite track for me. At this point we’re at a “Pros and Cons” scenario on choosing between the two already and more and more XDG Desktop portals are being used, which further reduce any wayland related issues.

And Gnome defaulted me to wayland, so statements of “Nothing boots into Wayland” confounds me further. Like, sure if your setup doesn’t support it, but inferring that your special case somehow means Wayland in general is not very quickly approaching being the default everywhere and working well there is confusing.

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The last time I attempted wayland was when I upgraded my OpenSuse to KDE 5.27 plasma a week ago, tried wayland session, and nothing happens. The attempt before was for Ubuntu on a different computer.

As stated previously. Most popular distros support both. Gnome makes it easy to use what works best for you at user login.

Appreciate the perspectives from all sides, use what you prefer. Let’s call it done from here. These things work themselves out in development. This conversation is not going anywhere productive.

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I ran Wayland on openSUSE in 5.27 for several weeks (on FW) without issues and enjoyed the per monitor fractional scaling support, but finally returned to XOrg, since I need reliable screen capture and Barrier. Hardly “nothing happens” though.