Personally I have been unimpressed with Wayland. Configuration, Stability and the ability to easily record my screen makes me stick with Xorg over Wayland (I am using an AMD GPU with Debian 11).
This coupling is one of the biggest design faults of Wayland. The platform-specific functionality is no longer encapsulated in a stand-alone piece of software - the compositor now must do everything, because Wayland trusts only it to do anything privileged. This leads to less choice and more restrictions. If you wanted to get X11 running on e.g. your phone, you would get the Xorg server Android app, then run the window manager you want, then run the applications you want. This is not possible in Wayland: there would need to be one per-platform app per compositor / window manager, so you would need e.g. Weston for Linux, Weston for Android, Weston for iOS, sway for Linux, sway for Android, sway for iOS, ...
I tried Wayland for around four years (GNOME, sway, KDE), almost daily. I have a multiple monitor setup. I always had to switch back to Xorg for several reasons, like:
- iBus CJK support was horrible. Languages like English, Russian or Spanish don't need that but Japanese/Chinese needs it. Things like the suggestions window was completely broken (misplaced and disappeared randomly). I used several tricks to work around it but it was quite uncomfortable.
- Wine refusing to work half of the time (even with the Virtual Desktop)
- VSync not working with games (making my GPU go 100%)
- Applications crashing for no apparent reason.
- XWayland crashing completely... Even the whole compositor would crash randomly making me lose all my work.
- But the worst thing was the drawing tablet. It was completely broken. Things like pen sensibility (quite important to get details right), screen locking (it's useless to draw with less than half of the tablet!) and top buttons.
I used Wayland since it was really smooth with an old Intel GPU. The Xorg experience was quite unstable (I couldn't find the right compositor configuration). One day I was quite fed up, got a new rig with an AMD GPU and removed Wayland completely. Compared with Wayland, even with its quirks, Xorg just works.
Staying on x11 makes more sense unless using Debian unstable or testing.
While the first commit on the Wayland git was in 2008, it's client and server APIs weren't considered stable until 2013 and then DE support for it only really picked up in 2016 since they were built around X11 from the beginning.
If you were an Nvidia user then your options for DEs were limited to the ones that supported EGLStreams and you didn't get XWayland hardware acceleration or support for Webrender in Firefox until Nvidia started support DMA-buf in June of last year. Nvidia didn't support GBM until October of this year but it had an annoying memory leak which caused issues with programs not wanting to launch of launching as black squares. On top of that, the code that compositors and XWayland used to detect whether to use GBM or EGLStreams didn't work at first and XWayland windows launched as transparent so they needed to be updated. It wasn't until these beta drivers, which came out this month, that I'm able to do everything I'm supposed to be able to do in a Wayland session and the major hurdles in Wayland adoption on Nvidia have been removed. Kwin already removed it's EGLStreams backend because it never worked well to begin with and the drivers will only improve from now on.
We have quite different experiences I guess. On my side I just see that the recurring graphical issues that I had with X11 are fixed. Everything is super smooth, no tearing and really stable. Bonus points some of the side initiatives also improved a lot the ecosystem, like Pipewire.
I also Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V files between directories in the file browser but not every week. I can also drag and drop them (move or copy). Everything other use of the clipboard happens less than once per month.
If left click / middle click doesn't work between all Wayland applications I can wait until all toolkits support it or X11 is removed from Linux.
It isn't just the weird bugs. It not being able to share and/or record my screen. Everything works fine with X11, nothing works properly with Wayland. For I know there is some way of faffing with it to get it to work but what I have now works perfectly and I see no reason to change.
Slack, Discord and a bunch of other programs also don't work. They work fine in X11. I can screen share a window in wayland but not the whole screen. I frequently need to share the whole screen (when teaching people how to certain tasks).
The fact that I had to spend well over an hour trying to find something that works means it isn't ready. The existing software works perfectly in X11 and I see no point in trying wayland again anytime soon.
https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...
> So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.
> ...
> So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86.
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I think that to the extent there's confusion, it's because a lot of people (myself included) don't understand the project structure of Xorg. I honestly still don't know what the distinction is between these projects, I just know that around this time people started saying that it was time to switch to Wayland.
This seems a bit like developer hubris to me, a bit like when commercial developers are overconfident in deprecating things without understanding usage in the field. It's somewhat blind to actual usage. It isn't dead in that sense.
Now, the maintainer might not want to do it, and that's within their rights. But it's possible that somebody will step up to do any maintenance work. Which would probably be minimal but not zero.