Linux

X11 is stable and maintained but not getting new features. It will generally work well for most people but over time it will and is drifting to obsolesence.

Wayland has some flaws but is not basically stable and feature rich enough for most people to use. It is not a complete drop in for X11 and won't necessairly ever will be but for the vast majorory of desktop users it is.

The problem with Wayland is that there are still issues for people with graphics drivers. Nvidia in particular has had serious issues with it although they are improving.

I personally still use X11 with my KDE set up because i still have problems woth Wayland. Thwyre not as bad as they were but its still not quite stable above for me.

If you use a laptop with high dpi and a docking station with a screen with another resolution. Wayland is able to hotplug you running session.

You can run either. The truth is depending on what you want to do, what hardware you running, and software versions you have available, your experience will be very different.

Personally I run X11 because I'm used to it. It's extremely stable and the failure points are well known.

The waylandism design really bothers me, and so does the attitude of waylandists. Throwing stuff that works away for no reason, chasing some sort of Android trash ecosystem dream that's never going to happen.

Whatever man, you're taking xgamma away from me over my dead body. cocks shotgun. Come and get it.

Multiple screens and clipboard changes. Wayland has a lot more security built in. Keeps applications from seeing what other applications are doing.

Scaling issues, again multi monitor.

The ones that affect me: Remmina RDP sessions using muliple monitors. I have to launch it with

GDK_BACKEND=x11 remmina

Libreoffice displays terrible on any screen that is a different resolution than the one orginally launched.

It too can be forced to use x11 as a backend.

And so through the xwayland tools it really has been fairly painless even with these issues.

I still struggle with running GUI programs as root, and cutting & pasting between windows in Wayland. Those are the big things holding me back from switching completely.

The difference is that some things work on one and some things don’t work on the other.

For example: the literal whole way you’ve ever been able to use a computer will only work on x11. That’s because x11 comes directly from the lineage of human computer interface that you’re used to. Everything just works. Unless…

Counter example: new stuff is phasing out (or has already phased out) x11 support! Kde and gnome for example, are Wayland only in the most recent builds. That doesn’t mean your rich copying and accessibility tools still work. They just didn’t implement those parts.

If you believe that open source is an impenetrable monolith that cannot be changed then you’d better get on the Wayland ship now and figure out how to deal with its shortcomings before you’re left behind.

If you believe that open source projects can respond to their users and improve, stick with x11. It works and someone will support it.

My Xpenguin won't work in Wayland 😢