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.

I'm a bit surprised you didn't find much searching the web, because this is one of the most hot topics in Linux and everyone has an opinion and discussions are endless.

I use Wayland for years by now and it improved vastly during that time. One of the advantages over X11 I appreciate is the better handling of multiple monitors, with different resolution, refreshrate and VRR in effect. This was simply not possible in X11 in this form. I like its more secure by design, in relation to keyboard input. X11 can read all keyboard input by any application at any time. Wayland works different here, but for the time being I enabled X11 compatibility for this in KDE, until a all applications support Wayland fully.

Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything! is more of an anti Wayland posting, but its good to have a view from all angles. So I post it here.

Have in mind that Wayland improved in recent years drastically. Searching the web is either full of Ai nonsense or old content about the old state of Wayland. Also it depends which desktop environment you are using, because some are better at Wayland than others; notably KDE is on the front regarding Wayland. So even if some Wayland features are already developed, does not mean that all desktop environments supports them already.

One thing that's annoying in Wayland is new window placement where app can't control it at all*. Wayland would place it on a screen it wants. This gets hugely annoying when you have more than one monitor and/or virtual desktops and you'd want to restore billion of browser windows, for example.

• A solution is being worked on, luckily

Honestly, on a running system with average hardware, the average user won't notice any difference. Depending on your de/wm of choice on x11, you may have to swap to something similar but different, but there it. Depending on what you used, something will require different solutions, like screenshots, but 90+% of stuff, there is no difference.

On my 2014 PC I'm using Fedora 44 with KDE, which defaults to Wayland: not problems whatsoever, but some applications say "Wayland support is experimental, beware".

I switched to X11 after a suggestion to debug some issues with a game. The issues was not fixed, all the other applications I've tried are still working flawlessly. PLUS the KDE night light feature is working (was not in Wayland). So I stayed with X11.

On my wife MacBook (2015) I installed Kinoite, defaults to Wayland. Everything works, but Rustdesk renders VERY small. I have not tried X11 on that, and will not try it.

Try both with all your applications and setups and choose the smoother experience. Make security a secondary priority: if it was the first you have less attack surface sticking to terminal only.

It depends heavily on your hardware and workflow.

Wayland can be a great experience and I personally enjoy how smooth it feels, but I acknowledge that many people run into some problems.

As someone who has used X11 and Wayland, it doesn't matter for the typical user. If you, like me, have a penchant for some smaller desktop environments like XFCE or window managers, you will be stuck with X11, but many are already working on porting to Wayland.

Couple edge cases for gaming, namely screen tearing on some X11 configurations and certain Nvidia hardware running into issues on Wayland. For multi-monitor or high DPI users, Wayland handles per-monitor DPI and fractional scaling far better than X11. Maybe a couple more edge use cases for remoting into the desktop, but Wayland support is also improving quickly on that end. In any case, Wayland is by design more secure than X11.

I personally haven't really seen much difference between the two except Wayland eating more CPU and being rather tedious for hybrid (Ryzen/Nvidia) setups (still haven't resolved it crashing when I change TTY). I'd personally say stick to whatever default your desktop environment runs on..XWayland helps with the whole compatibility concerns at least.

Just my experience though, yours could be different depending on your machine and general setup

Wayland is (part of) the modern solution to the problem that was previously tackled by X11. As such, it comes with improved security (read: keyloggers no longer have a field day) and features (read: HDR, VRR and no screen tearing) that one might expect in 2026. Furthermore, it breaks up the monolith of X11 and thus adheres better to the Unix Philosophy^[That is; Do one thing and do it well.] (if that happens to be something you care about). Finally, Wayland has basically come (as part of the plan) to replace X11. So, it will continue to improve as a platform while X11 will remain stagnant.

In the current landscape in which Wayland has (finally) fulfilled (most of) its promises, X11's lifeline are the edge cases in which (for a myriad of different reasons) the Wayland ecosystem hasn't reached full feature-parity yet. And Wayland's trajectory would suggest that it's only a matter of time until those have been ironed out as well.

TL;DR: Use Wayland. Most of the ecosystem has already adopted it and what remains is actively in the process of doing so.

Waylad is technically a better idea, the progression of X11, more secure and should be faster and smoother when it's ready...

But I run into so many incompatabilities still and often janky support via xWayland that I really don't think Wayland is ready to be the default just yet.

It will be, I'm sure, but for now I spend more time fighting it than I do using it. A bit of snazz in KDE and Waydroid seem to be the only things that actually need it, for me, and so many legacy things just nope right out and crash without going back to x by force.

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.