Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
Anyone that thinks X11 is still superior probably runs on a laptop with a single screen.
It really does seem that way. I’ve dealt with many different multi-monitor setups on X11 and only ever had problems. For example, I have an AMD based setup with 3 monitors, 2 are average 1080p60 displays and the third has a higher refresh rate. On X11 this setup always has either screen tearing/flickering, unusually high CPU usage by the compositor or the refresh rate seems noticeably off and hot-plugging additional monitors makes things behave weird or even crash, especially when unplugging monitors. On setups with multiple monitors across multiple GPUs it’s the same but worse. On Wayland it all just works without any problems, no matter the setup. Hot-plugging monitors on Wayland is very seamless. Even X11 software runs better for me on Wayland.
