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Ask HN: Do you prefer X or Wayland

11•Minks•6mo ago
I’m asking this because I’m still using the Xserver instead of Wayland.

For me there’s a certain ease of use in the form of its configuration that just really sticks with me.

Like just being able to launch another display, or the ability to not use a compositor is a huge plus for me.

Comments

roscas•6mo ago
Xorg still rules for me for plasma and xfce4.
Minks•6mo ago
I’ve tried many DEs and WMs but I always come back to xfce
d3Xt3r•6mo ago
Wayland. I like that I don't have to faff around with Xorg.conf etc, and that I can run mixed-DPI mixed-refresh-rate multi-monitor setups with zero issues - especially the fact that I can get blur-free fractional scaling.
heresie-dabord•6mo ago
Would you describe your use-case for the curious?
akagusu•6mo ago
It is not a about preference, it's about workflow.

X works 100% in all my use cases, Wayland doesn't. Amd according Wayland devs, this is by design; Wayland is not supposed to replace X use cases Wayland devs consider not valid.

So, in my case, X

tmtvl•6mo ago
Wayland is more secure, though accessibility suffers, which is a really difficult trade-off to make. If that Wayland AwesomeWM counterpart reaches 1.0.0 and wlroots a11y support improves then I'll be able to say Wayland without needing to append a bunch of asterisks.
abhinavk•6mo ago
> Wayland AwesomeWM counterpart

Pinnacle or CwC?

tmtvl•5mo ago
I meant CwC, didn't know about Pinnacle. Looking forward to see which of these will reach 1.0 first.
mapierce2•6mo ago
Wayland. But only on personal machines, and only because I like customizing my linux desktop as a hobby, and only because I have more than one machine in case an update borks the whole thing. If you want/need something that just works, Xorg just works.
Babkock•6mo ago
Been exclusively on Wayland on my laptop and Raspberry Pi for a couple years at least. I've removed almost all of the Xorg packages, but I keep the one xorg-server-xwayland. I don't miss X11 at all. But, I also don't have an NVIDIA graphics card.
hollerith•6mo ago
Wayland.
abhinavk•6mo ago
Wayland since last year. Currently I use niri and Gnome with PaperWM.
opan•5mo ago
I strongly prefer Wayland.

I've been on Sway for over 6 years now, I believe. I actually preferred its configuration right from the start. Stuff related to inputs and outputs on X11 often felt arcane to me and I didn't touch it much, but now it's all sitting nicely in my Sway config and the syntax isn't too crazy. I don't have to use feh or similar anymore, Sway can just set the wallpaper. It all feels simpler and more polished. I can set my keyboard layout per-device (so that my QMK keyboard with Workman defined in the firmware is treated as "qwerty" but my laptop keyboard gets its keys shifted into Workman in software so they both type the same) while setting global key repeat rate higher than default. I had used i3wm a lot before with a bit of time spent on awesomewm before going to Sway. It felt a bit like returning home and having everything cleaned and upgraded because of that.

What first made me switch is a little silly. I had a friend over who I hadn't seen in a while, and while I was scrolling Wikipedia in front of him he immediately comments on the tearing. He was a Windows user so he wasn't even trying to push me to Wayland and didn't know what it was. I had already become blind to the tearing, but then I think I felt a bit ashamed after that, and I couldn't unsee it anymore after he pointed it out. People would often claim you could fix tearing on X11, but I never got any of their suggested fixes to work. Wayland really does fix it with no extra effort needed, so that's nice.

There's been a bit of "find replacement for x software" since switching, but a lot of the time I end up on something better. I had used dmenu and Rofi before, Rofi kinda works on Wayland but it'd open in the center of my two monitors with half on each, or it'd appear on the wrong one, just weird and broken enough to want to switch. I tried Wofi for a while, sadly that one was particularly unperformant due to some GTK bottlenecks and couldn't handle filtering 30k lines of text without massive delays of 10+ seconds, but then I found bemenu and I like it a lot. bemenu is similar to dmenu in style, but it's configurable in a sane (non-suckless) way and has more features out of the box, so I like it more than I ever liked dmenu. I also really like the foot terminal emulator more than I ever liked alacritty or termite. slurp + grim are also incredible pieces of software. `scrot` is badly bugged and would often leave ugly outlines within the screenshot, like afterimages of your selection box, and even when screenshotting fullscreen, if you had multiple monitors it'd have some weird garbage data in the gaps around/between screens. slurp+grim just work perfectly. To be fair, though, I think maim on X11 is similarly less broken than scrot, I had just never tried it. That's a big benefit of Wayland, though, you're already shaking things up, it's a good chance to try lots of new software. Like reorganizing your stuff when you move houses seems a bit easier than doing it otherwise. I also really like wl-clipboard and its wl-copy and wl-paste commands. I ended up making dozens of scripts using these (stuff like lowercasing the clipboard, turning a YT Shorts URL into a normal YT URL, a basic clipboard manager using a text file for storage, etc.). I even sometimes ssh into my PC from my phone to wl-copy a string I had on my phone's clipboard and then run a script that modifies the clipboard contents on my PC after that. X11 has xsel and xclip, but once again I guess I never bothered to learn them and get comfortable with them before.

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