Hey Community,

Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.

  • What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
  • I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
  • what would be the best way to migrate?
  • why have/haven’t you made the switch?

Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor

laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps

  • Bob Smith
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    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t be in too big of a rush, especially if you don’t have a lot of time to experiment. I gradually switched over when I realized that Sway was meant to be a wayland replacement for i3wm. There were some rough edges at first, but starting about a year ago I switched to Sway on most of my machines. I didn’t have any trouble installing sway alongside i3wm and xfce4, and I would highly recommend keeping an x11 option as a fallback when or if something doesn’t work.

    Initially, I tried out Sway because I heard that most x11 developers were shifting their focus to Wayland and I figured that I should start experimenting with it. I like getting out in front of change. Eventually, Sway shifted from interesting to good enough for daily use. I figure that I’ll have less time to play around with my computers in the future, so I might as well try new stuff out now before it gets forced on me.