What’s the difference for a real user between using X11 or Wayland nowdays? I haven’t found anything useful on the internet, so I’m asking you. Internet articles on the topic (and about WMs too) seem to be advertising slop since they explain anything but the real things. Also, if anyone used the XLibre fork, I would love to hear about your experience with it.
As some general advice: If you don’t know the specifics, just go with your Linux distribution’s defaults. They probably have this figured out for you. Wayland is the more modern approach. We had a long transitioning period and some things didn’t work for a while or were missing. I’d say it’s ready by now. And if your distro maintainers also think it’s time to supersede the old X server, it probably is.
Wayland is more secure than x11 by design and more concise in scope. Notably it supports contemporary display technologies like display independent scaling, VRR, colour space (HDR) and several others.
Wayland is made by the x11 people.
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.
So you literally can not copy+paste something between different apps?
I can’t copy & paste between the password manager and other apps, so I have to type out all these long, randomly-generated passwords, and often there’s not an option to see what characters I’m typing, so I don’t know I made a typo until the very end.
I think they’re saying that it happens when you run one app as root, then you can’t copy-paste to other apps. It’s not a problem when running graphical apps as your normal user account.
I actually meant those as two separate issues. I guess I needed a comma.
Copy-paste should work with Wayland, so there is probably some way to fix that problem if you decide to give it another try, at least if you password manager is open source
I’ve been trying for years and still haven’t figured it out, but hopefully one day…
Security
When you use X11, you allow any program running on your computer to access anything on your screen and clipboard, collect your keystrokes and type. It’s trivial to implement a keylogger, for example. Do not buy into the whole “no viruses on Linux” thing, it’s not true and likely to become even less and less true, as desktop Linux is becoming popular.
Wayland at least tries to put some barriers in place against this.
- for most people, use whatever your distro ships with and installs for you
- choosing desktop environments still starts heated discussions – high end, it’s a choice between Gnome and KDE – mid-tier has Xfce, LXQt, Mate, Cinnamon, and more – limited hardware go for IceWM, JWM, FLWM, or similar – want to get your hands dirty? go for a tiling window manager
- X11 is (effectively) abandonware at this point – it’s still getting security patches, but the devs left and started Wayland 17-ish years ago
- XLibre is more political than technical – and I’ll leave it at that
Why is XLibre political?
If we ignore the deeply disturbing political views of the Creator the entire project is meant to be a statement. There’s a conspiracy theory that there was a grand plot to kill x11 by red hat and xlibre is built upon the idea that red hat was holding it back. This completely ignores the real issues that the codebase was pure spaghetti.
I heard that XLibre developers are working on cleaning the codebase. And I strongly believe we still need X11 at least until Wayland is polished enough, which still seems untrue even in 2026. The concerns about Red Hat are not conspiracy, a commercial corporation controlling important parts of Linux ecosystem is a serious threat, so having an alternative is never bad. Linux won’t have a future if everyone just uses Red Hat approved solutions.
Two things, one as previously mentioned the codebase is a mess and even the best developers working on x11 tend to introduce regressions (the xlibre dev isn’t so this is amplified). Second it absolutely is a conspiracy because red hat did everything in the power to save x11 until eventually they just kept using it (tbh it needed to be replaced two decades ago). As for your last point linux won’t have a future if its aggressively held back by an army of enthusiasts who demand things never change and fragmented until software support is non-existent.