January 4, 2026
Wayland vs X11: the custody battle
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
Linux graphics war: fans split between “Wayland future” and “X11 forever”
TLDR: A Linux power user tried moving his high-end 8K setup to the newer Wayland graphics system, but it still breaks badly enough that he’s staying on the old one. The comments explode into a split fandom: some say Wayland is all pain and no gain, others applaud the careful, non-ranty criticism.
A Linux power user just tried—again—to move from the old graphics system (X11) to the “shiny new” one, Wayland, and the community instantly turned it into a full-blown soap opera. The author’s 8K super-monitor and fancy Nvidia graphics card still glitch and split in half on Wayland, so he basically says: nice progress, but still unusable for me. That’s all the spark the crowd needed.
One camp storms in with doom posts. User jgb1984 declares Wayland offers “only downsides, without any upsides” and vows to cling to the old setup “for many years to come.” Another commenter complains that Wayland is just a confusing protocol with too many competing versions, unlike the old one which “just worked,” turning the thread into an argument about tech philosophy rather than screens.
On the other side, people are almost shocked this isn’t a rage-filled rant. xerxes901 admits they expected “unproductive and entitled whining” but were “pleasantly surprised” someone actually debugged the mess instead of screaming “X11 FOREVER!!!” Meanwhile, fans of the author’s minimalist setup show up like a cult reunion, flexing their nearly identical desktops and joking that switching from a “flawlessly working stack” to Wayland is basically choosing pain for no benefit. The result: half tech bug report, half comment-section reality show.
Key Points
- •Wayland adoption has progressed across desktops since 2014, but application support lagged and often required opt-in flags until recently.
- •NVIDIA initially resisted Wayland’s API (favoring EGLStreams) but added GBM support in driver 495; rendering remained glitchy until explicit sync was implemented.
- •Sway 1.11 and wlroots 0.19.0 introduced explicit sync, improving NVIDIA stability in Wayland sessions.
- •The author’s 8K Dell UP3218K requires DP 1.4 with MST and TILE; GNOME configures it correctly, but sway shows it as two monitors due to missing TILE support in wlroots.
- •Linux distributions are shifting toward Wayland by default, with RHEL reducing X server contributions and Asahi Linux prioritizing Wayland.