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.
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.
You know that “until Wayland is polished enough” is at least a year ago for the overwhelming majority of people, right?
A year ago I got a new PC, installed Ubuntu 24.04 which defaults to Wayland, and installed discord. Push to talk wouldn’t work unless discord had mouse focus. I spent a few hours researching and trying different things before switching to X11 where it just immediately works.
Tell me more about how polished Wayland is.
That is a feature. Allowing arbitrary programs to read any key press is how you get keyloggers.
Wayland has a protocol to request reading keys out of focus (which will ask the user for permission, as opposed to just read it like on xorg).
If the program was running in xwayland (which it probably was) of course it won’t use that protocol, and will just try to read it X11 style.
In some DEs (KDE) you can select if X11 apps are allowed to read keys.
“I switched to X11 and it immediately works”. I’ll give you another tip: if you run
chmod 777 -R /the file manager stops pestering about permissions and it immediately works.Yes, you clearly understand the problem, thank you. If there’s a problem with filesystem permissions you can use tools like
chmod,chown, andsetfaclto fix them in a variety of ways.How do you fix a wayland session if your app doesn’t properly support GlobalShortcuts? Where’s the
chmod 777equivalent that lets the user say “I know this means this can spy on everything I do but I’d prefer this work today instead of waiting on a bug fix.” Without something like this, the entire desktop ecosystem needs to mature before you can call Wayland “polished.”If it’s a Wayland application it will support global shortcuts.
For X11 apps. If you are on KDE there’s this menu:
Other DEs have different ways to deal with this.
And if you are on Gnome, change DE. Gnome will always follow its own philosophy, because apparently it doesn’t align with yours, you should use something else.
Btw, I gave the same answer in the previous comment.
Also, on the “how can you consider this polished”… Wayland supports global shortcuts, this is a fact. What it doesn’t support is “global shortcuts for apps that use a protocol that is not Wayland”. I think I made my point
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/56
Here is the x11libre dev not understanding what the
^operand does in C. Would you trust running this person’s code as a display server?Sure. No one expects anyone to know everything from the start, and people improve with time. But this was metux’s understanding of C when he forked off xorg thinking he could do better than freedesktop.
He might have confused it with shell script
The Linux ecosystem would whither and die without the likes of Red Hat.