Linux

I switched to Wayland over two years ago and these days I don't look back at all. I don't care if Wayland has full feature parity with X11 as long the features I actually use are supported which they are.

Clipboard sharing in VirtualBox doesn't work right now (though I'm relatively sure it could be implemented by VirtualBox right now with Wayland as it is) and neither does AutoTyping in KeePassXC (not sure if there's a mechanism for that on Wayland), though Autofill in the Browser works so it's no big deal to me.

In return I get 1:1 touch gestures, better multi monitor support and an overall smoother desktop on Plasma Wayland so I'll take it.

People often still make complaints about Wayland that have been fixed months or years ago and it's a bit tiring.

The ability to have multiple displays at different scales is a godsend when trying to use a laptop with a 4k display connected to 1080p monitors or vice versa

X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”.

I really don't know if there could be a more obnoxious opening than this. I guess Wayland fanatics have taken a page from the Rust playbook of trying to shame people into using it when technical merits aren't enough ("But your code is UNSAFE!")

Replacing good legacy will always be a struggle. X11 works pretty well and has been stable for decades. Most of the things that suck about it already have workarounds.

The advantages of Wayland are not directly visible for the end user. The security part will be great once it's completely integrated on the distributions to give granular permissions to software. The simpler apis and greater performance will help libraries creators, but most developers don't touch X directly and won't touch Wayland either.

Being stable for a couple of months is not good enough. People will use it once distros trust it enough to make it default, and this will probably only happen once Wayland or its compatibility tools work with most software and major applications work significantly better on it.

Every time I try Wayland, something doesn't work. The time before last, subpixel DPI scaling was badly broken. This last time, there's some glitch where the screen jumps right a couple pixels (and back) every dozen seconds. I don't have any interest in spending my time trying to fix Wayland issues when X just works.

I switched to wayland because of screen tearing and it fixed it. Idk if x is still glitchy on my new laptop but i dont really care. Also hyprland is really cool so im happy with wayland.

I've been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don't have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing "Ah, this will finally fix it!", but I don't know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland... eh... I guess it never hurts to try. It's pretty trivial to toggle on and off.

When both NVIDIA and KDE work well with Wayland, most of the anti-Wayland energy will go away. The advocates will calm down too bar cause they will have won.

Wayland's major "technical merits", as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That's it. If you don't have a touchscreen and aren't a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I'm aware of.

X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don't care about those things either.

Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn't make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.

So, as with so many things, "merit" is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.

Wayland on AMD is amazing

People on Unix environments that don't have Wayland support.

That's a big one. All the *BSD folk will keep on using X at least until it gets proper support over there (which might never happen) and even then it will still be boycotted by some BSD users for other reasons.

People using mainstream desktop environments that already support Wayland ... [but their distro hasn't made the switch]

I agree about that. Many people don't care and will just use whatever their distro tells them to use. As you said, there's usually good reason for it.

People using desktop environments or custom X setups that don't (currently) support Wayland.

This is another one, and is actually one I kinda fall under. I use a tiling window manager. The tiling Wayland compositors are often times not as polished, and a big annoyance for me personally is the fact that most of them (River, Hyprland, DWL) don't come with a bar. Of my X Window Managers, AwesomeWM, DWM and Qtile already have their own bars. BSPWM is basically supposed to be used with Polybar, the same way XMonad and xmobar are basically made for each other. On Wayland, Somebar is made for DWL, but waybar and yambar work really well with it. Sway has swaybar, but waybar works perfectly with it. Both Waybar and yambar work great with River. And there's Waybar, and gBar, and other bars for Hyprland. And that's without mentioning EWW, which can be used to make a bar.

Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn't get detected if I'm holding down a key. So if I'm playing Minecraft and I'm trying to turn around and run away from a zombie using my touchpad because my mouse's battery ran out, I have to do these actions one by one and hope I survive, or just let myself die. That's just an example, but I have noticed it in other games as well. No such issues on X. And I've also had Powerwash Simulator, ran through wine, just crash on me in some (Qtile or Hyprland), but not other compositors. In DWL, I couldn't turn all the way around and forbsome reason my movement was restricted to 270°, and in River I had 0 issues.

When you have a monopoly

You're saying this as if X didn't have a monopoly over Unix graphics.

What has kept me away from Wayland is the tendency to be dependent on the compositor for so much.

I use my preferred X11 window manager for largely aesthetic reasons, but by and large, I can swap it out and the rest of the software doesn't give a damn. At most, you might have to tweak a RC file to fix missing custom assumptions (i. e. disabling decorations on full-screenified Proton games)

It seems like on Wayland, there's a lot more of a "if you aren't using GNOME or KDE, the odds something meaningful breaks are much higher." Aside from the perceived bulk of these environments, they're highly opinionated-- I suspect it would be a major production number to hammer them into a shape that looked like FVWM or WindowMaker, even if you only wanted to match a single theme's aesthetics (as opposed to, say, FVWM's dynamic configurability).

I literally don’t care. I don’t have any issues with X11 on PopOS and I will switch when System76 decides it’s time.

The utilities that replace the utilities you're used to on X11 work great, so do the utilities that already work on X11.

That's um... not the best motivation.

Only reason I'm not using it is Nvidia. Missing night light in particular.

I’m not leaving xmonad. It’s such a bummer that Waymonad didn’t really take off.

I want to use Wayland, but it currently doesn't work with my Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia/Steam. It was working under old steam big picture mode but the new big picture mode broke it.

Hope they fix it because I do believe Wayland is the future.

I have software dating back to 2003 that I need to support. X11 isn't going anywhere.