I need some context for the picture?
My kid (13) surprised me the other day and said he wanted to try Linux. He has seen me forever using it and got scared about W10 getting hacked or something so thought of trying it out.
I handed over to him my Fedora 43 (KDE plasma) install USB drive and once installed the problems began.
The monitor couldn’t be set to native resolution, and Steam didn’t want to run. Turns out that there is no wayland compatibility with the Radeon Polaris RX480. What a bummer, that card is perfectly fine for what he does on his PC.
We tried with the cinnamon version and that is working fine. He even has roblox running.
Tl;Dr: Wayland isn’t compatible with older hardware that most casual windows users are mostly going to be using.
If he wants to try plasma just install the x11 version on fedora:
sudo dnf install plasma-workspace-x11
Yup. Its not the default anymore (and for good reason), but it is still supported for now. This is a pretty straightforward solution to the problem.
Idk, especially when using the most recent version of Wayland compositors, it’s been great. Solved my display and touchpad issues.
I did have some Nvidia issues but that shouldn’t be surprising regardless of display protocol.
But like… use whatever software you want. Worst case you can always just nest a minimal Wayland compositor like cage or gamescope in your X session.
Problem with Wayland, is the liability of being to not able the use of some software, and not being able to foresee it.
X11 is also working well, and a lot of the “issues” people have with it is more about hearsay than real issues.
This is the reason why we have distro diversity: we can choose ! And laugh at innocent memes either way we feel about it
Club is a war crime. I rest my case.
I will happily switch over once libinput isn’t absolute ass with my touchpad! Or if I could adjust its settings in any meaningful way!! Or if you could let me use my old touchpad driver!!!
Until then you can attempt to pry x11 from my cold undead still-animated hands
Plasma devs are currently focusing on input devices. Ideal time to offer them to help test your device and get amazing support out of it.
Or you could sit on your ass and do nothing, which is essentially gambling that they’ll happen to support it (or your next device) when you’re forced to switch at some point in the future.
Wayland is the one thing that fixed a whole shit-ton of my problems overnight and now I find out nobody wants to use it under any circumstances.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Alrighty thenAlmost everyone uses it. We just never make posts about “our configuration works effortlessly, give us attention”
Only people with a bone to chew and shit to stir feel the need to post such things. Back in the day it was people who felt superior for debugging their steaming pile of init shell spaghetti, now it’s people who just can’t live without diving into X11 configuration files.
I’m fine with X. Which problems did you have?
It’s been some time, but the biggest pain point for me on X11 was 4k@144hz. Short of some xrandr tweaks I couldn’t manage to set, Wayland immediately worked perfectly.
I suspect I ran in to x11’s limit in that case.
Plenty use it without knowing as it is what the Steam Deck uses in gaming mode.
The people who use it happily don’t make memes about it. I do have some weird errors every now and then, it’s definitely not as stable for me as X11. However X11 wasn’t very smooth with my multi monitor setup, and Wayland improved the smoothness of my PC enormously, so the random issues every now and then are worth it
x11 when you try to use 2 monitors that don’t have the exact same atomic composition:

I think it took me 2 years to get six monitors on two GPUs working consistently under X11. Yes, I’m that fucking stubborn.
Wayland worked right from the start.
Weird. I have to switch all my machines to x11 in order to get multiple monitors working. Wayland just renders back screens on everything but main. Also makes remote desktop access buggy as fuck if it works at all.
Yeah, my multimonitor experience is better under x11, especially gaming (also Lutris has more features for x11 too in that regard). I only use it on that machine tho.
Zoom still doesn’t work right on Wayland.
As someone who uses many of its features for job interviews on a Wayland machine, what doesn’t work?
Possibly, yet against their best efforts, their shit works better now, see the end of this comment. But first:
I’ve ranted about this before, but Zoom is bone-chillingly badly written software. It’s also the only piece of software that I’ve never seen the code of, but will make comments about code quality and development practice with 100% certainty.
Zoom has broken for me in so many many completely insane and creative ways that the only explanation is that they have nobody keeping things in check and just an army of interns hacking away at things half-assedly until they “work”.
If there are 3 nice and standard ways to do things that can be easily googled, Zoom does a given thing in 2 more ass-backwards ways that make no sense and are fragile as fuck. E.g. they did screen sharing using GNOME’s screenshot API, at a time when every tutorial told you to use the dedicated cross-DE screencast API. When called out, they switched to a different GNOME API.
I think at this point they finally fixed it by actually using the API people told them to use years earlier, but who knows what other inane mistakes are still there to prevent things from working.
Hear hear. They can’t keeo up though, with standards changing every 20 years or so…
no screen sharing software works on it.
Liar. Proof by contradiction: Everything I use works (KDE Plasma).
- Discord
- Slack
- Teams
- even Zoom, despite being a dogshit pile of hacks
You can include Google meet, rust desk and jitsi as well
Yeh, zoom works on one of my two main machines on wayland…
Meet also works with screen sharing on Wayland, so I’ve no idea what the GP is about tbh
Removed by mod
Three-day suspension. Come back when you’ve learned to regulate your emotions.
Thank you!
Well… you just said no software works. They’ve given you counter examples, now you either have to cite examples of software not working with screen sharing or you’re the fool
- teams
- slack
- zoom
- Firefox browser capture for web screen share
never have I had any of these work for me, I’m not the only one either.
still doesn’t make me a liar and we can both be right.
Then you should have said “for me” or “on my machine”, but instead you said “no screen sharing software works on it” in a context where “it” can only be interpreted as Wayland in general.
And that’s wrong and you know it.
You said “no screen sharing software”.
- That’s wrong
- It’s pretty much impossible that you don’t know that some screen sharing software works on Wayland
Consequently, that was a lie. Or you suck at expressing yourself and meant something different than what you wrote. But as written, definitely a lie.
What you said is literally incorrect. There are screen sharing applications that work on Wayland. I just used one ten minutes ago.
so you’re sticking with “it works on my machine” then. cool.
also incorrect does not mean liar.
incorrect means not correct.
You said “no screen sharing software works on it”. If “it” is anything other than your POS laptop, then you’re a fucking liar
Removed by mod
I screen share on Slack with Wayland at work every day
My child will never see more than 8-bit color
I’m sorry to hear about your child’s condition. Hope they can find a cure for it soon, wish you all the best.
This is your freedom, enjoy it.
You’re absolutely free to maintain X11 when no one else does
When Debian Trixie with GNOME started with Wayland by default, I switched too. It’s not bad I guess.
Meanwhile I’m here on Wayland because it does things that x11 doesn’t.
Like wreck the playability of your games? ;)
You must use a different Wayland than I do.
I play competitive multiplayer games with VRR on a 4k240 monitor in a tiling wm with direct scanout. Color management support (HDR, 10bit, anything beyond 8bit sRGB) is also coming along.
I’ve never had a better working setup than this. Everything on X was painful. Even just getting vsync to work properly used to be tricky in some cases.
I agree that wayland does miss features compared to X but a lot of them are conscious design decisions and don’t affect me personally. For example running graphical applications remotely through e.g. SSH or the complete lack of security allowing any application to easily read my keyboard input.
If by “WRECK” you mean “improve” yes.
Xorg never worked quite right for me with multiple displays of different resolutions, orientations and refresh rates. Even after extensive setup, I would get screen tearing effects all the time. In wayland, everything just works OOTB for me.
I set TearFree in the mesa driver settings (not sure if it’s amd only?) so there’s no tearing even without vsync, I have a small 50hz display and a 1080p 120hz without issues
According to the X11 devs, it’s all a pile of hacks to shoehorn in features like this. Some things would have never been properly possible with it. So why it might work for you, it’ll never work for everyone.
if variable high refresh rate on my game monitor while discord and YouTube run at 60hz on the other wrecks playability, then definitely
I’m not one of those people who loves tearing though, so its good enough for me
It actually does wreck the playability of games for me by disabling the ctrl and shift key. A known issue no one has bothered to look into. I cant complain tho, theyre working their butts off for free
As someone else said: Linux Mint is late to the Wayland party, use a more robust DE when you want to talk about what “Wayland” can and can’t do.
Doesn’t Wayland slow to a crawl under CPU load? I get mouse updates like once a second if I dare to make this mini PC play a video.
No, it doesn’t.
I still use X11 & will continue to do so for as long as possible. Wayland’s not bad, X11 just seems to works better…
Both are really good but it depends on your hardware setup and your goals.
Do you have multiple monitors of different resolution and DPI mixes with a primary monitor thats 1440p or 4k at 90 to 144hz and/or variable refresh rate and older/cheaper side monitors that are 1080p 60hz? Wayland is going to be your best friend.
Do you have a single monitor setup (or identical monitors) that you primarily program on or do system admin work that you need remote desktop from? X11 is gonna be your go-to (for the foreseeable future).
Do you want to try exotic window managers like a sliding window manager? Wayland is the way to go.
Wacom tablet? Wayland is working on it but its not quite there yet so X11 for you artists. This also lets you keep using color profiles until Wayland gets that implemented too (my bets are on Plasma getting it first).
And so on.
It really just boils down to what you’re trying to do. Which is why choice is good, as always















