this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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First of all, X is not a security nightmare. There were 0 cases of someone getting hacked because of X exploit. It's a FUD.
Now Wayland is a fad (haha). It's not that much better than X and when it was drafted 10 years ago everyone just ignored it. Over the decade it became clear that X is stuck and at some point it will become obsolete so people started looking at alternatives and Wayland started getting some traction. Over time different tools started getting Wayland support, some people started getting exited about it and a kind of new meme developed where using Wayland meant that you're ahead of everyone else (just like using Arch BTW). In the end it's just a nice PR stunt. Ask people what specifically is so great about Wayland and they will mention some obscure features most people don't need and features that it will have 'soon'. In the long term the move will hopefully be a good thing but as of now if you don't specifically need the few features it has you can keep ignoring it.
There are some really major deficiencies in Xorg that aren't present in Wayland. The main one that made me switch was proper support for variable refresh rate, and the ability to mix and match any fixed or variable refresh rate displays you want.
It's a super common use case to have a primary monitor with high refresh rate and VRR, plus one or two cheaper monitors that don't. Xorg doesn't really support that at all without some really hokey tricks that severely impede usability.
Proper sync support is another one. Yes, you can set tearfree in X but the implementation is crap. You'll still get tearing in a lot of programs and at least in my experience, it introduces a pretty significant and perceptible input lag, far more than needed to eliminate tearing.
I wish Wayland shills would stop spreading this lie. It literally just works. In fact, I'm doing it now on my laptop with a 144Hz 1080p monitor, and an external 60Hz 1440p monitor connected with Thunderbolt, with a dual-GPU setup (iGPU + nVidia, which Wayland doesn't properly support, yet this is nVidia's fault somehow even though Wayland compositors run entirely in user space, without interacting with the driver directly).
I believe we're specifically talking VRR, which for me in Kubuntu did not work properly without switching to Wayland.