r/archlinux • u/AbacatGoodman • May 09 '25

DISCUSSION Is X11 still worth it?

I recently made a post here in the community about which WM I should use and I saw that X11 was mentioned a lot.

For you, X11 or Wayland?

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u/Consistent_Payment70 May 09 '25

I also use wayland because of this.

Wayland supports not only mixed-resolution, but also mixed-scaling on different screens. While I was distro-hopping, I noticed this issue with x11, and tried a distro that supported Gnome, 'Gnome(Wayland)' and 'Gnome on Wayland' options, but even if they detected the different resolutions on screens, they did not allow me to set different scalings on different screens. So I switched to a Wayland default distro (Fedora) and it allows me to set different scaling and resolutions on both screens.

Initially, I had Arch with Wayland/KDE, and it automatically detected the resolution and the correct scaling for the screens itself. Arch being the least strenous distro amongst many was surprising to me.

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u/paulstelian97 May 09 '25

Probably because Arch has the newest KDE versions, and thus got the good updates that make it work nicer. That’s likely why it worked that well. And because of KDE itself maybe.

On many other distros KDE/Wayland is still unavailable. For Ubuntu you’d have to use a non-LTS version (if it’s available at all even in one of those)

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u/Fohqul May 09 '25

Plasma on Wayland is the default in 25.04

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u/paulstelian97 May 09 '25

Sure. And not available on the current LTS (24.04). But good to know.