When I was a Linux beginner Wayland was this weird thing that everyone thought might have been the future, but was really unfinished and incompatible, and it was nothing more than an optional addition. Now more and more distros and desktop environments are replacing X11 with Wayland as we speak.

I am not going to switch to Wayland, and I have valid reasons for that. It just makes me upset that X11 is being so pushed out.

For people claiming that Wayland is perfect: it is not. It is worse than X11.

The problem is the Wayland architecture itself.

X is build around the concept of a server and clients connected to that server. The thing actually handling the desktop is not the desktop environment itself.

And this allows for the cool features X has, namely:

• WM hot-replacing (try running "openbox --replace", and openbox will replace whatever WM you're currently running).
• The basic tools for managing desktop-related stuff are not WM-dependent.
• It is much easier to write an X11 window manager than a wayland compositor, since all the basics are already here and instead of copy-pasting the required garbage like you were a Windows programmer trying to create a window with WinAPI you can focus on doing the actual work.

There are surely more examples, but these are the ones that are on my head right now.

The most important from my point of view is the second. WM-independent desktop programs are awesome.

For example, I often need to switch keyboard layouts on the fly.

In X11 I just have an entry in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols, and I use the 'setxkbmap' command to set the layout I want.

A lot of you will probably yell at me, saying that this is not how I should be doing it, but you know what? I don't care. It works and I've had zero problems with it through the many years I've been using it.

In wayland there is no universal solution for that. Big desktops like KDE and GNOME have their own graphical menus (I don't like graphical menus for switching keyboards; it's much easier to hit the up-arrow key on the terminal and press enter). Sway requires you to change the config file and restart the desktop, which is very inconvenient when I want to change the keyboard layout several times a minute.

Plus, I don't know what on earth is the format those wayland compositors are using for that. Probably every wayland desktop uses its own thing, so screw portability.

Next, there is xrandr. It's basically a tool that lets you change your screen resolution from the commandline. It's mostly used to change the screen resolution, which isn't as much of an issue as it was twenty years ago, but it's still usable on virtual machines and stuff.

Wayland doesn't have xrandr or any similar tool. Everything is desktop specific, so once again, screw portability.

At last, there is xkill. When a program hangs you can just run xkill, then select the window you want gone, and it kills the process.

For most hung processes I use 'kill -9 $(pidof )', but xkill is incredibly useful for killing broken wine applications, since the program name of a wine application is the literal Windows path of its .exe executable, and typing it would be tedious.

On wayland, once again, there is no such a thing. Some desktops might have a similar functionality, some don't, so for the third time: screw portability.

I don't want the tools I use to be dependent on one specific desktop. I use many desktops. I use MATE a lot, I use Unity on an old Ubuntu setup, I use WindowMaker, and now I am writing this from i3 on Slackware 15.

With X11 I can use the same tools on all of them. Wayland can't do that. By design.

Another thing is xwayland, which is part of the problem. Running one windowing system inside of another means consistency issues.

When I was trying out wayland I noticed that xwayland applications (and there were many of them) lacked the correct theme, and there were also other issues.

On X11 there is no problem, since all applications are running under the same windowing system, utilizing the same API.

One more thing are the drivers. X11 is modular, so it's simply the matter of installing the xf86-video- of xf86-input- package.

On wayland ... I am no engineer, but for me it looks like the Wild West, and even though I have been using Linux as my only operating system for years and have been tinkering with it a lot, I have absolutely no idea how to install a driver in wayland and there is barely any information about it. The Arch Wiki said that it's all about KMS, which I suspect means that all the drivers are baked into the kernel and I guess you have to recompile it when adding unsupported hardware (correct me if I'm wrong).

Moreover, for me there are no real benefits of using wayland.

Does it make the system more performant? From my experience no, it doesn't. And even if it did, the difference is too small to be meaningful.

Does it make the system more usable? No, actually it's quite the opposite.

The reason, as always, is security. For security Apple glues hard drives to the motherboard so that you cannot replace them. Also for security they put the BIOS partly on the hard drive, so when it dies you have to buy a new computer. For security they are forcing ID verification on sites that have nothing to do with you all know what. For security they are making everyone switch to an objectively worse environment that has no real benefits for the majority of its userbase, and even has downsides in certain scenarios.

Is a change really needed? No, I don't think so.

X11 has worked for forty years, and while yes, there were some issues with the early 2000s, all of Linux had those issues, not only X11, but anyway they are no longer here.

X11 has since at least 2012 been providing a good user experience. Before there were problems, yes (I was recently trying to install Mandriva 2007, and it was not a good experience), but now they are no longer here. X11 just works.

So that are the reasons why I am never going to use wayland.

Honestly I don't care about XLibre. All those new features stalled in Xorg for years are not something I would make use of or notice anyway.

The X11 in Ubuntu 12.04 from 13 years ago provides exactly the same experience as the X11 in Slackware 15 or Devuan 4.

Is that a bad thing? Not by any means. Contrary to what people believe, updates are not something that is necessary. You absolutely can use older distros, with the only thing actually needing to be updated being the web browser (that is not its fault; rather that the internet is becoming more and more bloated at an incredible pace).

Basically from my point of view trying to push Wayland everywhere is like Tim Cook trying to persuade you that you have to buy an iPhone, despite there being nothing wrong with your current phone, and despite that iPhone being worse than your phone.

Because your phone is outdated, and so is X11.

And I am fine with it!

Software like DOSBOX or LXAppearance haven't received any significant updates in the last decade, maybe longer, and this doesn't make them bad software. I love DosBox and I love lxappearance, and I don't want anyone to force me to abandon them just because they are "outdated".

So, that has been it. Feel free to downvote (because wayland enthusiasts certainly will say the Apple way: it's perfect, you are just using it wrong) and have a nice day.