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State of Linux Windowing Systems: Is Wayland Good in 2025?
The Wayland display server has long been called the way of the future for Linux. But take a quick look, and you’ll find plenty of people suggesting it’s not ready for prime time. If Wayland isn’t ready now, when will it be?
X.Org vs. Wayland in 2025
If you’ve been around the Linux world for a while, the Wayland name likely rings a bell. The project has been in the works since its creation by a Red Hat developer in 2008. For years, the name took on a nearly mythical air, thanks in part to the way it never quite seemed to materialize.
Wayland is meant to replace the aging X11 (also known as X.Org) display technology, with better support for hardware acceleration and smoother performance overall. This is due in part to more tightly coupling the compositor with the actual application running instead of a separate window manager.
By 2023, Wayland was the default display server for new releases of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch distributions. Still, as we noted in our comparison of X11 and Wayland, while the display server was running the new technology, the applications themselves were still using the older X11 APIs.