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State of Linux Windowing Systems: Is Wayland Good in 2025?
Quoting: State of Linux Windowing Systems: Is Wayland Good 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.
That said, while application development is difficult to track, Wayland continues to see widespread adoption across both desktop environments and window managers. Even diehard desktops like XFCE and Mate have added initial support for Wayland, though both caution users against using it too much at the time of this writing.