I just saw a Phoronix article about Gnome today talking about removing X11 in version 50
and at the same time I see this from Nvidia which I use
Basically Wayland still lacks several things, which Nvidia, together with several companies, including Canonical are working towards, but because of the idea of removing X11 on version 50 (which I consider REALLY SOON), what is the expectations for Ubuntu 25.10 around still using X11 or even going for Ubuntu 26.04 (LTS) with still having the ability to at least opt in.
And here is why I am asking:
I got 3 computers, all Nvidia using computers. I have experienced Wayland from around 2019 with a not so positive experience. Latency issues in the past, graphical anomalies with the video cards and a lot of incompatible apps (I mean it. A LOT). Currently with the 25.04 I have not had any issues with performance or latency at all, but I do have apps that do not even detect me clicking on them when using Wayland. I still have buggy behavior when for example using flameshot (I use it for its ridiculous ease of use and UX experience). Even sometimes telegram goes crazy on wayland. None of that happens on X11.
I fully understand the benefits of Wayland, but it regards to parity, Wayland is still, at the speed it is going, at least a year still off. My concern is that the X11 cut off will happen too soon. Of course I got no problem in jumping to KDE which I love, but just wanted to peace of mind of the opinion of the ones that take the final decisions. I did love the comment about Jordan Petridis about leaving it for Gnome 49 and handling it, for the time being, with some workarounds, maybe because of the Nvidia issues and app issues mentioned.
I also got not problem in going to the custom gnome config and instead of disabling wayland, I would enable X11 support with the new variable, but just the concern of X11 going away completely and then having issues with the desktop that could affect my productivity.
I guess we might still keep X11 capabilities patched into GDM for the non LTS so people can switch back in that release as needed, but as the roadmap outlines the focus is to detect and fix the remaining issues so it will likely default to Wayland even on nvidia… (perhaps ask over at the other thread)
Thank you, and by the look of the progress KDE has done in the last 12 months (I mean the speed…omg the speed) I trust them more in regards to having much less issues and even so, tackling them much faster.
With that said, by the time Plasma 7 comes out it should be a beautiful masterpiece that works nice with Wayland.
There are a lot of apps(mostly) games which require still X11 as XWayland. GNOME made GL1 gone and if X11 apps(mostly Proton) is not X11 session, that’s fine under XWayland, but also there are also 32bits apps and that is becoming kernel disabled now, so for X11 session and XWayland session there should be some post 26.04 accessibility for program paths more testable for such old morons… And a huge list of hw is still on X11, 24.04 switch made it not so easy to make due a lot of debian changes underhood for 24.04.
Just finished running the glmark benchmark on the latest 25.10 daily image and the results are quite bad for anything using XWayland under Gnome, where Plasma seems to run perfectly well using AMD Radeon 780m. Any ideas why ?
Not going to help much with Ubuntu 25.10, but I’ve just installed the daily of Xubuntu 25.10 and that seems to be ruñing fine, I assume using X11, though I admit I haven’t double checked that yet; can Xubuntu run wayland yet? Itcertainly hasn’t been able to previously.
It’s not X11 that’s the problem but running a wayland session and using X11 apps with Xwayland. It seems that the gnome desktop may be using more resources than it should, or just not as well optimized.
Using Kubuntu 25.04 Mythtv had all sorts of issues with Wayland, along with a few other apps, but Mythtv was what killed Wayland for me until I found this workaround: All these issues are fixed by adding the mythfrontend command line option “-platform xcb” and then mythtfrontend runs OK on wayland. This is from this post on the Mythtv Forums [https://forum.mythtv.org/viewtopic.php?p=26513&sid=1cd151daa6f6ea87d9cb3386f84dd365#p26513]
I will continue to persevere with Wayland and the other apps, mostly concerned with video apps such as youtube and streaming services.
I think Wayland is almost ready, but I for one would appreciate keeping the option for X11 on the login screen for at least a couple more years.
Thanks for that 1fallen.
However when I try running a wayland session of Xubuntu 25.10 running in KVM/QEMU it simply goes straight back to the login screen.
This is on a very newly installed VM of Xubuntu 25.10 which in an X11 session runs without any problems or difficulties.
Maybe because it’s running as a VM but other distros eg Ubuntu 24.04 run well using wayland in KVM/QEMU so I’m not at all sure.
As a daily user since 2008, I completely dislike wayland and if X11 gets booted out of our distro, thee is going to be people putting a compiled copy on the git if that happen.
Internally we (Canonical) have been talking to partners about the potential of removing Xorg (not removing X11 support) in order to inform or defer the GNOME change. The responses we are getting so far have been surprisingly consistently positive (and surprisingly fast for large organisations). It’s noteworthy also that big partners only care about LTS so the discussion is always 26.04 onward from their perspective regardless of whether it happens in 25.10.
Within the community I have been tracking and triaging the blocking issues for a few years. We have already passed two major milestones:
24.04 introduced SimpleDRM which allows basically any Wayland compositor to run without hardware acceleration (so all hypervisors should now be covered).
Since then I have heard maybe three or four community members say they are not ready to move to Wayland and each time I asked them for further details. Each time I either got no response or was just directed to external forums.
So now we need your contributions. If you still have any concerns at all about Xorg being retired then please log a bug for each issue in Launchpad and tag it with wayland-blocker. And if the issue is specific to Nvidia then please also add the nvidia-wayland tag. We can’t make good decisions without being well informed, and boy we are trying to be well informed.
For Wayland support in Xfce 4.20, you will need to use an external compositor since xfwm4, the default window manager for Xfce, has not yet been ported to Wayland.
This means that while many core components and applications in Xfce 4.20 have been adapted to work with Wayland, Wayland support is still experimental and may have incomplete functionality or bugs
Labwc : A lightweight Wayland compositor that works well with Xfce 4.20.23
Wayfire : A more feature-rich Wayland compositor that also supports Xfce 4.20.23
Both compositors are recommended for users who want to experiment with Wayland support in Xfce 4.20, but it is advised to proceed with caution due to the experimental nature of this support.
Mostly happy with Wayland on 25.04 but Wayland has issues with screen painting still. For instance Autokey doesn’t work at all on Wayland, but flawlessly on X11. The screen painting issues is probably the reason for removing the easy shortcut facility on Kubuntu. That reduces productivity for many as shortcuts for things like your email address and physical address now has to be laboriously typed in many times per working day.
I have just tried wayland again on my Xubuntu 25.10 VM in KVM/QEMU after installing labwc and choosing a labwc session at login having first disabled the default compositor of xfwm.
Unfortunately I’m still unable to get to a working session; the display remains totally black except for the cursor which remains visible but useless as there’s nothing else to see on screen.
If I move the cursor to the bottom right corner of the screen where I have Action Buttons applet added to my bottom panel (though totally invisible) i can eventually logout and start again in a Xubuntu session but without compositing of course until U re-enable it.
So to sum up; for me wayland is a non-starter in Xubuntu!
@vidtek99, @ajgreeny, please report bugs in Launchpad about your issues and tag them as wayland-blocker. We still have zero bugs reported at the moment.
