Software Alternatives & Reviews

Wayland VS X11

Compare Wayland VS X11 and see what are their differences

Wayland logo Wayland

Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain.

X11 logo X11

X11 is no longer included with Mac, but X11 server and client libraries are available from the XQuartz project.
  • Wayland Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-30
  • X11 Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-09

Wayland

Categories
  • Window Manager
  • Linux
  • OS & Utilities
  • Utilities
Website wayland.freedesktop.org

X11

Categories
  • Window Manager
  • Linux
  • OS & Utilities
  • Utilities
Website support.apple.com

Wayland videos

WAYLAND: what is it, and is it ready for daily use?

More videos:

  • Review - Testing Wayland & Weston desktop experience in 2020!
  • Review - Wayland vs Xorg | Learn which one to choose

X11 videos

1999 Honda X11 Naked Blackbird Overview

More videos:

  • Review - Tern Verge X11 - Folding Bike Review
  • Review - The Monster: Fiskars X11 Splitting Axe

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Wayland and X11)
Window Manager
81 81%
19% 19
Linux
80 80%
20% 20
OS & Utilities
73 73%
27% 27
Utilities
74 74%
26% 26

User comments

Share your experience with using Wayland and X11. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Wayland seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 23 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Wayland mentions (23)

  • Session manager Anbox
    Waydroid is rebuilding the original idea behind Anbox with explicit focus on modern Wayland powered desktop environments. Source: 10 months ago
  • Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org
    Checkout out the wayland site.( https://wayland.freedesktop.org/ ) The gist is wayland is a protocol that describes how compositor implementations need to behave for clients to use them and clients need to behave according to the waylaid protocol to use the compositor. There are many different compositors. The wayland contributors have a full usable implementation. Gnome has one and I believe KDE has one. So if... Source: 11 months ago
  • Swingland: Recreating Java Swing for Wayland
    More recently I switched away from X11 & Budgie to pure Wayland for my desktop on the assumption that it's over 10 years old now, and is the default technology underlying current Gnome and KDE desktops.. Everything will be fine right? Kind of.. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Linux is Making Apple Great Again
    Wayland is not a WM. https://wayland.freedesktop.org Wayland is the thing "underneath" a Window Manager. For example you can run KDE on top of X or Wayland. There are a few blurry boundaries in all this but that largely covers it. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • How do I get emacs29 to work on X11 system?
    I told you it is for Wayland. If you don't want to use X11. Source: about 1 year ago
View more

X11 mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of X11 yet. Tracking of X11 recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Wayland and X11, you can also consider the following products

Mir - The purpose of Mir is to enable the development of user interfaces shells.

i3 - A dynamic tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.

XQuartz - The XQuartz project is an open-source effort to develop a version of the X.

dwm - dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

qtile - Qtile is a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written in Python.

Y Window System - Y Window System is a platform that allows you to improve the speed, working, and efficiency of the application in your operating system and helps you to increase the responsiveness of applications similar to any locally based app.