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@probonopd
probonopd / Wayland.md
Last active August 25, 2025 04:26
Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!

Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!

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Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.

Feature comparison

@mgalgs
mgalgs / active_window_xlib_demo.py
Created December 7, 2019 00:13
python-xlib example that prints the bbox of the currently active window
# Print the name and bounding box (x1, y1, x2, y2) for the active window in
# a loop.
import time
from collections import namedtuple
import Xlib
import Xlib.display
@ssokolow
ssokolow / x11_watch_active_window.py
Last active February 22, 2025 20:46
python-xlib example which reacts to changing the active window
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""python-xlib example which reacts to changing the active window/title.
Requires:
- Python
- python-xlib
Tested with Python 2.x because my Kubuntu 14.04 doesn't come with python-xlib
for Python 3.x.