Ask HN: Do you prefer X or Wayland

I strongly prefer Wayland.

I've been on Sway for over 6 years now, I believe. I actually preferred its configuration right from the start. Stuff related to inputs and outputs on X11 often felt arcane to me and I didn't touch it much, but now it's all sitting nicely in my Sway config and the syntax isn't too crazy. I don't have to use feh or similar anymore, Sway can just set the wallpaper. It all feels simpler and more polished. I can set my keyboard layout per-device (so that my QMK keyboard with Workman defined in the firmware is treated as "qwerty" but my laptop keyboard gets its keys shifted into Workman in software so they both type the same) while setting global key repeat rate higher than default. I had used i3wm a lot before with a bit of time spent on awesomewm before going to Sway. It felt a bit like returning home and having everything cleaned and upgraded because of that.

What first made me switch is a little silly. I had a friend over who I hadn't seen in a while, and while I was scrolling Wikipedia in front of him he immediately comments on the tearing. He was a Windows user so he wasn't even trying to push me to Wayland and didn't know what it was. I had already become blind to the tearing, but then I think I felt a bit ashamed after that, and I couldn't unsee it anymore after he pointed it out. People would often claim you could fix tearing on X11, but I never got any of their suggested fixes to work. Wayland really does fix it with no extra effort needed, so that's nice.

There's been a bit of "find replacement for x software" since switching, but a lot of the time I end up on something better. I had used dmenu and Rofi before, Rofi kinda works on Wayland but it'd open in the center of my two monitors with half on each, or it'd appear on the wrong one, just weird and broken enough to want to switch. I tried Wofi for a while, sadly that one was particularly unperformant due to some GTK bottlenecks and couldn't handle filtering 30k lines of text without massive delays of 10+ seconds, but then I found bemenu and I like it a lot. bemenu is similar to dmenu in style, but it's configurable in a sane (non-suckless) way and has more features out of the box, so I like it more than I ever liked dmenu. I also really like the foot terminal emulator more than I ever liked alacritty or termite. slurp + grim are also incredible pieces of software. `scrot` is badly bugged and would often leave ugly outlines within the screenshot, like afterimages of your selection box, and even when screenshotting fullscreen, if you had multiple monitors it'd have some weird garbage data in the gaps around/between screens. slurp+grim just work perfectly. To be fair, though, I think maim on X11 is similarly less broken than scrot, I had just never tried it. That's a big benefit of Wayland, though, you're already shaking things up, it's a good chance to try lots of new software. Like reorganizing your stuff when you move houses seems a bit easier than doing it otherwise. I also really like wl-clipboard and its wl-copy and wl-paste commands. I ended up making dozens of scripts using these (stuff like lowercasing the clipboard, turning a YT Shorts URL into a normal YT URL, a basic clipboard manager using a text file for storage, etc.). I even sometimes ssh into my PC from my phone to wl-copy a string I had on my phone's clipboard and then run a script that modifies the clipboard contents on my PC after that. X11 has xsel and xclip, but once again I guess I never bothered to learn them and get comfortable with them before.