My short answer:

Should I switch to Wayland?

Yes.

Applications that don't cope with wayland still work via Xwayland. Go ahead.

I've fully switched to Wayland some time ago (it could be already a year) after I learned about how insecure X really is and I honestly do not experience any issues that I sometimes see on the internet. I've been using Gnome for few months, but now I switched to KDE. I think a lot of apps are working natively on Wayland, but for other cases you have XWayland that also works flawlessy in my opinion.

One of things that was issue for me was that I couldn't use Auto-Type feature in KeePassXC, because Wayland doesn't let apps pretend to be a keyboard or capture windows as easily as X does. Funnily enough, I've managed to get it working by running keepassxc --platform xcb, but it stopped working sometime ago and I'm not entirely sure why. Other thing that is a problem for me is screen sharing. Wayland doesn't allow apps to capture screen as I mentioned earlier so it heavily relies on PipeWire for this and PipeWire has its own sets of problems. It seems working correctly for the most part, but I couldn't really figure out how to share screen with sound. Not a dealbreaker for me, and a workaround would be to route audio as a microphone input for example, but it is an issue nonetheless. This is only a problem on Discord, in OBS you can easily select video and audio sources.

If you're using KDE already, you could just select Plasma (Wayland) in your display manager and play with it a bit to see if you like it and experience any issues.

If you're not having performance issues, then I don't see much reason to change. Sure, Xorg is basically in maintenance mode, but so what? Your setup works for you, so do your thing.

That said, Sway is a window manager intended to be a drop in replacement for i3 on Wayland, and is pretty close from what I hear: https://swaywm.org/

Plasma is very good with Wayland, although you might want to wait for Plasma 6, since they're apparently making several improvements, and it's due out soon anyway: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6-Wayland-Great

You can install Wayland and switch sessions during login too, so you can check it for yourself and see if your i3 dotfiles work with Sway.

You should, I think. You don't have Nvidia GPU, so you can avoid almost bugs and better performance.

Advantages:

1. Better performance. e.g. for Firefox, @lilydjwg got double performance in wayland.
2. Better multi-screen with multi-DPI support.
3. Better maintaince. Many DE has put more and more to wayland. And many new features will only be implemented in wayland. (That's because implementing many new features will be difficult or even impossible in X11 old software architecture, as KWin developers said.)

Disadvantages:

1. Some missing feature, such as remote desktop.
2. Many bugs when you use Nvidia GPU.
3. None of the compositors except KWin and Hyprland can use input methods with electron.

I don't know which DE/WM you use. If you use Plasma/GNOME, migration is simple, just switch in SDDM/GDM. If you use i3, you can try sway, it's compatible with i3 config. If you use others, you can try hyprland or wayfire. Wayfire has fantastic animations.

I switch to wayland because I buy a new screen with different DPI... But when I switched, I found I got better performance and video hardware acceleration in Firefox (this feature was introduced to Firefox Wayland first).

Debian (a very conservative distro) switched to Wayland by default in debian 10 if I'm not mistaken (we're now on 12).

I didn't notice the change until I tried to run a niche program that really needs X11. Unless you're doing this kind of thing, then you can probably just use Wayland. At least in Debian it's really easy to switch between Wayland and X11 by selecting the session type when you log in.

The biggest Sin by far of Wayland is making users think about the graphics stack. Does this feature or this app support Wayland or X? Does this Compositor support this GPU? Does this particular environment support this mixture of displays with this DPI? Do I need to set a particular env variable or change a setting to force this app to start in Wayland mode because under X11 its scaled funky. What works in each environment? What doesn't work between environments?

Well before you reach the end of this flow chart you have lost virtually all of your users. This transition has single-handedly set the Linux desktop back by 20 years in terms of supporting more users whose level of interest in configuration is limited to clicking a control next to their monitor and making things bigger or smaller.

A saner design would have handled scaling correctly from the start and would have had a permissive mode which just made everything from the users perspective work while progressively adding a correct UI to provide features like global hotkeys, screen sharing, only to those apps users had authorized like android. If it wasn't a such a clusterfuck to use it would have had orders of magnitude more users much earlier in the development phase and perhaps attracted more development interest as well.

You should, and you will :) X11 is legacy, and is going to die. The only question is whether you're going to try and hold on to a broken system riddled with security vulnerabilities for as long as possible until you're forced to switch, or whether you're just going to enable what is mostly already the default stack on most desktop Linux systems anyway.

I think, it needs to be said that it doesn't have to be a hard switch. With KDE, you can just install the Wayland session and then when logging in for the first time after booting, you can select whether to start X11 or Wayland. To switch back and forth, you just need to log out and log back in.

With i3, that isn't as simple, since i3 doesn't support Wayland. You'd need to install a WM which supports Wayland + customize it, to be able to switch back and forth.

You're not using any NVIDIA hardware...? Hmm, nope, that's all hardware that runs under Mesa. Give it a shot, if it doesn't work, you can always switch back.

The big advantage is improved support for new features, like adaptive sync, multi monitor support, display scaling, etc. You'll notice, new features (mostly gaming related features) will just work better on Wayland. There will be a performance hit though.

I made the switch because it's just plain better, adaptive sync works (it never worked for me on X11), oh yeah and the night color actually works. Night color on KDE just does not work on X11, AMD or NVIDIA, least for me.

• Wayland has several new features like, say, removing screen tearing, but it's not necessarily "advantages" that are the reason to use Wayland. It's sort of a redo of how graphics should work in the Linux world, and it will be the standard going forward. X11 development has more or less ceased with those developers moving to Wayland (in fact, Wayland was created by X11 developers to address issues they had with the architecture of X11). It's not a matter of should you switch to Wayland; it's a matter of when should you switch to Wayland. The answer is, as soon as you can.
• Gaming varies drastically. Some games are fine. Some games make me launch Steam via Lutris to start (not sure why it works, but it does) but run fine after. Some games can't reach higher framerates. That said, no screen tearing is a plus. When it works, Wayland is very smooth, but it doesn't always work yet. An example off the top of my head, no matter what I do, Street Fighter 6 doesn't get above 45 fps on Wayland. It's a good idea to have an X11 option as a backup still imo
• The best way to migrate is just to install a Wayland compatible DE/WM. I've used both GNOME Wayland and Hyprland extensively and they both work great. If you're used to i3 (that's what I used to use and is still my X11 backup), Hyprland is great. KDE like you have on your Desktop already works good on Wayland from what I've heard.
• I have made the switch because most of my apps can run on Wayland, and it's the future. I still have a backup in case there's a game or something that doesn't quite work for me. For instance, I can't share screen on discord. It won't even recognize the pipewire route. Thus, I've gotta switch to X if I want to do that.

Can’t say anything about x11 but I use Nobara KDE with Wayland and it works pretty flawlessly. I found an article that’s a good jumping off point.

Why Use Wayland versus X11?

I didn't switch yet for lots of reasons, but I'll write one! Games; I lose 10%-15% FPS, when gaming on Wayland, compared to using Xorg. My hardware: Ryzen 3950 CPU, 64GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080, 12gb VRAM GPU! This happens on each n every game, around 10%-15% FPS loss!!!

Plasma is slick as butter on Wayland.

No, you shouldn't.

If you need Wayland you will know, if X worked for you well and you didn't search for how to sandbox it or maybe for some other functions that Wayland has then don't switch and don't break what works for you.

Wayland has much better multi touch support on many laptop touchpads. I would definitely recommend trying it out on your Thinkpad.

You're not running Nvidia so your desktop would probably work fine on Wayland as well. Wayland has improved privacy protections so it's possible screen recorders that haven't been updated in a few years break; most standard KDE tooling should work without issue, though. Wayland is missing some features X11 already has, and things like colour profiles are stoll in development; if your display needs a specific color profile to look right, you may want to stick to X11.

Performance should be very similar. I haven't noticed any difference. The scrolling and gestures are a lot smoother but that's not necessarily a performance issue, that's just X11 not being able to cope with modern touchpads. Wayland itself isn't a performance problem, in fact the Steam Deck game UI runs a custom Wayland implementation and that's basically a games console.

You can just install Wayland support on KDE (if it's not installed already) and select it from the desktop environment drop down on the login screen. If it doesn't work or isn't to your liking, you can always log out and log back into an X11 session.

As for i3, you'll probably need an alternative such as Sway as i3 is very much X11 only. There are a few very fancy i3-like environments for Wayland but it's up to you which one you want to give a go.

I've mostly switched to Wayland on my laptop, but that does cause some Nvidia related problems every now and then. The integrated Intel GPU works great, but as usual Nvidia makes life harder for everyone. My desktop has an Nvidia card so enabling Wayland causes video decoding issues and weird performance issues.

The only system I have where X11 is still better is a Raspberry Pi. The whole Broadcom software stack there is horrible and should diaf anyway.

Your laptop is old enough that it's probably not worth teaching the old dog new tricks. I have an 8th gen L480 that Lenovo already doesn't want to sell a new battery for.

The desktop would definitely benefit from a windowing system that understands "multi-headed" beyond being one weirdly large framebuffer. Wayland is architectured to deal with multiple screens with multiple DPIs and different refresh times.

For gaming, Wine/Proton currently targets X (with magical Xwayland protocols to bypass the worst of it), but it's going to be Wayland-native before you know it. Valve has a lot riding on making Linux/Wayland gaming better, and they're going to keep on plowing development into that. Intel and AMD are 100% on the train, and even Nvidia is being less bad about it.

https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/

You have the hardware ideal to switch to Wayland without any headaches.

Just make sure you're running the latest stable release of Plasma.

You can also install Swaywm on your laptop and bring over your i3 dotfiles to it. Should be fully compatible.

The only advantage for the end user is better support for multi monitor systems with different refresh rates. If you don't have problems with that there's no real advantage in upgrading. Also avoid using Wayland on systems with an Nvidia GPU.

What are the advantages of Wayland?

The big one is proper support for diffrent refresh rate monitors and VRR. Also some security improvment and long term support (X11 probably has only a few years before development stops).

What are the disadvantages?

Its still a little buggy in some cases (especialy when using Nvidia hardware) but with an AMD or Intel GPU its more then usable. Some apps don't play nice with Xwayland but its pretty rare.

How's gaming?

I haven't encontered any major issues with games. Some games might need launch parameters but usualy you can just google it and find the answer very quickly. Performance its exactly the same as on X (maybe even slightly better)

What would be the best way to switch?

On your desktop with KDE you can just select "KDE (Wayland)" in your display manager and KDE should just run like normal but with Wayland. On you laptop you'd need to switch to a diffrent WM since i3 dosen't support Wayland. Your best bet would probably be Sway since its compatible with i3 configurations.

Why have you made the switch?

I wanted to check out how well Wayland works and found that it works fine for me, and so i decided to move. Also X was giving me issues with screen tearing and multiple monitors.

Yes switch

Try it and pipewire to see how it works

I've been on sway since 2019 and I've had fewer issues than I did on i3. The performance was an immediate improvement. Feels silky smooth like x never did. Stable as a rock.

If it ain't broken don't fix it.

Wayland is not ready for gaming/streaming since it lacks a few features on obs (mainly the docks) and there is forced "vsync" on the games and you can't have tearing unless the game is wayland native and you have a recent desktop environment version on your distro thag supports it. Also some other apps may be buggy but for general usage is pretty much ready i'd say.

I've switched to wayland full time, on amd GPU so I didn't get any nvidia problems.

Used sway and hyprland as my compositors, and a large pro was incredibly smooth desktop experience, especially when browsing when compared to Xorg. No screen tearing, just smooth as butter scrolling. Also when gaming, I found the fullscreen/borderless experience to be way less of a hassle than on xorg.

That's where the pros off the top of my head end. The cons are that it's new, so it's lacking in some software like autoclickers (can use scripts as workaround), and the security feature of applications not being able to read each others inputs, which does help against potential keyloggers but disrupts any push to use/talk applications. If you want to create an autoclicker script or use discord's push to talk, you'll likely have to bind it through a compositor with varying results, or be pretty much limited to using them in xwayland windows. And recently, it seems that my loading times of games on steam went up, though not sure how much of that is wayland's fault.

Apart from that, yeah. It's a shiny new thing that is perfectly usable, and if you want to - go for it. For your use case specifically, the cons probably won't matter unless you don't want to use a window manager, because then I'd probably stay away if I were you. The only desktop environment that supports wayland is KDE and last I've heard the experience is still rather experimental. But overall, is it worth switching for practical reasons when compared to xorg? In my opinion, no.

in my experience wayland is faster to log in and less input lag, problems are things like discord that don't implement screen record, but it work on the browser, and sometimes i need to find replacement for some apps that work on wayland(like xdotool to simulate mouse etc) i use fedora so wayland is default

I can`t give you any technical details, but real-world ones -- it (drastically) decreased my cpu temps and cpu usage, while providing a slightly better performance overall.

t. Tested this on a rpi 4 while running Doom 3 (the closest of a "Crysis for rpi 4") a couple years ago. Pretty sure its even better right now.

You probably won't notice a difference in day-to-day use, especially since you use Plasma. I can't vouch for performance, but you don't have a Nvidia GPU so you should be fine. The easiest way to migrate for you on your desktop is to install plasma-wayland-session, and for your Laptop to install sway and put in your i3 config.

No it’s bad.

E: anti wayland, anti pulseaudio, anti systemd, pro xscreensaver.

I am no fan of wayland, but if it works the software you use and your workflow, then it would probably be advisable to do so. It is not for me and my day to day workflow.

I switched from Arch + DWM into Artix + DWL and my Thinkpad with Ryzen 5700U doubled the battery life from 3-3,5 hrs to 6-7 hrs. Also if I close the lid, the battery won't run out as fast it was actually used. I don't know what explains all this so I don't make claims either.

I'm not switching on my main laptop until xwayland app scaling is figured out. Either figure out how to make the apps scale properly or just leave them tiny on my screen. None of this stretching them to fit and making them blurry bullshit.

I use it on everything else because all my other computers don't have high dpi screens.

I wouldn't be in too big of a rush, especially if you don't have a lot of time to experiment. I gradually switched over when I realized that Sway was meant to be a wayland replacement for i3wm. There were some rough edges at first, but starting about a year ago I switched to Sway on most of my machines. I didn't have any trouble installing sway alongside i3wm and xfce4, and I would highly recommend keeping an x11 option as a fallback when or if something doesn't work.

Initially, I tried out Sway because I heard that most x11 developers were shifting their focus to Wayland and I figured that I should start experimenting with it. I like getting out in front of change. Eventually, Sway shifted from interesting to good enough for daily use. I figure that I'll have less time to play around with my computers in the future, so I might as well try new stuff out now before it gets forced on me.