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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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X11 and Wayland are the bits that handle windows, mouse inputs and stuff around graphical user interfaces. They’re what makes GUIs work.
X has been around since the 80s and is throughly decrepit and just does not support a lot of modern functionality. If you’ve had some issue with your windows and display being janky or monitors not working properly, it’s probably due to X11. It works for the most part, but there are just a lot of situations where it creates issues.
Wayland fixes a lot off issues because it is built to handle modern situations better. If you want to see an easy example, if you’re on mint with X11, go to settings and set your UI scaling to some uneven value like 136%, you’ll probably see some weird buggy stuff happen. That’s the kind of thing Wayland fixes.
I was shocked to learn a couple days ago when I installed Mint on my wife's Surface laptop that the UI scaling only had 2 options for scaling in the basic settings. 100% and 200%. I had to click advanced settings, enable fractional scaling or something similar, go back and then I had options for 50, 75, 125, 150, etc. i don't remember if I saw a box for custom values though.