Wayland is the default on most desktops now, and the remaining rough edges are specific enough to list. This is what a daily-driver setup looks like after a year, without the evangelism.
1. What is genuinely better
Per-monitor fractional scaling that works, no tearing without a compositor hack, and input handling that does not fall apart under load. Mixed-DPI setups in particular went from painful to unremarkable.
2. What still needs care
- Screen sharing works through xdg-desktop-portal. Install the portal that matches your compositor, or the picker never appears.
- Clipboard managers need
wl-clipboard. Anything expecting X selections sees nothing. - Global hotkeys for non-focused applications are deliberately unavailable. Bind them in the compositor instead.
- Remote X11 forwarding over SSH still requires Xwayland, which is fine but worth knowing before a debugging session.
3. The environment variables that matter
# ~/.config/environment.d/wayland.conf
ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=auto
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland;xcbThe Qt fallback to xcb is intentional: a handful of applications still crash on the Wayland backend, and a semicolon costs less than a bug report.
4. How to tell what you are running
echo "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE"
xlsclients # anything listed is running through XwaylandMost surprises come from an application quietly using Xwayland while you assume otherwise. Check before blaming the compositor.