Linux

Wayland all the way, 120 hz Freesync monitor with 60 hz second monitor works perfectly on KDE Plasma with AMD. No fussing about with X11 configs or worrying about if the compositor is active or not, it just works.

Don't bother choosing. Use whatever the distro gives you until you actually have a reason to switch

Wayland is the future. X11's future is dead. Unfortunately there are still some growing pains. Xwayland mostly works but I have issues with it sometimes.

If you don't know install a distro and use what comes with it by default and only worry about digging into the plumbing if something doesn't work for you.

Ideally you let your distro worry about plumbing.

I think Mint is nice if you don't need bleeding edge stuff. You can use Cinnamon which runs x11 but will eventually support Wayland.

I've heard good things about suse which has a rolling release option and supports gnome and KDE under Wayland.

Arch of course is a thing if you don't mind a manual transmission as it were.

Personally I might pick Mint to get started.

Wayland. No screen tearing and it doubled my battery life.

Wayland, because it's faster, more stable, handles multi-monitor better, you can have animations while playing a game, no tearing, no fcking around window managers/compositors or shit, lower memory usage and 1:1 touchpad gestures

Wayland for better multimonitor support, scaling, and tear-free rendering.

Wayland because X is owned by Elon Musk

Wayland. Because it's X12. Not a spiritual successor to X11, but an implementation of a subset of X12 by the X11 people. The fact that X11 even works for desktop is a miracle, and only possible due to everyone deploying ass-backwards workarounds to make it work. Now the only changes to Xorg are related to Xwayland.

Wayland if possible because it generally performes better and is actively maintained. Xorg if Wayland doesn't support your system yet.

X11 for X11Forwarding over SSH.

Wayland because I want something actively maintained and progressive.

Both have issues, just that X11 has old issues that rarely someone is workin on, while Wayland has new ones and people are fixing them. So Wayland for me, thank you.

Wayland first, but have both installed so you can fall back to X11 if you need to. If you do have to go back check wayland again after every few updates. X is dying a long-needed death. It started off has a hack decades ago and has just been held together with duct tape ever since. There are some not so great things in wayland with some apps, sometimes issues with context menus or screen recording for example, but they’re getting fixed over time.

I do kind of miss x forwarding over SSH. It was really convenient, there might be something for wayland but I haven’t looked for a while.

X11. I heard NVIDIA is buggy on Wayland. Also, I've never really had much problems with X11 and my system setup.

Wayland just feels more polished and clean.

Wayland. It generally works a bit better at this point, and it will only continue improving while X11 falls behind. I occasionally need to switch back to X.org for some legacy screen-casting or remote desktop apps, but even the ones that support Linux as an afterthought are starting to add beta Wayland support.

Wayland, especially with a laptop and/or a multi-monitor setup. It has a proper touchpad support with 1:1 gestures and setting different scaling factors for multiple monitors with different refresh rates is a breeze.

I get screen tearing when gaming on x11 so i use wayland and I only switch to x11 if i need to screenshare on discord.

Wayland, security

Wayland, but I mourn for X11. So many great tools, you could truly do anything. You're just not allowed to have fun in Wayland :D

Currently, you should use X11 unless you have a good reason to use Wayland, such as using multiple monitors with different refresh rates.

There are still some issues with Wayland, but once they are worked out, then Wayland will be the better choice.

Wayland if you have more that one monitor. X11 can support multiple monitors but it is a disaster.

Rustdesk doesn't work on Wayland and that is a real bummer

If Wayland works well enough for you, Wayland. If it doesn't work, X11

I would refer you to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW3nYiK3nd0

X11 because it's what I already have installed.

When I have/want to make a change then I'll go with Wayland :)

Wayland. Touchscreen support and gestures. No scaling issues. Better smoothness.

I love Wayland. But I go with X11 because fucking Slack. Video calls crash the whole thing on Wayland.

Edit: Debian 12, with Kde Plasma. The same thing happened with Gnome. It's a known issue afaik

Wayland, because anything I want to do is possible with wlroots compositors like sway. And if you don't need a feature not yet implemented in wayland (e.g. screen tearing), wayland is usually the better experience.

Obviously switching from X11 to a standalone Wayland compositor like sway involves changing out some apps, it's a core component of your system afterall. But xrandr has it's wayland alternatives, rofi has lbonn's fork with wayland support, dmenu has it's equivalent, etc. The X11 tools might work, but usually aren't as good of a experience (e.g. rofi X11 might stay in the foreground while not being able to react to keypresses, rofi-wayland fixes this.).

And I really like to try new things and be at the edge off new technology, so I really wanted to use wayland (And have been using it for years at this point).

Now that Hyprland exists... Wayland all the way. Its a bit buggy compared to Sway... but its fast, snappy and very lightweight.

Wayland da god

Wayland. I'm quite happy not to have to delve into xorg.conf for my keyboard layout.

I use Wayland because of my multi monitor setup not playing nice otherwise.

Unless you are on NVidia or need X11 specific things (E.g. a lot of the accessability stuff) I would go for Wayland, it still has some issues but so dose X11 and Wayland is simply the new display server from the xorg foundation because X11 was impossible to properly update by now, it has far too much lagacy code and didn't get any new version in ages for that reason.

Both of them have issues depending on the setup. X11 has worked flawlessly in my experience. Wayland has worked the same for most.

Personally, Wayland still has some growing pains, especially in regards to Input handling (mouse, keyboard, etc). In X11 it was "trivial" to edit one file and have the settings stick across different WMs (switching from DWM to i3, etc.) There's no standard for this with Wayland since it's up to the compositor to handle these things, meaning you're relearning how to do something as basic as setting pointer speed each time you try a new compositor. This is my only real fair gripe about it currently, as the rest of my complaints are just due to how young a lot of the Wayland-specific tools are - this will improve with time.

X11 because KDE cut some features for Wayland (some that will be cut in Plasma 6 X11 too, yay) and some apps just don't support wayland for technical reasons.

I honestly just stick with X11 because of the high degree of compatibility, and I often already rely on X11-only software anyways like Redshift (I know there's Wayland-supporting alternatives, but I'm picky and don't like switching if I don't feel I need to), also my DE/WM of choice is currently awesomewm and I think I've heard mixed things about using awesomewm on Wayland (or it might not even be compatible at all. I just woke up and I'm struggling to remember lol)

I still use X11 because one of my necessary voip apps (mumble) doesn't yet support wayland's method of global hotkeys.

Otherwise I don't particularly care one way or the other.

Either way is fine usually. If you really care about 1:1 trackpad gestures like I do, get Wayland. If you have an nvidia card, get x11. Otherwise it’s probably not something most people will even notice.