Igor Ljubuncic Once Again Shows That for Technical Reasons Wayland Still Sucks, Performs Considerably Worse Than What Existed for Decades

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 10, 2025

"These are significant numbers, and differences, because in many of the cases, Plasma Wayland was able to do 30-50% more frames than Gnome Wayland, and X11 was better still by 10% than Wayland in KDE neon. This is lots of frames."

This is how to debunk "Wayland People" (no politics required):

That was long, and to be fair, quite exhausting. The results are quite interesting. By and large, Gnome Wayland, as implemented in Fedora, seems slightly less performant than Plasma's Wayland, which in turn, is less performant than X11, and as we've seen that, too, is still worse than X11 with compositing off. Significant numbers that, to me, tell one things: it's too early to deprecate the old framework, because the new one still hasn't caught up. No emotion, no fanboyism, simple pragmatic c'est la vie.

If we look just at Wayland, on idle, Gnome performed worse in battery use and CPU data, with surprisingly good GPU numbers that do not align with any other test. Under load, again, Gnome's Wayland used most resources, and had the worst FPS count by far. Furthermore, Fedora's kernel seems to be doing a lot more work, but also doing it quite efficiently. Lastly, both Plasma's System Monitor and Gnome's System Monitor seem to be badly optimized tools, given what we've seen so far.

To sum it up, X11 is still the most optimal choice, performance wise, to say nothing of the compositing off option, which blows the rest out of the water. Plasma's Wayland implementation is better than Gnome's, it seems. Both still lack a lot. This highlights the tragedy of the forced X11 deprecation. To top it all off, you get unverified packages and a codec vomit mess, to remind you how far Linux still has to go before it can be a normal solution for the normies. Hint: don't copy the worst parts of Windows. There. Solved. Bye.

There are many tables in that page.

That is aside from compatibility factors and other crucial factors.

Thanks to Igor Ljubuncic for providing scientific data where it is sorely needed. Ljubuncic is a scientist, not a reckless coder or a poser like many Wayland enthusiasts tend to be. █