if I make the switch or is it more of an under the hood optimization that won ' t be visible to the naked eye ? In my use case there are clear noticeble differences . I run gnomeshell that outputs the desktop to a 4 k TV without any scaling . I love the huge screen real estate . Unfortunately my graphics card can only push 30 Hz and that is fine . I barely notice any difference to a display driven with 60 Hz , even when gaming . Under X , whenever I drag windows around or something gets redrawn in the interface like opening a menu , I will see some artifacts . They are VERY noticeble . Under Wayland the problem is totally gone . Incredible . Another difference No more video tearing , even in corner cases . In X sometimes video will tear when played on window mode , in wayland this is never the case . The only pain I have with wayland right now is the absence of VDPAU hardware acceleration , so 4 k videos are a slideshow because my CPU cannot handle them . When this problem gets fixed , I ' ll be working full time on a wayland session . Wayland still has its problems , but I suppose if we give it some time to mature , it will most definitely turn out to be great for developers and users alike . Let ' s remember , this is opensource . Where is demand for a feature and devs willing to implement it , it will eventually get implemented .