> Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing?
Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.
Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.
> X11 has basically no development anymore.
Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version in my distro's package manager.
> That means regressions are entirely ignored.
Should I ever actually have a problem, and it's something that I can't (or CBA to) fix, and my distro's maintainers don't want to try to fix (and then tell me that upstream will never fix), then I'll look more closely at XLibre. XLibre may or may not be a dumpster fire at that point, who knows? If it is a dumpster fire, then I'll look around for other alternatives.
> It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default in [TYOOL]
Nah. It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland. The shocking thing would be if I were to waste a ton of time chasing the new shiny... especially when those responsible for the new shiny have been lying for the past 10+ years about how it's ready for everyone's general use. [0]
[0] Perhaps it's ready now, after nearly eighteen years in development. I can't rely on the statements of those responsible for the project to tell me, and I CBA to go searching for (and evaluating the trustworthiness of) information on the topic.
> Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version in my distro's package manager.
Yea these are security updates but the eco system requires a lot of desktop manager scaffolding in user space. That has basically stopped. It's baffling why you would run X11 today. The X11 emulation layer for Wayland works great too by the way.
Just as one example when you screen share from discord or zoom or Google meets there's now a pop-up that asks you to select the screen or window you wish to latch on to for streaming. This provides some security. With X11 anything can just take a screenshot at any time. Sure that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11 anymore. As someone that made the switch three years ago I get how you might think the old system is better but in reality you haven't tried the new one so you don't really have a way to compare. I noticed so many quality of life fixes that I can't even imagine running X11 anymore.
> Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11... Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.
Weird. I don't use KDE's compositor, and -AFAIK- WindowMaker doesn't have one. When in either KDE or in WindowMaker I don't have stuttering with either fullscreen, borderless "fullscreen", or windowed games... everything is as smooth as it is in Windows. Having said that, I do know that -when using KDE- some fullscreen games get jittery as all shit if a notification pops up and remain that way until the notification disappears. I expect that that performance problem would go away if I was using the compositor... but I don't want to spend the VRAM on it.
I use AMD graphics cards, so it might be an Nvidia thing that you're seeing. It also might be a "Your Linux distro simply stopped shipping good xorg installs" thing. I'm running Gentoo Linux which continues to ship updated versions of xorg and supporting software. [0]
[0] I've heard people running Debian and Debian-derived distros report X11 behavior that absolutely does not match what I've been seeing for years... so some percentage of the "X11 can't do $THING" when it really, really can must be coming from distros that ship either dramatically out-of-date or severely crippled xorg installs.