How I moved on from my Xs and reasons why you should do the same

So you fell into another clickbait. You might have clicked the link hoping for me ranting about my love life. You aren’t completely wrong. This is actually a rant about my love life, just not the one that you’re familiar with. I’ll start this off by letting you know that I’ve found happiness with Hyprland and to date I can’t think of anyone else to mimic the experience.
My life with the X display server started during my school days when we were introduced to the It@school OS custom made by the Kerala Government for the State board highschool education. I later found out that the Desktop environment they use is a modified version of the KDE plasma. I’ve noticed an image being featured in KDE official website taken from an event conducted by the kerala state Government. Throughout the years I used different iterations of ubuntu mostly with Gnome with the windows user mindset, being tied to the mouse and not trying to see what’s going on underneath.
Until I was 16 and cleared my highschool I didn’t had the luxury to own a computer thereby restricting my chances to properly understand it’s working. Thanks to the budget restraints kept while buying the PC I didn’t drown into the world of pc gaming and sticked with windows. And within 5-6 months I had managed to fry half of the RAM I had (2/4 GB) And at that point Windows 10 wasn’t really running on my PC anymore. I had no choice but to switch to the poorman’s OS which was ubuntu for me at the time. I realised I could pretty much do everything in ubuntu that can be done with Windows. Even though I absoloutely Hated the THICK title bar ubuntu provides I was satisfied with the overall snappiness (not snap packages) of using it. \ Fast forward 2 years and I bought a new laptop and like all the standard ones available, mine was also having Windows 10 installed by default. Believe it or not I switched to linux after one of my senior sent me a text stating “You’re a communist right? So you’ll be using linux instead of windows eh ?”. This for sure can be considered to be the wildest reasons ever to switch to linux compared to my peers who switched to linux for customisation, better performance or better coding experience etc. The senior later made another key contribution with inviting my focus to KDE Plasma and opened my eyes to see the working of Desktop environment and window managers. I had spent multiple hours trying to disable the THICK title bar that comes with Gnome and with plasma you can effortlessly get customised and sleek window panes along with much more UI/UX settings. Ubuntu with Gnome and plasma installed side by side became to cluttered for me to handle and as Ultron said.

I tasted arch with Manjaro Linux , the KDE version ofc. I was alreaddy daily driving KDE in Ubuntu but making it the only DE installed provided me with a much more polished experience. It was Farseen that introduced me to the world of window managers especially he mentioned the arch + i3 setup which at that time sounded like an untamable beast. \ Even tho I loved using plasma I realised that it was pretty resource intensive especially when I have multiple Browser tabs and 2 VM (Thanks to Online classes) running at the same time. I decided to make a deal with the devil and try out i3. It was confusing at first NGL I lost count of the times I was stuck with nothing but the sddm screen stuck as my wallpaper. All i needed to do was read the documentation yet I preferred to learn using i3 the hardway 💀 after learning the basics of i3 i continued to use it when i was doing resource intensive tasks. I was fascinated by the amount of speed and snappiness (incomparable to the ubuntu one) I was able to achieve even when resource intensive apps were running. As the semester came to end the ultron inside me woke up again. This time I was brave enough to embrace pure Arch linux that to without any install scripts (thanks to arch install youtube videos) and ofc Archwiki. Even tho I was daily driving i3 at this point I wasn’t confident enough install only i3. The major reason was I was still unaware of the packages I require to properly run my PC. so I installed the Plasma DE again without KDE apps. and then installed i3 along with it.
it was around at this point I heard about waydroid which was a containerized android environment. And trying to get that installed was when I heard of the wayland . Wayland remained a buggy display server that never worked out for me for another semester. Again comes the end of a semester and this time I was confused on which stone I shall throw myself at.

On one side I craved for using emerge package manager achieving true free and open source feeling that’ll cost me compile times ranging days and debugging stuff even more. On the other hand I wanted to better utilise my time using Fedora aka “IT WORKS OUT OF THE BOX OS” according to long time fedora fan boi Naveen S D. I hated fedora for a long time. And Naveen S D hated arch for some reason. I wanted to put an end to the argument that my hatred for fedora is irrational and I can only claim fedora sucks only if I use it. There was pros and cons for my experience with fedora. I for sure loved all the trackpad gestures. COPR can’t even compare with AUR and dnf is SLOW 🐌. I lived my life as if I was married to the wrong person. And poor Naveen had to hear all my complaints cause he set us up 💀 and before completeing the semester itself I went back to Arch. But I was so comfortable with wayland so that I couldn’t go back to i3 which uses X server. Compared to the X server I still was lacking options to choose from with wayland. Since I loved working around i3 and was familiar with the configs with i3 I went with Sway WM. The archinstall script was pretty mature at the time so i went with it to complete my installation. My exposure to r/unixporn made me pretty good with ricing 🍚 my environment. Unlike X things were pretty much more organised with wayland. HDMI works on the go no need for xrandr. The apps that is being built for wayland shows how far it is ahead of the display server that was designed in the 80s 💀 waydroid, mpvpaper to name a few that I’ve used.
Within a short time period wayland turned the tables. From being a buggy protocol which had no chance up against the industry standard X to being the default display server for gnome, Wayland for sure has an inspiring underdog story. It’s also worth noting that the adoption for Wayland has reached a point where many of the X related packages are getting deprecated and developers are shifting focus to wayland. It’ll only increase as more of you switch over to Wayland 😚
X server did serve me well. It had it’s glory days but the legacy code prevents it from ever achieving what Wayland is destined to achieve. There are still some apps mostly proprietory that still works only with X but not for long. As usual NVIDIA is being NVIDIA with Wayland, making life hard for developers.

If you’re still not convinced to ditch your X and embrace Wayland