Lev Lazinskiy

How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing

I’m running Debian Testing on a laptop, and I would like to disable Wayland because not all of the tools that I use currently have first-class support for it. There is an old post that I used to reference to get this to work, but it appears that gdm3 changed the naming conventions for the configuration file in a newer version.

There used to be a file called /etc/gdm3/custom.conf which appears to have been renamed to /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf in newer versions of Debian. Luckily the contents of this file are more or less the same.

# GDM configuration storage
#
# See /usr/share/gdm/gdm.schemas for a list of available options.

[daemon]
# Uncomment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
#WaylandEnable=false

# Enabling automatic login
# AutomaticLoginEnable = true
# AutomaticLogin = user1

# Enabling timed login
# TimedLoginEnable = true
# TimedLogin = user1
# TimedLoginDelay = 10

[security]

[xdmcp]

[chooser]

[debug]
# Uncomment the line below to turn on debugging
# More verbose logs
# Additionally lets the X server dump core if it crashes
#Enable=true

In order to disable Wayland and switch back to X11, you should uncomment #WaylandEnable=flalse in this configuration file and restart your computer to apply the changes.