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.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025)
Today's links Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach': If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Scary Godmother; Nightvale novel; The war on Worker's Comp; Cadillac's murdermo…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow October 21, 202510 pointless facts about me
Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave, here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Do you floss your teeth? Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Tea, co…
via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed October 21, 2025Getting started with simple CSS View Transitions
There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a web…
via Terence Eden’s Blog October 21, 2025Generated by openring