How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing

| debian | linux |

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

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

The New Separation of Concerns

In our new comprehensive online course, Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens, we discuss the need to revisit the powerful concept of separation of concerns. Separation of concerns is a computer science principle introduced in the mid 1970s that …

via Blog – Brad Frost June 18, 2025

Israeli-linked hackers steal and destroy $90 million from Iranian Nobitex exchange

The Iran-based Nobitex cryptocurrency exchange suffered a $90 million hack, and the attacker has also promised to imminently release data and source code from the platform. The hacking group appears to have burned the crypto assets, …

via Web3 is Going Just Great June 18, 2025

Pluralistic: The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice (18 Jun 2025)

Today's links The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice: Anarchists, cryptids and haints (oh my). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've …

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow June 18, 2025

Generated by openring