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

Notes from Alexander Petros’ “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”

I loved this talk from Alexander Petros titled “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”. What follows is summation of my note-taking from watching the talk on YouTube. Is what you’re building for future generations: Useful for them? Maintainable by them? Adapt…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog May 14, 2025

Open Up, Episode 2: Fundamentals, Principles, Navigating an Imperfect World, Collaboration, and Old Friends

I’m late in posting this because boy oh boy, there’s been a lot going on. But Episode 2 of our show Open Up is out! Geoff and I tackled some great questions and covered a lot of ground in this […]

via Blog – Brad Frost May 14, 2025

Your license is a scam

Good morning. Good morning sir! How can I help you? Hello, hi. I was interested in buying one of your cars, the Model A. I really like it and it seems perfect for me. That’s an excellent choice! Model A is a great car, the price starts at 20 …

via Manuel Moreale May 14, 2025

Generated by openring