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
- Great Lakes, Illinois
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Ladybird on Debian Stable
- Are we inside a Sarlacc?
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
- [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Clicks Communicator
Clicks: A new kind of mobile communicator Designed for doing, not doomscrolling. That tagline definitely got my attention. Based on the design and some of the copy, it made me think it was a more...
via Chris Hannah January 3, 2026Reminder: New Year, New URL
I mentioned it in the last post: To give this blog a more personal touch, I switched the URL to https://soeren.one. If you access through RSS feeds, bookmarks, or saved links, please take a moment to update them so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you…
via gluecko.se January 3, 2026Ink in the Stomach
Something I believe very strongly, mostly from observing changes in myself, is that, once you’ve shoved your own hands deep in the entrails of a building, you’ve permanently altered your entire relationship with the world.
via The Map is Mostly Water January 3, 2026Generated by openring