In a earlier post I spoke of how I had distro hopped for a long time before landing on and falling in love with Zorin. I have been happily using Zorin core 17 with the Wayland windowing system for about a year with no issues. In that earlier post I said I was going to buy Zoring 18 Pro when it came out. I did buy 18 Pro not because of the goodies it has (I really don’t need) them but to just support the Zorin project. After installing Zorin 18 pro I found that my computer would periodically lock up and become totally unresponsive giving me no option but to close it with the power button. I started using the X11 windowing system instead of Wayland and there have been no more problems although my system seems just a little bit slower (not a big deal). Zoring is still working great with the X11 windowing system but I am just wondering what caused this. I am using a Dell Latitude E6440 with a Intel® Core™ i7-3770 × 8 processor, 16 gigs memory with a 1tb ssd. By the way I am still using Wayland on my desktop with no issues.
Xorg is generally better supported on older hardware, as Wayland is still under very active development and changing fast from one release to another.
The hardware itself is also major factor when it comes to OS compatibility. Some internal components are simply not as well tested for Linux. You can find that the same distribution of Linux, or even down to a specific application, works fine in one machine while struggles in another one.
It could also be that the computer needs a little physical maintenance to reapply thermal paste on the CPU, clear up the dust, things like that. All in all, it's just too big of an unknown.
I can say that Zorin OS 18 on Wayland has been working fine for me thus far. But that's why is best to have choices: use whatever works best for you, be it Xorg or Wayland.
Thank you for your reply I understand and agree with all you said. What really has me confused is why did Wayland work under Zorin 17 but not under Zorin 18
Unfortunately my system has been the same since upgrading to 18. I mostly have it installed as a test area anyway, so it's not a large deal to me, but the wayland session for my system (and seemingly many others) has had some very noticable degradations. I'm hoping (possibly naively) that it's just an extension is causing an issue and could be sorted out in the near future... but I don't honestly know at this point.
Out of the box everything was working fine for a couple of days. recently I've had the UI not recognizing MOUSE input. I am able to switch windows using the ALT+TAB and start working with the mouse in that window. But to get things back to 'normal' I've had to open a terminal and issue a REBOOT NOW. Not how I like to do things. Better than hard reboots though.
I need to learn how to swicth from the default wayland and see how that works.
Simply at the login screen, when entering your password, bottom corner will have a cog icon. You can change the desktop session from there and then login as usual. It saves what you've selected for future sessions, so you don't need to change every time. It also is just as simple to switch back if something else goes wrong.
Thanks. I had forgotten that little piece of the login screen. Been so long since using a linux system. I love it.