Products · Product
X Window System
Raised as a usability problem by 135 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 132 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Remote X11 apps sluggish due to blocking round tripsUnreviewed
20082026- Remote app through X forwarding is slow and laggy, with long startup delay over WiFi2024-05-06
- Apps feel slow because of many round-trips for network transparency2023-11-22
- Modern apps are dog slow when run over the network because of latency sensitivity2023-09-01
Mixed-DPI monitors force a compromise scaling settingUnreviewed
20082026- Users find X vs Wayland display behaviour frustrating, especially with mixed hiDPI monitors and fractional scaling2025-11-16
- Mixed-DPI monitors need lots of configuration, apps mis-scale, and windows look wrong when moved2025-06-26
- Windows look wrong across differently scaled monitors, and users must hunt for environment variables2025-06-24
Copy and paste use separate clipboards, so paste misses last copyUnreviewed
20082026- Select-and-middle-click paste uses a separate buffer from normal copy-paste, which is confusing2022-01-15
- Middle-click paste is hard to use because no other UI adopts it and it assumes a third button2020-04-25
- Auto-copying on selection makes the single merged clipboard incredibly annoying to work with2019-02-10
Touchpad gestures don't work on X11, and misfireUnreviewed
20082026- Touchpad gestures don't work out of the box, requiring manual configuration2026-02-10
- Multi-touch gestures are broken when running X11 mode2025-06-17
- Multitouch gestures on touchpads don't work well2024-04-25
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Desktop drops frames and stutters, especially at high refresh rates or under load2026-05-23
- Touchpad gestures don't work out of the box, requiring manual configuration2026-02-10
- Setting monitor modelines in a text file, with risk of damaging the monitor2026-01-21
- Inverted terminology confuses newcomers to Linux for a while2025-12-25
- Users find X vs Wayland display behaviour frustrating, especially with mixed hiDPI monitors and fractional scaling2025-11-16
- Input and output settings feel arcane and hard to understand2025-08-12
- Popups steal focus, so typing accidentally confirms dialogs the user never saw2025-08-08
- Enabling it breaks clipboard, GLX and many apps, leaving the desktop unusable2025-08-05
- Palette shifts whenever the mouse moves in or out of the window2025-07-15
- Mixed-DPI monitors need lots of configuration, apps mis-scale, and windows look wrong when moved2025-06-26
- Windows look wrong across differently scaled monitors, and users must hunt for environment variables2025-06-24
- Multi-monitor scaling is often buggy or wrong, working only on one display2025-06-19
- Poor error handling and no feedback on whether X11 calls worked2025-06-18
- Multi-touch gestures are broken when running X11 mode2025-06-17
- Configuring scaling, rotation and external displays was harder than on Wayland2025-02-11
- Adds friction for new Linux users, so they should skip it2025-01-22
- Menus were pop-up only and buttons were not standardized or recognizable2024-09-07
- After window manager crashed, user had no idea how to recover and had to hard boot2024-07-11
- Config asks questions with no way to check answers, so users guess, restart and retry2024-07-11
- Athena Widgets apps look hideous and xfontsel font selection is awkward2024-06-10
- Browsers run over X are slow to start and perform poorly2024-05-09
- Remote app through X forwarding is slow and laggy, with long startup delay over WiFi2024-05-06
- Multitouch gestures on touchpads don't work well2024-04-25
- Touch input only moves the cursor, so dragging doesn't scroll pages as expected2024-04-25
- Screen tearing needs manual Xorg config edits to fix, while Wayland works out of the box2024-04-07
- Mouse pointer can get lost in invisible dead areas between monitors2024-03-30
- Scrolling does nothing after re-entering a window with the mouse wheel on fractional-scrolling apps2024-02-11
- Desktop lags and feels unresponsive under X11, especially when the system is loaded2024-02-03
- Fractional DPI scaling works poorly on X11, pushing the user toward Wayland2023-12-29
- Friend's X terminal mouse buttons and key combinations are impossible to make sense of2023-11-28
- Apps feel slow because of many round-trips for network transparency2023-11-22
- Researching how to get a specific GPU working correctly on every install2023-11-16
- Keystrokes and clicks go to the wrong window when typed quickly, forcing users to click slowly and wait2023-10-10
- Mixed framerates and resolutions are horrid to use, with performance problems on one 4K screen2023-09-07
- Back/forward buttons and scrolling are hard to detect; scrolling jumps around unpredictably after leaving windows2023-09-07
- Modern apps are dog slow when run over the network because of latency sensitivity2023-09-01
- Changing scale factor per monitor requires restarting the window manager, a huge pain2023-09-01
- Complex conventions make apps misbehave, breaking cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop and focus for users2023-08-02
- Toolkit adds three layers of complexity and is confusing even when working2023-08-01
- Mixed-case, case-sensitive key names are hard to type correctly without copy/paste2023-07-13
- Required pages of hand-written guides to configure X11 config files2023-07-10
- Screen tears everywhere and the screen locker fails to engage when a context menu is open2023-07-10
- Remote apps are unusable without compression and laggy even with it2023-07-10
- Touchpad gestures don't work on X11, and when made to work they lag and misfire2023-05-14
- Windows cannot be moved between screens; apps must be restarted with a new DISPLAY2023-02-28
- Remote graphical tool runs below 1 frame per second, practically unusable2023-02-23
- One DPI setting per server forces blurry workarounds across mixed-resolution screens2022-12-30
- Forwarding remote graphical editor UI over X11 was clunky and slow2022-12-21
- Gesture handling stutters badly and is hard to get working smoothly on X112022-11-18
- Remote X11 GUI interactions take dozens of seconds due to latency2022-11-14