Hey Community,
Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.
- What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
- I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
- what would be the best way to migrate?
- why have/haven’t you made the switch?
Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor
laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps
If you’re not having performance issues, then I don’t see much reason to change. Sure, Xorg is basically in maintenance mode, but so what? Your setup works for you, so do your thing.
That said, Sway is a window manager intended to be a drop in replacement for i3 on Wayland, and is pretty close from what I hear: https://swaywm.org/
Plasma is very good with Wayland, although you might want to wait for Plasma 6, since they’re apparently making several improvements, and it’s due out soon anyway: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6-Wayland-Great
You can install Wayland and switch sessions during login too, so you can check it for yourself and see if your i3 dotfiles work with Sway.
Xorg is in maintenance mode for the next few years (most likely), so it’s really not something that anyone needs to worry about today.
- Wayland has several new features like, say, removing screen tearing, but it’s not necessarily “advantages” that are the reason to use Wayland. It’s sort of a redo of how graphics should work in the Linux world, and it will be the standard going forward. X11 development has more or less ceased with those developers moving to Wayland (in fact, Wayland was created by X11 developers to address issues they had with the architecture of X11). It’s not a matter of should you switch to Wayland; it’s a matter of when should you switch to Wayland. The answer is, as soon as you can.
- Gaming varies drastically. Some games are fine. Some games make me launch Steam via Lutris to start (not sure why it works, but it does) but run fine after. Some games can’t reach higher framerates. That said, no screen tearing is a plus. When it works, Wayland is very smooth, but it doesn’t always work yet. An example off the top of my head, no matter what I do, Street Fighter 6 doesn’t get above 45 fps on Wayland. It’s a good idea to have an X11 option as a backup still imo
- The best way to migrate is just to install a Wayland compatible DE/WM. I’ve used both GNOME Wayland and Hyprland extensively and they both work great. If you’re used to i3 (that’s what I used to use and is still my X11 backup), Hyprland is great. KDE like you have on your Desktop already works good on Wayland from what I’ve heard.
- I have made the switch because most of my apps can run on Wayland, and it’s the future. I still have a backup in case there’s a game or something that doesn’t quite work for me. For instance, I can’t share screen on discord. It won’t even recognize the pipewire route. Thus, I’ve gotta switch to X if I want to do that.
The biggest Sin by far of Wayland is making users think about the graphics stack. Does this feature or this app support Wayland or X? Does this Compositor support this GPU? Does this particular environment support this mixture of displays with this DPI? Do I need to set a particular env variable or change a setting to force this app to start in Wayland mode because under X11 its scaled funky. What works in each environment? What doesn’t work between environments?
Well before you reach the end of this flow chart you have lost virtually all of your users. This transition has single-handedly set the Linux desktop back by 20 years in terms of supporting more users whose level of interest in configuration is limited to clicking a control next to their monitor and making things bigger or smaller.
A saner design would have handled scaling correctly from the start and would have had a permissive mode which just made everything from the users perspective work while progressively adding a correct UI to provide features like global hotkeys, screen sharing, only to those apps users had authorized like android. If it wasn’t a such a clusterfuck to use it would have had orders of magnitude more users much earlier in the development phase and perhaps attracted more development interest as well.
Nobody’s requiring you to use Wayland currently, I mean realistically name a Wayland-only app (excluding the ones like remote desktop apps that are replacing X11 apps that don’t work at all on Wayland), they don’t exist. But with new technologies will always be growing pains, the X11 -> Wayland transition will still be another few years I imagine, I mean at this point we’re really only waiting on NVIDIA 🫠. It’s a painful process, but one that is only so painful because it’s been put off for so long, if we put it off for any longer it would’ve just been even worse.
It’s painful because the developers took 14 years to produce something semi usable while ignoring incredibly common use cases and features for approximately the first 10 -12 years of development
Well, such is the downfall of OSS, I mean look at VR on Linux, Mesa straight up will hard crash if you try to run SteamVR on the latest versions, and the time it takes for VR related bugs in Mesa to get patched are insanely long.
Just gotta make a hubub about it until someone with the knowhow can fix it.
Nobody’s requiring it until devs start not supporting X11 anymore and start saying things like “won’t fix, use Wayland”. Which is already happening
See: GNOME’s response to a critical GTK4 bug on x11 that makes any program using GTK4 unusable on certain devices under x11
I think that’s a little bit premature for GNOME to do, though I have to ask, what “certain devices” are we talking about?
certain hardware configurations. I have two computers on linux. One of them has issues with GTK4, the other one doesn’t. The only difference between these machines is hardware.
And yeah, I agree that’s premature for them to do
certain hardware configurations. I have two computers on linux. One of them has issues with GTK4, the other one doesn’t. The only difference between these machines is hardware.
Right, what are the “certain hardware” configurations? Are they really old? Are they really niche?
if I knew what exactly was causing it hardware wise I would have a way to fix it, and I don’t
given GNOME’s solution is “use Wayland” (which I can’t for a variety of reasons) I don’t think I can ever figure out what the problem is. Their attitude from the start is already non helpful.
all I know is my hardware isn’t niche nor really really old. And Im not the only one experiencing this
What are the advantages of Wayland?
More modern and in some cases better performance (as if Xorg performance were bad … but hey)
What are the disadvantages?
Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications). Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.
why have/haven’t you made the switch?
I did not find one single floating WM that is as good as Openbox for Xorg. Also: Screen recording with OBS is problematic in some constellations.
Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications).
I’ve never seen any distro with Wayland that didn’t have XWayland set up and working out of the box, so that’s not something the end user needs to worry about. And “Basically None” is also not true anymore. Practically anything made with GTK3/4, Qt5/6, SDL2, recent Electron versions etc. natively runs on Wayland. It’s mostly games, Wine and a lot of proprietary software that doesn’t.
Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.
Wdym by that exactly? I mean, a KDE application will run just fine on GNOME or Wlroots compositors.
XWayland doesn’t mixed/high DPI properly anywhere but under KDE >= 5.26. On Void I found Plasma’s Wayland implementation somewhat flakey and sway completely useless as it didn’t handle scaling + xwayland.
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The hit on NVIDIA is pretty rough, I only see about 5% losses on AMD. But it will depend on your hardware fs. Hopefully we can finally see native Wayland support in Proton soon
No, you shouldn’t.
If you need Wayland you will know, if X worked for you well and you didn’t search for how to sandbox it or maybe for some other functions that Wayland has then don’t switch and don’t break what works for you.
You’re not using any NVIDIA hardware…? Hmm, nope, that’s all hardware that runs under Mesa. Give it a shot, if it doesn’t work, you can always switch back.
The big advantage is improved support for new features, like adaptive sync, multi monitor support, display scaling, etc. You’ll notice, new features (mostly gaming related features) will just work better on Wayland. There will be a performance hit though.
I made the switch because it’s just plain better, adaptive sync works (it never worked for me on X11), oh yeah and the night color actually works. Night color on KDE just does not work on X11, AMD or NVIDIA, least for me.
The only advantage for the end user is better support for multi monitor systems with different refresh rates. If you don’t have problems with that there’s no real advantage in upgrading. Also avoid using Wayland on systems with an Nvidia GPU.
touchpad pinch to zoom
I’d consider asking in a Linux audio or music production community (I’m not aware of any on Lemmy that are big enough to have a likely answer though). If music production is a primary use case and audio latency matters to you, almost no general users are going to be able to comment on the difference between X and Wayland from a latency perspective. There may not be a difference, but there might and you won’t be likely to learn about it outside of an audio-focused discussion.
Ardour and Audacity work just fine for me. Dunno if that’s what OP uses but, worth mentioning
That’s an interesting report but it’s possible to “work” at different latencies. And unless you have specialized audio capture/playback hardware and have done some tuning and testing to determine the lowest stable latency that your system is capable of achieving… “works” for you is likely to mean something very different than it does to someone who does a lot of music production.
It remains an interesting question to some users whether Wayland changes the minimum stable latency relative to X and if so whether it does so for better or worse.
in my experience wayland is faster to log in and less input lag, problems are things like discord that don’t implement screen record, but it work on the browser, and sometimes i need to find replacement for some apps that work on wayland(like xdotool to simulate mouse etc) i use fedora so wayland is default
You have the hardware ideal to switch to Wayland without any headaches.
Just make sure you’re running the latest stable release of Plasma.
You can also install Swaywm on your laptop and bring over your i3 dotfiles to it. Should be fully compatible.
The only system I have where X11 is still better is a Raspberry Pi. The whole Broadcom software stack there is horrible and should diaf anyway.
Your laptop is old enough that it’s probably not worth teaching the old dog new tricks. I have an 8th gen L480 that Lenovo already doesn’t want to sell a new battery for.
The desktop would definitely benefit from a windowing system that understands “multi-headed” beyond being one weirdly large framebuffer. Wayland is architectured to deal with multiple screens with multiple DPIs and different refresh times.
For gaming, Wine/Proton currently targets X (with magical Xwayland protocols to bypass the worst of it), but it’s going to be Wayland-native before you know it. Valve has a lot riding on making Linux/Wayland gaming better, and they’re going to keep on plowing development into that. Intel and AMD are 100% on the train, and even Nvidia is being less bad about it.
https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/
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I switched from Arch + DWM into Artix + DWL and my Thinkpad with Ryzen 5700U doubled the battery life from 3-3,5 hrs to 6-7 hrs. Also if I close the lid, the battery won’t run out as fast it was actually used. I don’t know what explains all this so I don’t make claims either.
You probably won’t notice a difference in day-to-day use, especially since you use Plasma. I can’t vouch for performance, but you don’t have a Nvidia GPU so you should be fine. The easiest way to migrate for you on your desktop is to install plasma-wayland-session, and for your Laptop to install sway and put in your i3 config.
