I’ve been on Wayland for the past two years exclusively (Nvidia).
I thought it was okay for the most part but then I had to switch to an X session recently. The experience felt about the same. Out of curiosity, I played a couple of games and realized they worked much better. Steam doesn’t go nuts either.
Made me think maybe people aren’t actually adopting it that aggressively despite the constant coverage in the community. And that maybe I should just go back.
I’ll adopt it when it’s ready.
For NVIDIA users, that’s the right answer. For AMD users, it’s already ready. No problems here (6700xt)
Yeah, it was ready for my old AMD machine. My new Nvidia box…nah.
But since I’ve switched to XFCE, I don’t need to worry so much about new-fangled things like Wayland…for now.
All AMD here and I can’t have it as a daily driver. So many issues made me hate my PC. Back to X11.
Which DE are you using? I’m using KDE.
Plasma 6. I’m going through a very busy time at work at the moment. Once it’s done, I’ll just reinstall the whole system and see if that helps.
It’s not just about hardware compatibility. It has to be compatible with existing workflows, and it’s currently very limiting.
On nvidia, there are still too many edge cases involving Wayland that are just crippled. Orca slicer doesn’t work for me for example, you are completely missing any of the 3d accelerated graphics in there.
On the other hand, the AMD 7x00 series have different kind of bugs, with ring0 errors leading to full resets.
I think once nvidia drivers are squared out (the proprietary ones) it will be smooth sailing.
The first and the best answer
Yes. I’ve used X11 for far too long to have any rose tinted glasses for the piece of fucking broken shit it always was. a LOT of people don’t realize how many hacks, workarounds and sheer tears and duct tape goes into making the piece of shit render the smallest line on the screen.
That’s also why Phoronix comment section neckbeards are so infuriating for me. They talk like X.Org works like at all.
That’s because their mid-2000’s setup with single 1024x768 screen works just fine with compositing disabled, 24bit color depth via VGA connector.
I had to switch to Wayland the moment I tried to run simple 4K@60 on my old RX570, and Xorg was just refusing to set the mode, or produced some colorful vomit garbage when forced to do so, no matter what. And Wayland (just like Windows) simply worked.
Was it perfectly ready back then? Heck no. Is it ready now? Maybe not for everyone, but it’s getting there and time is telling us that the missing parts on Wayland side are fixable.
Criticism is viable to some degree, though. Because from the very beginning there were certain assumptions made, and creators of the base protocol didn’t care about real world use on desktop as much as they cared about the security model, it takes a lot of time to solve some of those. The development is slow and there are always some gaps here and there, but I watch it long enough (17 years) to know that to some degree it is like that with the entire ecosystem, let alone Xorg that no programmer wants to touch anymore for anything but simple bugfix or security patching.
Full wayland all the time for probably 2 years now
Yeah, me too. Whenever Fedora made the move to Wayland by default for Gnome.
Since I switched to AMD about a month ago. Literally every naggling issue I had with NVidia is gone. Only complaint is that I didn’t switch sooner.
Why I’m not using it:
- worse performance (Nvidia)
- couldn’t get screen sharing and recording to work
- unfinished or abandoned alternatives to xorg tools (swhkd for example)
Made me think maybe people aren’t actually adopting it that aggressively despite the constant coverage in the community.
Take the community with a grain of salt; It’s made up of the same type of people that say Arch is a stable distro that never has any issues.
Some distros are pushing it aggressively (Fedora for example), so use them as a more accurate gauge. If Fedora doesn’t accept the proposal to start phasing out xorg, you can know for sure it doesn’t have the conversion rates they’re hoping for.
Started my Linux journey with Wayland 1.5 years ago and haven’t used X11 at all.
Oh, you’ve been missing out on a lot of “fun” 😄
I mainly use Wayland(nvidia) and have been using it for the last couple of years. Only switch to X11 when there is a game that absolutely won’t work with Wayland.
As I see it both display servers are ass.
X11 just being old and crusty, maintainers don’t really wanna deal with it. Vsync in general has problems so you usually just turn it off in hope of your software running fast enough(or you could lock fps lower than display hz) so you won’t get screen tearing.
Wayland being new and has active development is great but now we have a very opinionated dev team. It took until Valve came along for them to actually listen to complaints, I guess if Valve is knocking at your door you would answer.
Some days I’m pretty close to going back to Windows, then I remember how ass windows is and I just deal with it. And for anyone saying “just buy AMD” I had a AMD card before this and I couldn’t even use Linux, it would just constantly crash.
Maintainers don’t want to support it? Because the code is shit and they developed a new product Wayland. I mean when the people who develop it think the code is unmaintainable.
I’ve got three hard problems preventing me from using Wayland (sway/wlroots) right now:
- No global shortcuts for applications, especially legacy applications; I need teamspeak3 to be able to read my PTT keys in any application. Yes I know that could be used to keylog (the default should be off) but let me make that decision.
- Button to pixel latency is significantly worse. I don’t need V-Sync in the terminal or Emacs. Let me use immediate presentation in those applications.
- VRR is weird. I’d love if desktop apps were V-sync’d via VRR but the way it currently works is that apps make the display go down to 48Hz (because they don’t refresh) but the refresh rate never goes up when typing; further exacerbating button to pixel delay.
There’s a portal for Global Shortcuts: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.html
KDE and Hyprland already implement it, and COSMIC seems likely to
On the app side, if we can get the major toolkits to adopt it, then hopefully that covers most actively-maintained apps (but it’s unlikely to cover legacy apps): https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/38288
If I can get the portal to just forward every keypress (or a configurable subset) to an xwayland window, that’d work for me. (I am aware of the security implications.)
As far as I know xwayland in plasma/kde already does that. However as it’s KDE, it is most likely configurable and might not be enabled by default :P
I’m not an expert, but my understanding of the Global Shortcuts portal is that it’s very much designed for the push-to-talk use case where an app is not focused but still receives button events for exactly the keys its interested in and no other keys: I think this would cause problems if an app requested every key (e.g. if the request was approved then no keys would work in every other app)
It’ll be interesting to see how the remaining compatibility/accessibility issues are tackled, either in portals or in wayland protocols
Yeah and that’s great but my point is that I don’t see an obvious way to use it for that in its current implementation. I’m sure you could build it but it’s simply not built yet.
Every day on all my computers. No interest in going back to X11, things work better on wayland, multimonitor doesn’t shit itself randomly anymore.
I switched to sway from i3 about 5 years ago. It’s easier to configure (no /etc/X11 nonsense) and it fixed my screen tearing issue. I’m not much of a gamer, so can’t comment on that. Supertuxkart and browser games work fine.
Exact same. Sway’s 1.0 release was March of 2019, and it did everything I needed.
Even playing games on my desktop, Xwayland worked fine for me.
Is Sway like a Wayland equivalent of i3? That’s the only thing really keeping me on X
Yes, on my laptop where it works well and it allows for nice fractional scaling.
It works on my desktop too but I can’t stand vsync while playing CS so it’s Xorg for now.
When XFCE supports it.
Still won’t be able to stick i3 in xfce because of how Wayland is designed
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Sway for a little over a year now (on an AMD gpu). I switched for mixed refresh rate support and VRR. VRR requires a workaround in sway but works better in others, like hyprland, however I like sway’s tiling better so I stuck with it. Also the absence of tearing in anything, ever, is worth it to me. I have two vertical displays and it was really hit or miss on X11. Sometimes GPU acceleration would just decide not to work in browsers and I’d have to restart them because smooth scrolling would turn into a stop-motion film. That’s never happened since switching to sway.
EDIT: I used i3 before
I’ve used it for about a year on a laptop with an 8th gen i7 and Intel graphics. It works well there.
