Been on Wayland since 2016 and to this day my only issues (apart from when I had an Nvidia card for a few months, that is…) was video sharing in Discord/steam in-home streaming, both of which still don’t work right.
Other than that, it’s been great. Multi-monitor works way better, far fewer bugs, my desktop feels a lot more fluid and smooth.
On laptops, Wayland+Gnome gestures are exceptional, putting even Apple’s gestures to shame. I cannot stress enough how good of a job Gnome+Wayland does with trackpad gestures. It makes other gesture systems, especially ones under X11, feel like they were cobbled together by a Fallout 3 modder.
Overall Wayland has been great for me. I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app.
Been using Wayland since 3’ish years ago and my desktop experience has been really smooth – no crashes, errors or anything of the sort. Everything “just werks” just as if I were on Xorg instead. Even on a completely obscure/zero linux support single board computer (Orange pi zero 3).
Graphics drivers are what matters. Your orange pi uses a mali GPU which is well supported by Linux (thanks ARM).
nVidia is just barely at the point where their most recent gpu drivers aren’t terrible under Wayland. It’s taken a while to get there.
GPUs with good open source drivers will fare fine.
It still sucks for me at least. Doesnt respect scaling, or work after suspend, also discord streaming still broken for years. Also push to talk.
maxwell users are fucked tho
Not as bad as you might think. The nouveau drivers have come a long way for maxwell. You should give it a shot if you haven’t. But, unfortunately, if you are using anything new then nouveau sucks. It’s a fun game where you get to wait until nvidia no longer wants to support your GPU and hope by that point that nouveau has progressed far enough that you won’t be looking at noman’s land.
I meant the GTX900 series. I’m aware the 700s have decent support in nouveau, but the 900s has already been dropped by nvidia so we are on older drivers not capable of the latest vulkan extensions required by modern Proton.
For nouveau it needs GSP firmware that wasnt released as part of that release they did a while ago. I think pascal users are on the same situation, they just havent been dropped by the proprietary drivers yet. I wonder if we are gonna be stuck on xorg forever.
The newer cards got the important bits released by nvidia so the community can at least have a path forward…
I wasn’t fully aware of NVK and where it’s at. It’s actually pretty exciting. I wouldn’t mind dropping my current nvidia binary blob for fully open source drivers.
it didnt work ootb for me on ubuntu so i dropped it, but i hear it can already be made to work well with the desktop and basic stuff. performance in games is still bad but they are running.
I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
- Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
- RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
- Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
- Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
- VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
- Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
- Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
- Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
- Video tearing has basically disappeared.
- Video timing issues seem to be improved.
- Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
- Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.
I wouldn’t say it breaks everything. Franky it fixes / handles better issues that are common usecases today that was not the case during the time X11 was still the norm / actively maintained such as:
- Multiple monitor support with varied refresh rates
- Hybrid GPU setup (including being able to use your motherboard’s hdmi socket and your dedicated gpu hdmi at the same time)
- Display scaling
- Better isolation of applications (to the deterrence of existing linux applications)
Of course granted its a new protocol, it doesn’t support all the usecases that X11 was designed for due to variety or reasons (including controversial decisions)
Mind you, Wayland isn’t perfect either. For example, I found out that despite Wayland having better Hybrid GPU setup support out of the box, there are applications that ended up having broken multi-gpu support (where the application in question can choose which gpu it would utilize for its processing) where it works fine X11.
With the state of the hardware we are having, it is understandable why distros have been focused on pushing Wayland as the default, although honestly, it would be wise for these distros to not completely phase out x11 because currently, Wayland isn’t perfect.
Quite literally, the only problem or “stuff broken because or Wayland” is some old ass apps or lazy companies that won’t update their electron version. Looking at you discord, screen sharing COULD WORK if you managed your stuff
They make enough money off nitro and shit to not care. Everything becomes worse when they start making money
I’ve been using Wayland sessions as default since plasma 5.22 came around, and with other window managers before that too. Everything that has ever been broken for me, was broken because of X11 or XWayland. I’d rather take a considerably better experience with an occasional issue, that an experience that is held together by candy wrappers and hot glue, and is widely considered obsolete
Im in the same boat. Been using wayland since around that version or a little later and it has only been uphill (except for right now since i am on the development build and Qt broke itself causing the system config menu to fail to load 80% of KCMs, but this is my fault for switching to alpha software lol)
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Xorg has no fractonal scaling so I have been uaing wayland since I have switched to linux on nvidia and yes I use it for gaming. Not silky smooth but great so far.
I really don’t like nate’s take here. IMO it’s really not that good, Wayland is still outright lacking features, even when using the craptastic xdg portals junk
