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.
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I’ll adopt it when it’s ready.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
No. I’ll use it when it’s stable enough for Debian to merge it.
Possibly in 5 years?
Yeah I’m holding out for xscreensaver support
Been daily driving sway for over 5 years now. There were a few problems along the way. I used to have JWM and then XFCE as a back up in case wayland fails. I really only need to go into them when there’s a need for screen sharing. But then, I mostly live in terminal and browser. Low graphic games I play seems okay. The most demanding one I played is probably Starcraft 2 and it plays well even on my crappy 7 years old laptop with intel graphics.
3 or 4 years, including on Nvidia machines. I’ll admit it took fiddling to get working awhile ago. Nowadays I use my desktops AMD iGPU as the main display driver and offload the rendering to the Nvidia card for intense programs or games, best of both worlds.
When XFCE supports it.
I used Wayland for a couple years on AMD hardware and it was fine; I didn’t really have any issues. Since acquiring a laptop with an Nvidia card as a gift about a year agi (it was a hand-me-down), I switched to X11 because it is still more stable for Nvidia. I will be switching back to Wayland (with Nvidia) when Fedora 40 releases. Hopefully the support for explicit sync patch will be available by that time, but if not I won’t be heavily affected, as I am not playing games currently. I expect that patch to fix the black frame insertion during VRR that people have been complaining about, at which point Nvidia will be viable (for me) on Wayland.
I’ve been on the Wayland train for quite some time now, it’s only really had issues with Nvidia because Nvidia refuses to adapt their graphics driver for it. We have to rely on the Wayland and XWayland projects to fix the incompatibilities that Nvidia is too lazy to fix themselves (like not supporting implicit sync). Luckily AMD is on top of things and has worked very well with Wayland for years now, so those with AMD hardware are better off.
EDIT: Here’s a link to a Lemmy post about the explicit sync patch. Looks like Nvidia drivers plan to support it in the May 15th patch, so about a month after Fedora 40 releases.
I will daily drive wayland once sway fixes all their compatibility bugs with i3 and once polybar works on wayland as well.
I think you meant sway, i3 is a window manager written for X11.
?
I said: “I will daily drive wayland once sway fixes their compatibility bugs with i3” That is I am not using wayland at the moment and I’m using i3 (x11) due to bugs in sway.
Sway is the wayland window manager that is a “drop in” replacement of i3. I can’t use it right now because it has several bugs that prevent me from using it.
Nevermind me, haven’t had my morning coffee yet, I read “I’ll use Wayland once they fix their compatibility bugs with i3” so was kind of confused since i3 dies not work on Wayland.
since i3 dies not work on Wayland.
Might wanna drink a bit more coffee btw (sorry I couldn’t hold it lol).
Hahahaha, I’ll take your advice into consideration
For about 3-4 years. I switched after sway added support for per-display VRR which xorg cannot do still (and probably will never be able to do due to core design limitations)
On AMD it’s been better than Xorg for a couple years now in my use case. No more tearing and latency issues, any games that don’t play nice have worked fine with gamescope.
With HDR support finally on the horizon it’ll be able to completely replace windows for me which I already barely use.
The only issue I regularly encounter is programs handling windowing strangely. Some programs like to switch themselves into my active workspace under certain circumstances which is mildly annoying but just requires that I press the hotkey to put them back where they belong a couple times a day.
I daily drive Linux Mint, which has only recently just now launched experimental beta Wayland support. I’ve been on X11 this whole time and it’s been surprisingly good.
I’ll adopt Wayland when Mint does, I’m confident by then it’ll be good and ready.
I do have a little tablet that runs Fedora Gnome, it runs Wayland. It’s okay, though trying to get the digital pen to work properly is a problem because a lot of the advice out there is written with X in mind. But.
