this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I’ll adopt it when it’s ready.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

For NVIDIA users, that's the right answer. For AMD users, it's already ready. No problems here (6700xt)

[–] balancedchaos 12 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

All AMD here and I can't have it as a daily driver. So many issues made me hate my PC. Back to X11.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Which DE are you using? I'm using KDE.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Full wayland all the time for probably 2 years now

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

When some crappy vendors (ahem, Zoom) bother to get screen sharing working on Wayland.

Until then I'm stuck on xorg at work, but it's Wayland all the way at home... not by explicit choice, just the distro default.

[–] bigmclargehuge 16 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Started my Linux journey with Wayland 1.5 years ago and haven't used X11 at all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Oh, you've been missing out on a lot of "fun" 😄

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] ikidd 10 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Last week I did an install of Debian 12 on a little NUC7CJYH to use for web browsing and ssh sessions into work and ended up with wayland by default. Seems to work great.

From what I have experienced, it goes great with intel integrated graphics, great with a radeon card and can be made to work with Nvidia if you are lucky or up for a fight.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

My experience with Nvidia had been mostly seamless (although, laptops could be performing worse) up until recently when everything started bursting into flames. Electron applications are nuts, steam store doesn't even render, multiple game broke down fully. I can't even find any other use reports.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've got three hard problems preventing me from using Wayland (sway/wlroots) right now:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

I’ve been daily driving Hyprland for almost a year now I think, my only complaint is that some of my electron apps act out a little bit (Discord won’t open links, etc). I don’t game as heavily as I used to, but I regularly am running Overwatch 2 around 200 FPS with no issues, and Bauldur’s Gate 3 is super smooth as well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've used it for about a year on a laptop with an 8th gen i7 and Intel graphics. It works well there.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

No. I'll use it when it's stable enough for Debian to merge it.

Possibly in 5 years?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

When I have to. Either when Wayland does something that I can't do with X11, or X stops being supported.

[–] Samueru 7 points 9 months ago (9 children)

I will daily drive wayland once sway fixes all their compatibility bugs with i3 and once polybar works on wayland as well.

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[–] dinckelman 6 points 9 months ago

I've used Plasma on Wayland since 5.24, and Wayland-based tiling window managers before that. No complaints here. There have been some hiccups occasionally, but it's still leaps and bounds ahead of anything X11 could offer, at its best

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I've been using Wayland for 2 years. It was enabled by default when I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed with Gnome.

[–] SMillerNL 6 points 9 months ago

Couple of years since I switched and I rarely run into any issues with my all-AMD build

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't know lol. I running Manjaro right now, not a clue if it's x or wayland

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Still holding out for desktop streaming via SteamLink to work on Wayland. I use it almost nightly to mirror my screen to my phone so I can watch what's on my PC while cooking dinner via my phone.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I'll try again once Nvidia's 555 series drivers are released which should support explicit sync. Right now it's too unstable under Wayland even though I gave it a shot once KDE Plasma 6 released.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Daily drove wayland back in November when I finally built my new desktop and installed Nobara. It's the default and it juat worked out of the box. Have always been a windows user until now.

Games workost of the time. Good enough for me. Full team Red build inside the case.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I switched my laptop to Wayland about three years ago. AMD graphics, normal DPI 60Hz screen, doesn't really do more than run a web browser.

My gaming desktop needed more of those troublesome edge cases hammered out - freesync in xwayland, app DPI scaling in xwayland, etc. I only switched it last year.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Tried Wayland about 5 years ago to see what all the hype was about, with Nvidia proprietary drivers, got a black screen. Could never get beyond that. Went back to xorg.

Tried about 3 or 4 years ago, with amdgpu drivers, no black screen this time but chrome would not work and a few other programs didn't work right or at all. There may have been special builds or wrappers to work around some of those issues but I had no interest in dealing with that at the time, so I went back to xorg.

Have not felt motivated to try again as I haven't had any issues with xorg. I'm using Nvidia drivers at the moment. I also heavily use turbovnc server with virtual gl and not sure how (or if) that'd work in combination with Wayland.

I haven't had to even think about the fact I'm using xorg or screw around with the configuration in like 10 or 15 years. It just works, for me and my setup, anyway.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

ye. i've been using wayland since forever.

started on hyprland, and then moved to sway, but it's been an almost perfect experience for me

sometimes i have to install a different version of a package or smth, but otherwise everything works fine.

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[–] cant_breath 5 points 9 months ago

Yes, on fedora for 2 years. Using integrated amd

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I use sway and the only issue I have had is screen recording.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] jafo 5 points 9 months ago

I've been using it on Ubuntu 22.04 for almost 2 years. It started off rocky, with frequent restarts needed, maybe every week or two. It's been pretty solid, though I did give up on using it for screen sharing and captures, which is unfortunate timing in today's WFH world.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

When they port FVWM.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

No.

When it's a drop-in replacement for X.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I use it on my Surface Pro 8 with PopOS as Xorg doesn't work properly

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Not yet. Biggest dealbreaker for me is screen sharing not working in Slack, which I need for work. Once that’s no longer an issue I will be more inclined to make the move. Given that plasma is becoming the default choice for distros, I hope Slack devs will make this a priority.

What I look forward the most with Wayland is actual support for fractional scaling. I think fractional scaling is required for a pleasant experience when using high dpi monitors, but Slack screen sharing has higher priority for me.

[–] CarlosCheddar 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I actually had to switch to Wayland to be able to stream with audio on Discord.

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