https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/967
The short version of the story, wait until this has landed in your distro of choice, or you'll have flickering problems.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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I’ve spent some time reading this page and the associated exchanges between these people/devs. Amazing work and professional behavior. I'm impressed.
How would I find out this patch is in, say, Fedora?
First, wait for that pull request to actually show "merged" instead of open, then, wait for a release of xwayland, you can find those here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tags
Once that's been released, note the version number of the version of xwayland that has explicit sync
https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/xorg-x11-server-Xwayland/xorg-x11-server-Xwayland/
then look here and see if the version number matches or is greater than it.
edit: woo it's merged.
Last I heard, Nvidia was planning to release support in their drivers for explicit sync in Wayland in ~~May in their 555 beta driver release~~ actually it looks like it might not be merged until Nvidia's 560 driver. I wouldn't expect full support until at least then. Maybe we'll have some support in Fedora by June? You'll hear about it in the Linux and Linux Gaming communities on Lemmy, so look for it there. Fedora will be pretty early adopters, so it shouldn't be long after the changes are merged until you'll see support in Fedora. Do note that it isn't as bleeding edge as Arch though, so expect it to lag a week behind Arch support (maybe a little more?).
Also, if you're between KDE and COSMIC, go with KDE. COSMIC isn't even in alpha yet, and there are no distros that support it yet. KDE has great support and just merged a lot of performance and bug fixes in the last mega release (Plasma 6). Fedora has a KDE spin, and Plasma 6 will come with Fedora 40's KDE spin when it releases on the 16th of this month. That will be before explicit sync support though, so I'd say there's no rush unless you're really interested in Linux. Nvidia on Wayland is still pretty good without explicit sync support, but explicit sync is essentially the last thing that most people are waiting on. It's kind of like the last nail in X's coffin before Wayland is 100% viable on Nvidia. It will fix a lot of little annoyances (flickering, stuttering, etc). KDE has VRR support and a lot of great gaming support, so it's a good choice.
You found your way here. Just wait until it happens. Alternately maybe follow Fedoras release notes
https://arewewaylandyet.com/ has links to the caveats at the bottom, though it doesn't mention CosmicDE, which is also in pre-alpha rn so I'd recommend use something stabler rn, especially for your main computer
For KDE, they are:
- Make sure
nvidia_drm.modesetis set to 1 - Night Color (yellow tint at night) is not applied to the mouse cursor: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479889
- This seems like a non-KDE and universal issue as I have it with AMD on Windows too
- Poor performance on external screens on hybrid GPU setups when using NVIDIA GPU as a secondary GPU because it requires CPU copying from the primary GPU to the secondary GPU (see https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/1031, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452219)
It largely depends on the program. If the application has native Wayland support then it usually works pretty well, but apps that only run on X11 (which need to run through Xwayland) may be a little glitchy. It will depend on a lot of different variables including drivers, model, libraries, kernel, etc. But later this month Nvidia is to release new drivers that allow "explicit sync", which should address a lot of this I believe.
It's the other way around. Wayland will add support for explicit sync. Nvidia drivers can do explicit sync, what they can't do is implicit sync, which is what's currently causing issues with Wayland + Nvidia.
All parts of the stack need to support explicit sync. All the graphical drivers, and all the Wayland compositors, and all the graphic libraries etc.
Implicit sync was a kernel workaround that everything relied on because it was easy but it was never a good solution.
last i used it, 3ish months ago, it was still unusable.
@[email protected] on Manjaro KDE with Nvidia proprietary drivers mine works 100% on X11, but with Wayland I still get random freezes of about 40 secs to a minute. It's better than it was a year back when it would not boot into Wayland at all. I understand this issue is affecting some using the Nvidia proprietary driver and supposedly may be resolved with KDE v6, but I'm still waiting for the KDE v6 to hit stable release.
Besides g/free-sync and stuff like framegeneration not being supported Nvidia works just fine for me incl for gaming
Okay that's good to know, thanks!
Things should be taking a giant leap forward in a month or two:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/explicit-gpu-synchronization-for-xwayland-now-merged/
try dual booting with the latest ubuntu and try a few things, customise it a bit. you might be surprised how good things are!
I've been using it with gnome and nixos and it's been fine. No crashes pretty stable good preformace
Works just fine with hybrid graphics. Nvidia only? Yeah, not so much.
With a 1080ti, nvidia 550.67, and Plasma on Wayland, my experience is practically flawless now. The only offenders are apps that cannot run in native Wayland mode, one way or another. For example: anything on Chromium Embedded Framework, such as the Steam client. Games still run perfectly fine, but the client does flicker occasionally. For Electron apps, you usually have configs to toggle everything on
FYI I've been running Steam and Wine games in Gamescope because I'm using a window manager that doesn't implement XWayland. I don't know if that would help with Nvidia, but might be worth a try. It works ok; Gamescope has a Steam integration switch that helps.
I think Electron apps mostly switch to native Wayland mode if you set an environment variable, ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=wayland. The one I don't have working in Wayland mode is Discord. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland#Electron
I have 2 PCs
my main one is full AMD running hyprland -5800X, 7900XTX, 32GB ram, etc.
My second PC is solely used for streaming and is running an old GTX 1070 for encoding purposes.
From what I can see, I've not really had any issues running hyprland on it. Though I will admit it doesn't do much beyond running Carla, OBS, Qpwgraph, Firefox, discord and jack_mixer on specially designated workspaces. And it streams soley via EVGA Xr1 Lite capture devices. It does have desktop-portal-hyprland, just in case I want to capture my stream PCs desktop, but I don't really use it much. It's connected as a second input to my secondary monitor, and has a mirrored display on a small touch screen so I don't have to swap monitor inputs too often, and can trigger scene changes with just a touch. The hardest part was getting the monitors to play nicely, as the touchscreen sits upside down.
Full specs of my second PC, as it's quite old - Intel Core i5-4690, ASRock H97M pro4, 16GB Ram, EVGA GTX 1070, Intel 120GB SSD, 1TB WD Green 5400rpm HDD.
None of the issues I have with wayland stem from my nvidia GPU, and I'm on a laptop.
I think it was just a lie told often enough its become 'true'.
I have flickering issues with some Electron apps. Everything else seems to work fine, including a 2nd monitor. But I still dual-boot Windows for games, I'm waiting for HDR support to fully make the switch.
Only issue i get is Spotify flickers randomly
Is Spotify an electron app? I've noticed on my laptop (with intel gpu) that in Discord the screen flickers when selecting a gif and Discord is an Electron app I'm pretty sure.
I think it is and yeah Spotify and discord both sometimes flicker but nothing else does. They’re both installed as flatpaks
I currently have a Thinkpad W530 with a Quadro K2000M. Because I have coreboot as its firmware, I am able to run completely on the discrete GPU. So far I've been doing great.
I've looked on the feature matrix of the nouveau support and my GPU (Kepler) happens to have all the features checked-off, with the exception of dynamic power management (mostly WIP).
Right now, I'm running KDE wayland with the nouveau driver with no issue.
On the other hand, I've tried having the hybrid GPU and it sucks.
I currently have a Thinkpad W530 with a Quadro K2000M. Because I have coreboot as its firmware, I am able to run completely on the discrete GPU. So far I've been doing great.
I've looked on the feature matrix of the nouveau support and my GPU (Kepler) happens to have all the features checked-off, with the exception of dynamic power management (mostly WIP).
Right now, I'm running KDE wayland with the nouveau driver with no issue.
On the other hand, I've tried having the hybrid GPU and it sucks.
I'm not a bot, I just find funny this.
There's a bug with arch distros and the Nvidia driver 550 which is breaking systems, the drivers should get updated on the 15th of May and some fixes could come out sooner, but in the meanwhile I'd wait a bit
Good. But, xorg only
that is very incorrect
Flickering makes it true for all xwayland games such as proton until nvidia driver with explicit sync.
most games have never had flicker issues for me on arch/sway with a rtx2070. Steam itself used to be unusable and last i checked was still a bit glitchy, Discord also sucked, but the games always worked fine.
apart from some issues with recognizing the mouse cursor in a few games.