this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Hey guys, what are the pros and cons to wayland if I intend to use my PC for gaming + others?

Comparisons to X?

General impressions?

Your advice on if I should use it or stick with X?

My PC parts are arriving soon, and while Ive been a linux user since 2016 its the first time I intend to fully main drive linux, so I guess im just looking for as much information as I can get on it.

Feel free to post links to articles or anything that will answer if you prefer, we're on a link aggregator after all ;) and I dont mind reading.

Thanks in advance :)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I personally love Wayland for my system. I use Sway for mine and with support for VRR with my monitor, a lot of the vsync problems people talk about goes away (at least for me). I will say, some things that rely on Xorg screen sharing (Like Discord) will only share Xwayland windows. This is fixed in most applications, but not all. Also screen recording in general is a bit lacking. My main pro for Wayland is I use multiple monitors, and unlike Xorg which caps the refresh rate for the full desktop to the lowest (which for me is 75hz), Wayland allows different refresh rates per monitor, which means if I drag a vsync game over to a different monitor, the fps cap changes.

Wayland is also vastly improved by moving over to PipeWire instead of Pulseaudio. I've never had a singular problem with PipeWire and it's drop-in pretty much. I recommend that as well. PipeWire is compatible with applications that use PulseAudio so you shouldn't even notice a difference at worst, and will notice an improvement in sound latency most likely.

I think the main drawback about Waypand right now is people have VASTLY different experiences. Which is why I say just try it out. Most big DEs like KDE and GNOME have Wayland sessions that you can choose if you just install the wayland parts. Worst case scenario you go "This sucks" and go back. Wayland is only getting better, though, and I find that a lot of the problems I had even just 6 months ago are pretty much gone. Check in often and just keep your Xorg stuff laying around. That's the beauty of Linux.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is probably what Ill do - have both and give wayland an honest chance, while not severely limiting my experience by being trapped in it. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No problem! Happy waylanding! And out of curiosity, an update would be appreciated. I always like hearing how others' experiences are. It helps when I help others with Wayland.

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

Honestly, depends on you GPU and the game. Nvidia has been quite reluctant with their Wayland support for a while, while AMD is often pretty even. Here are some benchmarks from early 2023. However, recently there were some improvements for XWayland which may improve performance significantly (there was a post on Lemmy just today or yesterday).

If you use a distro/DE that install both by default (like Ubuntu) I'd recommend to just test it and then decide for your case.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

distro: just look at my instance xD

Its a full AMD build, so I shouldnt have any issues with the green goblin

[–] TwinTurbo 4 points 1 year ago

I’ve had great experience with AMD GPUs on Wayland. Unless you run into specific issues, I don’t see a downside of running Wayland. With NVIDIA, chances are you will run into issues very quickly, unfortunately…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Then you should just try it out. If it doesn't work for you, you can easily switch back from your login screen.

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[–] AtypicalType 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

A few gaming related downsides for me:

There's no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you'll have some extra input lag. It shouldn't matter if you play fullscreen games though.

Missing Xorg tools like xinput or xrandr. Maybe I'm too finicky, but sometimes I can't find the exact mouse speed I want through the settings GUI (for example, in KDE Plasma there are 11 steps from slowest to fastest), and through xinput commands I can just type any speed I want, which is very useful if one step feels too slow but the next one feels too fast.

I also want to increase the screen's gamma level sometimes and I haven't found any way to do that at all on Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah; I've a trackball mouse with an unhelpful button layout. XInput gives me the power to change the button assignment (and indeed, speed if I wanted) for input devices on a manufacturer / model-number basis. The amount of flexibility it provides seems ridiculously over-done, until you actually have a use for it.

Wayland developers seem to have thrown out all the 'cruft' when they've started over, but not realised that a lot of cruft (even basics like on-screen keyboards, screen readers) is superfluous to many but completely essential for a few.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There’s no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you’ll have some extra input lag.

The reason compositors historically increase input lag so much is due to design flaws in Xorg. With VRR Wayland has comparable input lag to Xorg with no compositor, and it's only slightly worse than Xorg without VRR. In the best case scenario Wayland can have better input lag than uncomposited Xorg: there's a reason the Steam Deck uses Wayland in game mode.

I think as of recently Wayland with compositing might actually have better input lag than Xorg without compositing, but I haven't seen any thorough benchmarks in the past few months.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

All very good points, thanks! I'll need to look into the windowed games thing as I have 2 monitors, often one is the game and the other is any info for the game (e.g. 3PTools for Elite Dangerous) so the input lag will need some testing. I mean worst case scenario I simply go back to X while I can right?

[–] eugenia 1 points 1 year ago

It matters for Krita, which is windowed, and uses OpenGL for its drawing area. Using a pen and tablet to draw under Wayland was many times slower than under Xorg on an older PC (where you could easily experience the speed difference).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One pro of Wayland is better multi-monitor. X11 can't really handle mixed refresh rates, nor multi-monitor VRR, and per-monitor DPI scaling isn't easily done. Of course, Nvidia doesn't support Wayland VRR yet, nor does GNOME, but Plasma or wlroots on AMD should work. Wlroots btw is the Wayland compositor library e.g. Sway and Hyprland is based on.

Forced vsync has been a problem for gaming on Wayland, though that's in the process of changing due to the tearing protocol, at least on Plasma and wlroots, doesn't seem like GNOME has picked it up yet.

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

This (multi-monitor support) is exactly why I switched to sway from i3wm, and haven't looked back.

Not a gamer, so I can't speak to that aspect, but for everything I do there's not much difference.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@lack @LaggyKar wanted to try sway or other wayland based DE for better monitor support but being dependent on xkb for colemak keyboard prevents that.

Need to find a solid keyboard solution that works on wayland as well as in X11.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do use a Dvorak_ES layout and it works perfectly fine in both Sway and Hyprland. I assume Colemark would too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@SrEstegosaurio I use colemak from bigbagtrix that applies it via setxkbmap. Tried that on fedora sway spin, wouldnt work erroring cos it needed X11. Maybe should try out in other WMs like you said or try using kmonad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

xkb layout options are set in the sway configuration file in the input section: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/sway#Keymap

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you uave any experience with bspwm and WL? Thats what I plan on going with

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I do not. But bspwm looks like an X window manager, so doesn't support Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Wayland is generally great. The only reason I've stuck with X11 is a few random bugs and issues that still aren't solved in Wayland.

I'm planning on switching over to Wayland fully at the end of this year. Seems like every 6 months I try it and there are less issues than before.

Try them both, plenty of folks have no issues at all running Wayland right from the start, so give it a go and see what happens.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Really, what it should come down to as an individual is that all of the x11 devs left to work on Wayland because x11 is unmaintainable.

Use Wayland if it works for you, if you find something that doesn't work, go back to x11 and find the issue tracker and switch back if you care for the benefits later.

The benefits:

  1. A better security model
  2. More efficient rendering
  3. Better animations
  4. Better support for multi displays (mixed refresh rate/dpi)
  5. HDR (soon)
  6. Better color management (soon)

The only problems I have currently is sway doesn't support single window capture and the XWayland clipboard isn't great.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Many users seem to think that the only problem is nvidia, but it's not true, app compatibility is still a very noticeable problem sometimes.
For example, as far as I know there are still no on-screen keyboards, except for those integrated into desktops, if they have them at all.

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

Relatedly, pretty sure most autotypers don't work. I know that keepassxc can't do autotype in wayland

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

keepass (not xc) has a plugin for autotype. I have not tried it yet.

keepassxc seems reluctant to use this method and instead would prefer to push the work upstream https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 .

Unfortunately keepassxc has backed themselves into a corner where the upstream fix referenced in that issue is closed, and they are unwilling to implement a workaround themselves. So it looks like it won't be supported any time soon.

EDIT: Seems as though there may be a way to do this with xdg-desktop-portal in the near future. But the sentiment about cutting out the middleman only to need more middlemen seems to be accurate for that direction.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is something that I am sure will be solved eventually, but one of the major weaknesses of Wayland is the lack of lightweight standalone compositors.

For example, if I want a lightweight stacking window manager on X, I can choose between Openbox, Fluxbox, FVWM, IceWM, Pekwm, JWM, Window Maker, hell even twm if I were a masochist. I have tried out all of these at one point or another and they all have something to offer users. But using Wayland, there's, uhh, labwc, and that's it? Maybe I could try using kwin standalone?

The situation for tiling window managers is similar, with Sway being the only one that feels mature.

I plan on migrating from Openbox to labwc at some point in the future, once it's ready. labwc itself is really good, but some of the other programs I need to recreate my setup aren't there yet. Someday...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to have experience with tiling window managers and wayland. Any suggestions for a WL compatible bspwm-esque one? I dislike the way i3 handles tiling, which is the only other one other than bspwm that ive tried. Also one which is reasonably well documented?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

bspwm is probably my favorite general-purpose tiling window manager. I have not personally tried this out yet, but River is superficially similar, with the main configuration done through a combination of shell scripting and riverctl commands. I'm not sure how the tiling behaves in comparison though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is the #1 showstopper issue for me. Until it's possible to do the equivalent of EXWM switching is not really an option for me. Somebody has presented preliminary work on this at EmacsConf last year but it still has ways to go.
Unfortunate that we have taken such a big backwards step in this area.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

But using Wayland, there’s, uhh, labwc, and that’s it? Maybe I could try using kwin standalone?

There is a big list here (Although a lot of them are not mature).

Wayfire and hikari also comes to mind.

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

Xorg is not even in maintenance mode at this point. It's practically a zombie (and the devs are pretty clear that if you want that to change, YOU will have to step up to do it)

Wayland has the basics done bar Gnome being Gnome and Nvidia being Nvidia, and the uncommon use cases are having solutions built for them as we speak, although quality software will inevitably take time. Especially if we don't want Wayland to end up an Xorg v2, but splintered.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

So use it and wait for the standard to "catch up"? ;)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Try it. Easy enough to have both options on your machine. I poke into Wayland about every 6-12 months, then go back to X11 because I just can't be fucked with fixing shit that works under X11 and is broken with Wayland. Plenty of people try Wayland and don't have any issues. Eventually just about everyone will be on Wayland, if that makes a difference to you. I'll check it again in maybe near the end of 2023.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Ive redid my arch install with 27 4k monitor and decided to go with gnome . Then switched to Wayland because their fractional scaling for hidpi works great comparing to x11. Overall I very much like it, I used to have various small artifacts on x11 and now they're gone. Waiting for xwayland scaling fix and it's all I need personally.

[–] cupricreki 4 points 1 year ago

Wayland is great these days. Love Wayland for touchsceen. Only thing missing for me is software kvm like synergy. Looks to be on the near horizon though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

A major downside of even trying Wayland is that you need to throw away all the knowledge and all the little tools you built up over the years on X and start over from scratch. And that without a guarantee that you won't have to come back to X due to the lack of hardware support on one out of two major graphics card vendors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For new users this isn't really a problem though, but I agree with the sentiment

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

For new users it is mainly a problem for blog posts and similar sources that now provide solutions to their problems that no longer work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

But that is to be expected when switching stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

been on Wayland with amdgpu for several years due to multi monitor and haven't looked back. endeavourOS with kde currently, 7900xtx, 4k/144 and 4k/60

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I’m not a distro hopper. I settled on Ubuntu, which was fairly quick to adopt Wayland. I haven’t had any issues beyond the occasional app (kitty) that doesn’t show decorations properly without minor tweaking. (And, despite its name, X forwarding over SSH works just fine.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Wayland fixes a number of bugs and fundamental issues in X.Org. It is also much more actively developed, and it seems likely that over time new hardware will stop working with X.Org due to bugs nobody is interested in fixing (this is already the case for the Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers).

On the other hand, Wayland also introduces a number of additional bugs. However, some distros like Fedora have enabled it by default for years. In practice, most of the bugs relate to at least one of Nvidia's drivers, DPI scaling, and DEs with less mature support. If you're using an AMD GPU, 1080p display, and GNOME, you'll likely have few issues and possibly even a better experience compared to X.Org.

[–] Knoll0114 2 points 1 year ago

Controlling input devices is a massive PITA it turns out. What would be been a couple of lines with xinput involved a massive (to a beginner at least) stuff around with config files. There should be a GUI way to turn off input devices.

[–] GustavoM 2 points 1 year ago

Last time I tested it (On a raspberry pi 4), it gave me a slightly less CPU usage and overall temps compared to Xorg. (Tested it with "dhewm 3", a old first person shooter game that used to be very resource-demanding back in the days.)

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