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.
For NVIDIA users, that’s the right answer. For AMD users, it’s already ready. No problems here (6700xt)
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.
All AMD here and I can’t have it as a daily driver. So many issues made me hate my PC. Back to X11.
Which DE are you using? I’m using KDE.
Plasma 6. I’m going through a very busy time at work at the moment. Once it’s done, I’ll just reinstall the whole system and see if that helps.
It’s not just about hardware compatibility. It has to be compatible with existing workflows, and it’s currently very limiting.
Which workflows? Asking because I’d like to experiment with some edge case stuff.
I’m running KDE with wayland on multiple different vintage machines with AMD and intel graphics and it would take alot for me to go back to the depressing old mess that was X.
The biggest improvement in recent times was absolutely pulling out all my Nvidia cards and putting in second hand Radeon cards, but switching to wayland fixed all the dumb interactions between VRR ( and HDR ) capable monitors of mixed refresh rates.
Even the little NUC that drives the three 4k TV’s for the security cameras at work is a little happier with wayland, running for weeks now with hardware decoding, rather than X crashing pretty well every few days.
For me it’s a million little details that just don’t work. Stuff like positioning windows, removing decorations from a window, remapping buttons on a trackball, setting a graphics output to tvrgb, disabling a display via ssh and enabling it again, etc.
Appreciate the reply. Which desktop environment are you using?
My only experience with Wayland is also with KDE. Wheres for the 27-ish years before that I’ve used all sorts of stuff with X.
I’ve scripted the machine that drives the frontend for our video surveilance ssytem to place windows exactly where I want them when it comes up.
I use a couple of dbus triggers that make the TV on the wall in my garage go to sleep from the shell, perhaps not tested via ssh though. They were pretty well the functional equivalent of some xset dpms commands that I used to use. Not sure if that is what you were meaning. I think I also had something working that disabled the output altogether. I think that was pretty clunky as it used some sort of screen ID that would occasionally change. Sorry I’m hazy on the details, I’m old.
I’ll try it all out when I get home, I’ve got to find some old serial crap for a coworker in the garage anyway.
I use gnome for the most part. I have been checking out kde recently to see how the newer versions stack up (gave up on it during the 4.0 days). As you mention kde supports dpms changes on wayland because they have their own protocol extension for that.
That’s actually my biggest gripe with wayland - the huge amount of fragmentation it has caused. I’m pretty confident that almost all the missing features I talked about are possible on one or two of the compositors, but not all of them. And definitely not on the one I use. I’m sure once some pragmatism takes hold that all the issues will be ironed out, but my plan for now is to stick to X11 until that happens.
Agreed, it seems like they should have put just a little bit more in the standard feature set so every little window manager doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
On nvidia, there are still too many edge cases involving Wayland that are just crippled. Orca slicer doesn’t work for me for example, you are completely missing any of the 3d accelerated graphics in there.
On the other hand, the AMD 7x00 series have different kind of bugs, with ring0 errors leading to full resets.
I think once nvidia drivers are squared out (the proprietary ones) it will be smooth sailing.
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.
Full wayland all the time for probably 2 years now
Yeah, me too. Whenever Fedora made the move to Wayland by default for Gnome.
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.
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.
Started my Linux journey with Wayland 1.5 years ago and haven’t used X11 at all.
Oh, you’ve been missing out on a lot of “fun” 😄
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’m using Wayland on my AMD laptop (with integrated Vega graphics). I had zero problems with this setup.
Maintainers don’t want to support it? Because the code is shit and they developed a new product Wayland. I mean when the people who develop it think the code is unmaintainable.
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.
I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.
I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.
Good news is that we humans are complex adaptive systems! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.
(This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)
Ok I’m done rambling.
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.
As far as I know xwayland in plasma/kde already does that. However as it’s KDE, it is most likely configurable and might not be enabled by default :P
When XFCE supports it.
Still won’t be able to stick i3 in xfce because of how Wayland is designed
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
Exact same. Sway’s 1.0 release was March of 2019, and it did everything I needed.
Even playing games on my desktop, Xwayland worked fine for me.
Is Sway like a Wayland equivalent of i3? That’s the only thing really keeping me on X
Yes, sway presents itself as a drop-in replacement for i3 (just built on top of wayland instead of xorg).
I’ve used it on a Thinkpad laptop for close to 4 years, and on my desktop for the past 3.
The only problems I’ve encountered are some apps not being Wayland-compatible; xwayland makes the rendering work for those but then things like sharing a window or the entire screen don’t always work. Notably, Discord’s sharing doesn’t work, but I can use OBS to record any entire screen since [the OBS devs] put in the work to properly support Wayland.
Oh interesting! I actually found Wayland to have a bit of an edge vs X. I just didn’t like the Unity environment from Ubuntu so I’ve been using i3.
I’ll have to give Sway a try
No. I’ll use it when it’s stable enough for Debian to merge it.
Possibly in 5 years?
Debian’s wiki states that “Wayland is used by default in Debian 10 and newer” (on gnome, It’s also the the default for plasma 6 but that’ll take some time to get into debian as you say)
