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.
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.
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” 😄
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.
When XFCE supports it.
Still won’t be able to stick i3 in xfce because of how Wayland is designed
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’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.
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.
I’ve used it for about a year on a laptop with an 8th gen i7 and Intel graphics. It works well there.
I don’t know lol. I running Manjaro right now, not a clue if it’s x or wayland
More people should be like you.
The problem is for me stuff just works under Wayland. Multi finger gestures and the like. When I have to boot to x11 always a shock it’s not there.
I wanted to love Wayland but the fact is half of the apps I use are either too small in the UI or too blurry when scaled up. Until that’s fixed I’m staying on x11 begrudgingly.
I have these exact same issues with wayland on KDE.
Yep running kubuntu and I’m a xorg boi for a while still
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.
No. I’ll use it when it’s stable enough for Debian to merge it.
Possibly in 5 years?
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
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.
