If you’re not having performance issues, then I don’t see much reason to change. Sure, Xorg is basically in maintenance mode, but so what? Your setup works for you, so do your thing.

That said, Sway is a window manager intended to be a drop in replacement for i3 on Wayland, and is pretty close from what I hear: https://swaywm.org/

Plasma is very good with Wayland, although you might want to wait for Plasma 6, since they’re apparently making several improvements, and it’s due out soon anyway: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6-Wayland-Great

You can install Wayland and switch sessions during login too, so you can check it for yourself and see if your i3 dotfiles work with Sway.

The biggest Sin by far of Wayland is making users think about the graphics stack. Does this feature or this app support Wayland or X? Does this Compositor support this GPU? Does this particular environment support this mixture of displays with this DPI? Do I need to set a particular env variable or change a setting to force this app to start in Wayland mode because under X11 its scaled funky. What works in each environment? What doesn’t work between environments?

Well before you reach the end of this flow chart you have lost virtually all of your users. This transition has single-handedly set the Linux desktop back by 20 years in terms of supporting more users whose level of interest in configuration is limited to clicking a control next to their monitor and making things bigger or smaller.

A saner design would have handled scaling correctly from the start and would have had a permissive mode which just made everything from the users perspective work while progressively adding a correct UI to provide features like global hotkeys, screen sharing, only to those apps users had authorized like android. If it wasn’t a such a clusterfuck to use it would have had orders of magnitude more users much earlier in the development phase and perhaps attracted more development interest as well.

• Wayland has several new features like, say, removing screen tearing, but it’s not necessarily “advantages” that are the reason to use Wayland. It’s sort of a redo of how graphics should work in the Linux world, and it will be the standard going forward. X11 development has more or less ceased with those developers moving to Wayland (in fact, Wayland was created by X11 developers to address issues they had with the architecture of X11). It’s not a matter of should you switch to Wayland; it’s a matter of when should you switch to Wayland. The answer is, as soon as you can.
• Gaming varies drastically. Some games are fine. Some games make me launch Steam via Lutris to start (not sure why it works, but it does) but run fine after. Some games can’t reach higher framerates. That said, no screen tearing is a plus. When it works, Wayland is very smooth, but it doesn’t always work yet. An example off the top of my head, no matter what I do, Street Fighter 6 doesn’t get above 45 fps on Wayland. It’s a good idea to have an X11 option as a backup still imo
• The best way to migrate is just to install a Wayland compatible DE/WM. I’ve used both GNOME Wayland and Hyprland extensively and they both work great. If you’re used to i3 (that’s what I used to use and is still my X11 backup), Hyprland is great. KDE like you have on your Desktop already works good on Wayland from what I’ve heard.
• I have made the switch because most of my apps can run on Wayland, and it’s the future. I still have a backup in case there’s a game or something that doesn’t quite work for me. For instance, I can’t share screen on discord. It won’t even recognize the pipewire route. Thus, I’ve gotta switch to X if I want to do that.

What are the advantages of Wayland?

More modern and in some cases better performance (as if Xorg performance were bad … but hey)

What are the disadvantages?

Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications). Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.

why have/haven’t you made the switch?

I did not find one single floating WM that is as good as Openbox for Xorg. Also: Screen recording with OBS is problematic in some constellations.

I think, it needs to be said that it doesn’t have to be a hard switch. With KDE, you can just install the Wayland session and then when logging in for the first time after booting, you can select whether to start X11 or Wayland. To switch back and forth, you just need to log out and log back in.

With i3, that isn’t as simple, since i3 doesn’t support Wayland. You’d need to install a WM which supports Wayland + customize it, to be able to switch back and forth.

You’re not using any NVIDIA hardware…? Hmm, nope, that’s all hardware that runs under Mesa. Give it a shot, if it doesn’t work, you can always switch back.

The big advantage is improved support for new features, like adaptive sync, multi monitor support, display scaling, etc. You’ll notice, new features (mostly gaming related features) will just work better on Wayland. There will be a performance hit though.

I made the switch because it’s just plain better, adaptive sync works (it never worked for me on X11), oh yeah and the night color actually works. Night color on KDE just does not work on X11, AMD or NVIDIA, least for me.

If it ain’t broken don’t fix it.

You have the hardware ideal to switch to Wayland without any headaches.

Just make sure you’re running the latest stable release of Plasma.

You can also install Swaywm on your laptop and bring over your i3 dotfiles to it. Should be fully compatible.

I’d consider asking in a Linux audio or music production community (I’m not aware of any on Lemmy that are big enough to have a likely answer though). If music production is a primary use case and audio latency matters to you, almost no general users are going to be able to comment on the difference between X and Wayland from a latency perspective. There may not be a difference, but there might and you won’t be likely to learn about it outside of an audio-focused discussion.

I switched from Arch + DWM into Artix + DWL and my Thinkpad with Ryzen 5700U doubled the battery life from 3-3,5 hrs to 6-7 hrs. Also if I close the lid, the battery won’t run out as fast it was actually used. I don’t know what explains all this so I don’t make claims either.

I can`t give you any technical details, but real-world ones – it (drastically) decreased my cpu temps and cpu usage, while providing a slightly better performance overall.

t. Tested this on a rpi 4 while running Doom 3 (the closest of a “Crysis for rpi 4”) a couple years ago. Pretty sure its even better right now.

i switched my desktop to wayland a few months ago due to weird performance issues in some 3D applications

it went mostly flawlessly, i haven’t had much if any issues in terms of app support, as long as your wayland compositor supports xwayland, everything should work pretty great!
the application ecosystem isn’t as widely developped though, so you may run into issues if you try to use standalone window managers/compositors like sway, hyperland, etc… but besides that, everything’s been great for me!

You probably won’t notice a difference in day-to-day use, especially since you use Plasma. I can’t vouch for performance, but you don’t have a Nvidia GPU so you should be fine. The easiest way to migrate for you on your desktop is to install plasma-wayland-session, and for your Laptop to install sway and put in your i3 config.

I use xmonad and won’t switch until there’s a viable alternative (probably never).

There is still way too much instability and too many paper cuts on KDE Wayland. IMO if you have waited this long just wait for their Qt6 release. X11 will remain the best supported experience for KDE 5.