Skip Navigation
Linux @lemmy.ml
headroom @lemmy.ml

Do you daily drive Wayland, if so since when, if not when will you?

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.

294 comments

  • 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.

  • 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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.

  • 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'll try again once Nvidia's 555 series drivers are released which should support explicit sync. Right now it's too unstable under Wayland even though I gave it a shot once KDE Plasma 6 released.

  • Yes, on my laptop where it works well and it allows for nice fractional scaling.

    It works on my desktop too but I can't stand vsync while playing CS so it's Xorg for now.

  • ye. i've been using wayland since forever.

    started on hyprland, and then moved to sway, but it's been an almost perfect experience for me

    sometimes i have to install a different version of a package or smth, but otherwise everything works fine.

    • Why did you switch from hyprland to sway?

      I have no experience with both, but to my knowledge they are similar, but hyprland is aheads of wlroots

      • they are very similar. my only problem with hyprland was that the mouse is still required for some things, and it's a bit annoying having to switch back and forth.

        on sway, everything can be done by keyboard. i still use the mouse a lot, but there's less switching in the middle of tasks.

        it's a little difference, but it was worth it for me.

        there's also the drama about some people being transphobic (i think?) in the hyprland discord, but i try not to pay too much attention to that.

        hyprland accomplishes it's goal of being pretty (and i got some really cool screenshots), but sway is pure functionality, and it's damn good at it.

  • I daily drive Linux Mint, which has only recently just now launched experimental beta Wayland support. I've been on X11 this whole time and it's been surprisingly good.

    I'll adopt Wayland when Mint does, I'm confident by then it'll be good and ready.

    I do have a little tablet that runs Fedora Gnome, it runs Wayland. It's okay, though trying to get the digital pen to work properly is a problem because a lot of the advice out there is written with X in mind. But.

    • I'm confident by then it'll be good and ready.

      Depends. Cinnamon Desktop is not a huge project, so yes it may be more stable because of how Mint releases stuff, but also it is not GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, or one of the wayland-only windowmanagers, so it may be less complete.

  • Cinnamon user here. Would love to try it when they get keyboard layouts figured out.

  • About 2 years ago when fractional scaling got good in kde. X just blurred the shit out of everything else. Pretty happy on wayland!

  • been using it since i switched to amd.

    been using it for even longer on my intel gpu laptop.

    nvidia has been holsing it over for a decade at this point.

  • Yes, for over a year now (since early December 2022, don't remember the exact date).

    My experiences with it seem to constantly be different than that of most users, because Wayland was a direct upgrade for me - I couldn't play games properly on X11 at all because they would stutter and freeze really badly even when Vsync was disabled and the game reported to be running at 60 FPS, but Wayland fixed the issue altogether for me.

    ...Granted, I'm on an AMD card. If I was on Nvidia it'd probably be another story entirely. :x

  • I used Wayland for a couple years on AMD hardware and it was fine; I didn't really have any issues. Since acquiring a laptop with an Nvidia card as a gift about a year agi (it was a hand-me-down), I switched to X11 because it is still more stable for Nvidia. I will be switching back to Wayland (with Nvidia) when Fedora 40 releases. Hopefully the support for explicit sync patch will be available by that time, but if not I won't be heavily affected, as I am not playing games currently. I expect that patch to fix the black frame insertion during VRR that people have been complaining about, at which point Nvidia will be viable (for me) on Wayland.

    I've been on the Wayland train for quite some time now, it's only really had issues with Nvidia because Nvidia refuses to adapt their graphics driver for it. We have to rely on the Wayland and XWayland projects to fix the incompatibilities that Nvidia is too lazy to fix themselves (like not supporting implicit sync). Luckily AMD is on top of things and has worked very well with Wayland for years now, so those with AMD hardware are better off.

    EDIT: Here's a link to a Lemmy post about the explicit sync patch. Looks like Nvidia drivers plan to support it in the May 15th patch, so about a month after Fedora 40 releases.

  • When it is ready and passes black screen or can use hardware acceleration without crashing compositor, I'll use wayland

  • Switched like a year ago or so, not really any difference on my AMD pc and Intel laptop. Now I need wayland for HDR on Plasma 6 so there's no way I could go back personally, as well as the great multi-monitor and fractional scaling handling.

  • I can't use Wayland until this xwayland Nvidia bug is fixed, which is a shame because I think that's the last thing holding Nvidia users back. I tried the new Plasma 6 recently and for the most part it was great until I tried gaming and hit that bug. I tried different older and newer beta driver versions but it was more or less the same bug.

    • Seconding this. XWayland is literally unusable with my 3060 Ti, while I've been having very few problems with X11. Hopefully explicit sync support is added before Fedora 40 drops

294 comments