this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Switched over to wayland about 4-5 years ago, have run into a couple of problems dealing with theming, fractional scaling and of course nvidia, but on the whole my experience has been without major issues.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

When? Since Ubuntu made it the default for non Nvidia PCs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I never switched. Just doesn't seem worth the hassle.

Loads of broken features and extra work shoved onto the individual compositor / WM developers. I don't care about security on my own computer, I just want screen sharing and clipboards to work reliably.

That said, I use just one (ultrawide) monitor, so even the benefits aren't really there at all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Professionally, we’ve only used Wayland in our products since 2015

Personally, I switched all my home computers to Wayland in 2021

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Wayland has been very stable for me since 2021, never went back to X.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

@headroom Wayland has been my daily for almost a year-and-a-half, most of that on Intel/Nvidia hybrid gpus. I used to use XFCE but switched to Plasma in anticipation of the Landing of Way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I'll adopt it when it becomes Linux Mint's default

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I daily drive a ThinkPad for work running Wayland. I have one occasional problem with a commercial application that I suspect is related but I haven't bothered to prove it since it's so infrequent. Otherwise, rock solid experience for the last year since I was given the machine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I started daily driving sway during the transition from wlc to wlroots back in early 2019 (sway 1.0), so it's been 5 years.

Note that's since I got an HiDPI laptop in 2015, I have been looking at Wayland progress from the GNOME side for a long time, but not completly daily driving it because of some annoyances.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I think about a year when I switched to it to see how it was and then forgot I had.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Tried wayland but it doesnt work on debian stable + kde + nvidia hickup-free yet. I will switch when a) the fixes come to stable and b) a need to switch arises.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Probably never. X11 just works better. Wayland has bad design and bad implementations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Feels good to hear someone else say this. I regularly try switching and always end up finding bugs in the DE or clients. Some issues I've found have existed for years with no fix in sight.

I worry we'll end up in a situation where X11 starts accumulating bugs due to lack of maintenance while Wayland takes ages to mature.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

When I can use mtp connections with cli apps instead of only gui apps

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Since maybe 2 years and i am very happy with it. Sometimes screensharing problems but thats it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I know I have used it since Fedora made it default in 2016. I think I actually used it a while before that, but I don't have any thing to help me pin down the exact time.

Since I only use Intel built-in GPU, everything have worked pretty well. The few times I needed to share my screen, I had to logout and login to an X session. However, that was solved a couple of years ago. Now, I just wait for Java to get proper Wayland support, so I fully can ditch X for my daily use and get to take advantage of multi DPI capabilities of Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

That's why it felt very early to have used it before it was default, I mean before 2016 felt too early for me... But it was way before Covid, so I'd say around 2017.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

When I can inject keystrokes to windows not on focus with scripts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I tried it a few times on different hardware. There were weird lags, freezes, crashes, latency, artifacts, flickering (once I had to reinstall the system to fix it), no cursor in games etc etc so no thanks. It doesn't work for me. Maybe it's possible to fix if I spend a week in the terminal but ehh idk. It's just not ready for me I guess. And I didn't even have enough time to find compatibility issues. I'm a little bit afraid that by the time Wayland is ready, a new system will already be required lol. It's getting better though so probably it will be ready for business/production in a few years idk. The only thing I can definitely tell is that it must not be the default on regular desktop distros now. Wayland may be good but it's not mature. Switching to it on the login screen is a 3 seconds task and it fixes so many issues, especially on older hardware

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I switched to Wayland to get discord streaming with audio working but now Steam remote play has issues capturing some windows unless I open Steam with the -pipewire option. Other than these issues with video streaming it’s been almost the same ir better than x11 on my AMD machine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I've been using Sway on and off since 2020. Wayland always worked well as long as it supports the specific use case and the apps are doing the right thing (e.g. pipewire, portals, no Xwayland).

VRR with multiple monitors and HDR are likely the biggest reasons to use Wayland, as most other improvements are less noticeable. E.g. Sway always felt more responsive to me than i3 + picom, even with a single monitor in 2020.

If you have issues with applications not working well on Wayland, either wait for proper Wayland support or ditch them. For Steam this'd likely mean stay on X.org.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

When my DE, Budgie, supports it. I'm not too bothered about using it, with a beast monitor and a high-end PC I hardly notice the X.Org quirks.

I'll take it as when Budgie is ready to ship a full Wayland-only experience, I'll be ready to use one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I use multiple machines. On one of the core machines, I switched to Plasma 6 on Wayland when that was released. I used XFCE on X11 previously. It seems ok so far.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I haven't used Wayland for about a week overall in my year of using Linux.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I only use wayland on my t480 and it makes a noticeable difference on that machine, but not on my desktop with Nvidia. I have been testing it for a couple of days on my Nvidia box though. So far I've found it mostly works better than I expected but some games played on Nvidia+Wayland makes it look like my monitor is about to die with the weird flickers it does at times and under certain conditions (like loading screens it's unbearable), otherwise performance is good and seems to lock in at 144hz. Also does anyone know why there are no settings in the nvidia-settings app under Wayland?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don't. And I will when it actually fucking works.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

About five years with Wayland now. Started with sway and now running KDE Plasma 6. It is snappy, simple and definitely so good I will not miss X11.

(I also think systemd is cool, you can crucify me now)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I use Sway exclusively on my personal systems. For work, I have to use Zoom, and you can't share your screen on Zoom if you're using Wayland. So I use xorg-server and i3.

Aside from Zoom, the only thing I wish would support Wayland better is ffmpeg. There are janky workarounds to make ffmpeg capture from Wayland, but they're... well, janky workarounds. If I abolutely have to capture video from my desktop, I switch to xorg-server/i3 long enough to do that then go back to Sway.

I'll switch to Wayland on my work machine when Zoom supports it. And I guess the ffmpeg thing, while unfortunate, isn't enough of a deal breaker to keep me from daily-driving Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I use sway and run zoom in my browser (because zoom is shady and I don't trust them). Screen sharing works fine in the browser. The application never worked very well to being with anyway for me, even on X11.

I also use https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ for individual output screen recording such as gaming which works amazingly well. You can not select a section of a single output though, only the whole output. That's a deal breaker for some, and a non-issue for others, just depends on what you need.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I don't use Wayland. I can. I've tried, but I went back to X. On Wayland, when I take a Firefox tab out of a window to make it it's own window, there's a pause of over a second until the new window appears. It drives me crazy every time. On X it's instantaneous.

I don't use two monitors, I don't use Nvidia. For everything else I use my computer for, I haven't found an advantage of using Wayland over X. So, I'll stay on X until I'm forced to change, I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Full AMD. KDE. Only one issue. I RDP into my work laptop, and sometimes I get weird artifacts on the screen until I minimize/maximize. Everything else is flawless

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Probably like 3+ years on the laptop (Intel), approaching 1 year on the desktop (AMD).

Wayland + NVIDIA is still a disaster and a very inferior experience compared to the AMD side. I would stick with Xorg if I had NVIDIA too.

Only on Intel or AMD do you get a Wayland experience that makes you go "wow I can't wait for Xorg to be dead for good". I had a very, very noticeable improvement even years ago on Wayland when it comes to triple monitor performance, VRR and vsync in general. Now that screen capture and stuff is mostly figured out, it works perfectly for me.

At this point my only issues with Wayland are related to features that haven't been implemented yet, not bugs or performance issues. And I'm more than willing to workaround the limitations and take the benefits.

I've been patiently following development and waiting to switch for 10 years, first exploring Wayland with the EGLStream patch for Weston on my GTX 580. Even back then you could feel the difference, but obviously it was also unusable other than demos.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yes, I have Wayland on both my gaming machine and my laptop. I switched for security reasons (i.e. client input isolation). I think Wayland compositors tend to be buggier than X WMs/DEs, just because they are newer/more immature, and there is less native support for it. But some native Wayland-only programs are really good, like Foot is pretty much the perfect terminal emulator for me, being lightweight and fast but with sixel support too. It pretty much has every feature I want to use (except ligature support but that's not super important to me) without any of the features I wouldn't use (looking at you Kitty).

However the downside is the occasional program that just doesn't work on Wayland, like JetBrains IDEs, which are one of the few pieces of proprietary software I voluntarily use. JetBrains IDEs use a bunch of X hacks so they have some buggy behaviour on Xwayland. I really hope JetBrains hurries up with their native Wayland support, especially since so many DEs and distros are moving to Wayland by default now.

I also wish there were more tiling compositors out there. It seems to just be Sway, Hyprland, River, DWL, and QTile (which has a Wayland option, which is very cool). Of which I have daily driven Hyprland and River and been happy with them. I know there's others but they seem pretty obscure or abandoned and not something I'd be looking to daily drive. On X there are so many WMs for every possible use case. And of course the popular X WMs are pretty mature software; I don't remember many breaking bugs when I was on i3, but Hyprland and River are in very active development which means a new update can mean bugs of varying levels of annoying/need a workaround/need to downgrade.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Been using it since plasma 6

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I don't feel like fighting my OS. It locked up every time it went to sleep and I switched to X and the problem went away. Maybe I'll try again but why bother? Everything is working fine for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

i'll probably jump the next time i change window managers or distros... i havent a reason to currently

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

For my home workstation running Debian/Bookworm I started running Wayland-Plasma when Xorg mysteriously refused to work after replacing my video card. Wayland just worked and really had no issues for me so while I'm sure I could have solved the X11 problem I didn't have a real need to.

I also changed my laptop to Wayland-Plasma more recently. A problem I had was in setting up the right modes for external monitors on laptops but that seems to work OK now. Generally things just work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

When I'm forced to, and not before then. X works perfectly well so there's no reason for me to switch to something else with less features.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I've been using Hyprland for about 2 years. I did have some issues with screen sharing (teams, discord) and some steam games (non native, with proton) need some extra launch parameters, but they all work now. Over time I was able to fix all the little issues. For me Hyprland is a daily driver, but I like to tinker. I can see how this is not for everyone.

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