My move to wayland: it's finally ready
My move to wayland: it's finally ready
I was a Wayland detractor, had very bad experiences with it in the past, but I decided to give it a try again, and it’s time to say goodbye to Xorg.
Let's talk about #Linux on the desktop, #Gnome and the state of #Wayland in 2024.
I've just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn't get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I'll wait a little bit more.
What hardware do you have? I have all AMD, and it works just fine on Nobara on Wayland.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA. I was buying a new PC half a year ago, and only started even considering to make the switch to Linux few months after that, so I am at a pretty unlucky point where I just had recently spent a lot of money for new-gen PC, but without knowing that I should really go for AMD.
I will make the switch to AMD as soon as it's justifiable, but I'm too lazy to deal with second-hand resale and it's hard to justify a new GPU when I still have the current gen, but from wrong manufacturer.
Did you file a bug report with the Sunshine devs?
Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn't really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I'll look into it, so far I suspect that it's actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I'm not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I'm on Nobara and don't want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn't something I have the guts for yet.
Gnome has been pretty great on Wayland for a while.
Personally I've been using it since 2017, and besides a stint with a 1080 Ti that was constantly causing issues, it's been pretty good besides screen sharing in some programs. Speaking of...
I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app or people would abandon that shitty app. Unfortunately neither looks likely.
Right, actually you can use Discord natively on Wayland just passing the flags mentioned in the post. The only issue I have found with the official Discord client is that it doesn't support streaming audio alongside to streaming your screen, but vesktop does the trick for that.
Hadn't heard of vesktop. Thank you for the tip.
Use vesktop. Works great on Wayland and supports streaming with audio.
From my experience, it seems like the video quality really sucks the moment you try to stream anything more complex, like a 3D game - no indication on my side, but a friend complained and I got the same result checking the stream on a second device. Frame rate drops to 2fps or worse, with bad quality on each frame.
I remember reading an issue on vesktop about it, but sounds like it might just come down to missing HW acceleration in electron for the relevant APIs? Though if you have any suggestions and/or better results, I'd love to hear about it.
I think this thread shows it's very hardware/driver dependent?
I'm posting from Wayland running on Plasma 5, on 100% recent gen intel hardware, and as far as I've been able to tell I have zero deficiencies that matter in functionality. (aside from whatever little bugs surely exist that I'm not noticing - and big things no one really has yet like HDR)
I don't have much sympathy for the haters who think we shouldn't be moving to Wayland ever, but every recent thread seems to confirm that Nvidia and possibly other HW configs are still likely to be problematic.
A big aspect is fractional scaling needs. I have tried the current kde 5 wayland version everytime a new minor release is done and it's very bad with inconsistencies in many places and weird font rendering and stuff like that. I'm very eager waiting for kde 6 where many of the bugs are supposedly fixed.
I've got a 3.5k 13" display and have only noticed scaling issues with xwayland apps (which Plasma warns you of) - but I'm not disputing your point, there are clearly rough edges some folks see that others don't.
Plasma may not ever implement window shading for Wayland, but I'm hopeful. That's probably my last blocker.
This should not be surprising at this point that a lot of users prefer the wayland session, gamingonlinux survey shows that wayland adoption is consistently increasing (while X11 usage declines).
I am on a very strange situation, Wayland for me still quite buggy, but my x11 session only render about half of the red subpixels on my display, so wayland it is
As a DWM user I won't be moving for a long time. Yes I know about DWL, but it dosnt have half the patches I use yet.
I do like the lower amount of screen tearing on Wayland, but I've minimised it in Xorg.
If you avoid Nvidia, it have been ready for many years. And to be honset, not sure X11 was really stable with Nvidia either. My main issue with Wayland, is that X doesn't have multi dpi support... and for that I really cannot blame Wayland. Also, Skype doesn't have screensharing, well, they actually had for a while, but then removed it... still, hard to blame on Wayland.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything... that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
I got my Nvidia GPU before I even considered moving to Linux. I am honestly getting pretty tired of reading these gatekeeping comments telling me "I'm not allowed to complain about anything" or how I'm a trash person for buying an Nvidia card in the first place. Nvidia is the largest GPU manufacter, people are going to own Nvidia cards, you need to live with it. Be constructive and nice to other people.
X11 is rock solid with Nvidia, never had a single problem.
I had a lot of issues with Wayland on KDE, lots of flickering issues all the time. I moved to Hyprland and things are mostly fine. IntelliJ has ocasional problems but they are working on a Wayland version anyways.
Machine learning pays my bills, and I never had a choice on my graphics card brand. To be sure, I wanted an AMD for the open source drivers, but CUDA remains essential to me. RocM support from AMD is a joke, and isn't anywhere close to an alternative. Reseachers release code that only runs on CUDA for a good reason. To say that I don't get to complain is going too far
Exactly. You'd think with the two things they're really competitive on being raw flops and memory, they'd be a viable option for ML and scientific compute, but they're just such a pain to work with that they're pretty much irrelevant.
You get to complain to Nvidia, not Linux developers and maintainers.
That's true, but it also wasn't fair to be a Wayland detractor then.
Nvidia needed to do stuff to make that combination viable, and their delay in doing so wasn't anyone's fault but Nvidia’s
Ha, your first sentence is just plain wrong. It was quite broken under "normal" usecases with per-DE bugs.
For example, on KDE, about 1.5 years ago the bug finally got fixed where your Wayland session would completely crash if your monitor lost any signal whatsoever (monitor sleep or shutting off the monitor). If you ask me, that is an very standard usecase without which there is no world where said action crashing the entire session would be considered ready for general use.
I think we are there now, just some visual glitches nowadays, also some recent glitches with monitor sleep, but Wayland very rarely crashes anymore.
Thanks to nouveau, I can still use GNOME even after dropping X11 🥳 I have a GeForce 6800M GT, I think, which would need a proprietary nvidia driver that is not supported (but patched by community) since kernel 5 I believe. Only thing that needed to be considered is, that one has to boot via legacy BIOS and not EFI, even on a mac laptop which normally uses EFI to boot into macOS and the grafic card still works. Would be nice if the nouveau team would get the card running on EFI as well.
Literally display of why "year of the Linux desktop" is the OG Internet meme. It doesn't work on the most popular and powerful GPU in the planet and that's your fault. 🤦♂️
My personal experience could never agree with that. I could never use Wayland on KDE on either one of my laptops with Intel graphics due to numerous glitches and incompatibilities, so nvidia is not even the scapegoat I wish it was.
I'm looking forward to plasma 6 next month, but at least on KDE, Wayland has not really been usable so far.
My intel graphics laptop (surface pro) runs perfectly on kde wayland
Unfortunately I still have some breaking bugs with wayland on my laptop.
Most notably big blue button (an open source video conference tool) refuses to connect when using firefox with wayland.
Firefox does not allow copying of urls in wayland if a certain setting is enabled in kde plasmas settings.
I cannot move views around or redock windows in eclipse.
Xilinx vivadi randomly crashes on wayland but not on X11.
Notably, aside from the url copying problem, most of those things will not be an issue for the typical user
In my experience, any HDMI's or Display Ports plugged into my GPU have terrible performance on Wayland while working perfectly on X11, so it seems there are still problems. Though tbf X11 doesn't work at all with HDMI's plugged into my motherboard so it could be a hardware issue? I have a 11 year old motherboard so idk.
How is the state of tilig WMs? Last time I ried Wayland, mixing and matching WMs and status bars was really flakey, with font scaling and rendering issues. There are certain things I will no longer compromise on in a WM, and if I wanted to be forced to use a specific desktop to get a working graphical environment (functioning scaling, for instance), I'd use a Mac.
Herbstluftwm hasn't been ported - is there a similar configuration file-less tiling WM? On X, I could also settle for bspwm; both WMs are completely configurable on the command line. How about bars? I'm using polybar right now, but there are a dozen to choose from under X, any of which I can use with whichever WM (and have it function properly).
Again, mere months ago, trying to get font scaling to work properly with the same scaling in all applications was messed up. Under X, if I set a font and size in any program (that supports font selection), I get the same apparent font size - because programs get fonts from X and the same code does all font rendering which makes everything consistent. How is that on Wayland, now, because that was a major deal-breaker last a couple of months ago.
Using wayfire (disabling the fancy resources eating plugins) + waybar + plus a bunch wlr utilities (some from sway).
I'm using integrated intel gpus. There's a laptop with both the integrated intel gpu and a nvidia discrete one, but I had to configure the bios to only use the inegrated one, both the binary nvidia drivers, and the open source nvidia drivers fail to set
fbdev=1(the external hdmi monitor is the one associated to the nvidia gpu, and it gets a blank screen), which is required for enabling KMS, which is required for wayland, so no luck. Nouveau actually works, but it's not stable enough, after some time of use the monitor turn off and there's no way to turn it back on, and it feels slow or lagging compared to the intel gpu, although it should be the opposite. So I gave up on nvidia on that laptop, and any other box only has the integrated intel gpu anyways. I've read of successful stories with nvidia, both with the binary and the open drivers, but I think it's not a generic thing that all nvidia gpus will work well on wayland with nvidia drivers. The noveau drivers are the only ones working for some gpus, but not stable enough. So I stick with the recommendation to stay away from nvidia if using wayland...I guess although WM still applies, on the wayland jargon they're called compositors, and the wayland compositors are not as light as the Xorg WMs, since there's no Xorg server, and part of the responsibility of the server goes to the compositors on wayland...
There's labwc, which is the compositor I would have chosen, but the developer decided to stick with xml configuration equivalent to the the openbox one, and also with the openbox themes/styles, which I never liked. On Xorg I used fluxbox + tint2 + ..., and I tried openbox, but totally disliked it compared to fluxbox... But other than config and theming, I like its idea of being a light compositor.
Actually by disabling the plugins I am on wayfire, it's pretty much labwc but with new decent config (I really like its config BTW), and using the gui toolkit theming, so no specific wayfire theming at all, which is nice, as opposed to the labwc own theming... Still, labwc is also an option for some.
Wayfire and labwc are not tiling compositors as most of all others, :)
I used sway for a long time(months to a year?) and it was very stable. I'm currently messing with plasmas tiling option ATM and it works okay... Not as fluid but well enough that I haven't switched back.
My issue is my dependency on touchegg...
It's probably not what you're looking for but I've been using
Hyprlandand it's working mostly file. Usingwaybarworks great.
Nobara (wayland/gnome) + NVIDIA 2080ti, screen and projector dual setup = never add any issues. I'm a noob, came to linux 6 months ago. I'm really curious about why so many people are having problems with Wayland and NVIDIA but my system basically worked out of the box. I guess I was lucky?
Plasma is even better with Wayland, but yeah, it's fine in Gnome too. 2016 it wasn't ready but from 2021 or so it's been fine.
I'm ignorant to all this, but I found that weirdly my mouse's gesture features are broken on Wayland. So X11 it is then.
I don't have enough experience with either x11 (or whatever else is used) or Wayland to have a well thought out opinion, but Wayland seems promising to me because of waydroid.
Can I use electron apps without 20 hours of troubleshooting? Can I go 24 hours without my Nvidia card having issues?
Oh so it's not ready for the majority of hardware and my use cases. Got it.
Year of the Linux desktop 🤦♂️
It's not a matter of Wayland becoming ready for Nvidia, but Nvidia becoming ready for Wayland.
Getting them mixed up is like saying Linux has a Microsoft Office/Adobe Photoshop compatibility problem, as opposed to the other way around.
And for what it's worth, with the latest Nvidia driver, Nvidia finally seems to be updating their crappy drivers with Wayland support.
You can want it to work that way and I'd agree. It doesn't. The end user does not care.
For most electron apps, I just use the
--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=waylandflags and they work fine. Hopefully you don't have an xcompose file because it will now be ignored.By far the most frustrating part of using Wayland is figuring out all the environment variables and flags you need to setup.
XWayland works fine, you can do nothing.
I use Nvidia + electron apps, and it does work fine, read the article.