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► Chapters:

00:00 - Wayland on the Linux Desktop
00:29 - What is Wayland?
00:48 - Wayland breaks stuff ... or does it?
01:43 - Wayland and NVIDIA
02:18 - Missing features and limitations
03:18 - How is it today?
05:24 - It's Stability
06:02 - Other Desktop Environments
07:08 - Conclusion

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► Description Tags:

wayland vs x11, wayland vs xorg, wayland linux, fedora 40 wayland, plasma 6 wayland, kde plasma 6, linux wayland vs xorg, linux wayland 2023, switching to wayland, wayland is bad, wayland by default, michael horn

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#linux #opensource #discussion

[Kris-odsj]

3:04 Reminder: *VSYNC =/= FPS CAP!* It's an extremely important distinction!
- The Windows approach is to use *FIFO* (First In - First Out) presentation mode: the first frame rendered is the one that's going to be displayed when monitor's next refresh cycle comes. Hence there's no point in rendering more frames during that period between finishing first frame and displaying it - we get a frame cap.
- The Wayland approach is to use *mailbox* presentation mode: frames are being rendered without a frame cap and when monitor's refresh cycle comes it's the _last_ fully finished frame that gets displayed, which is way more recent than the first frame.
_It's still not as fast as tearing, but it's pretty close, and definitely miles ahead of the Windows' frame-capped experience!_
Let's assume you're rendering at over 3x the monitor Hz:
- FIFO will show you the 1st frame rendered, which is awfully old by the time it displays on screen;
- Mailbox will show the 3rd frame, which is 2 frames-worth of time newer than the 1st frame
Things worth noting:
Mailbox presentation mode _can_ be enabled on Windows at least on Nvidia, I think only for DX9-11 games, and they call it "Fast sync".
Wayland's mailbox, as well as mailbox in general has its caveats:
- mailbox might lead to microstutter at FPS around double of your monitor's Hz (you preferably want a stable FPS=~3xHz or even higher). It's especially noticeable in racing games.
- on Nvidia KDE in particular: fullscreen XWayland windows get framecapped, you need to either make your game windowed, run as a native Wayland window or wait for the 545 driver which is supposed to fix this bug

[domojestic]

A quick correction/update on the Cinnamon situation; according to a blogpost made by Clem (the leader of Mint), work has started on Cinnamon on Wayland and will be available as an experimental option in 21.3!

[TheBitPianist]

Times change. By now I'm daily driving Debian 12 with Wayland (Gnome). And it's a great experience!

[angeldude]

My issue with Wayland is that it's _just_ a protocol. Having separate protocols and implementations isn't a bad thing, but what is a bad thing is the _many_ desktop environments and window managers made for X11 that were able to focus on providing a good desktop and could rely on Xorg to actually handle the dirty work under the hood. With Wayland, that dirty work is suddenly thrust onto the desktop environments and window managers, meaning every single one needs to either implement their own server themselves, or import a 3rd party implementation. For the big environments like Gnome and KDE, this isn't a problem, but for just about everyone using something other than those, it absolutely is. There have been smaller desktops built using WLRoots, but without the funding an attention that XOrg, KDE, or Gnome got, I have doubts that it and the desktops built using it will ever be as mature and featureful as the alternatives.

Sincerely - Someone who tried to use Windows as though it had a tiling window manager since before I knew what Linux was. I can't stand my windows overlapping each other.

[suscactus]

good progress being done. im really hyped for plasma 6, it seems like lots of small important things are being looked at, which is great to see.

[rayfox]

It's not ready. Had to switch manually to X11 after the KDE6 update. Too many graphical glitches and a lot of games don't work with Steam's Proton.

[dnlov]

Yep! Still waiting for resolving the fractional scaling issue. As for now, I've enabled text scaling in GNOME Accessibility settings. Makes fonts bigger on my 14-inch 1080p laptop.

[fanis]

X11" will never be dropped, it will always be supported with XWayland. What may be dropped is the Xorg implementation.

[walter_lesaulnier]

Wayland came natively on my Fedora KDE Plasma. After about 9 months, it is 95% perfect. Pop-up menus sort of disappear sometimes but the items reappear when the mouse cursor passes over them. Doesn't happen much so not a big issue.

[mohamadzx]

Xorg is better for the time being as for Wayland its hope of becoming the best protocol has a long way to improve

[VCTMIZED]

Dont forget, you cant use push to talk on discord with wayland unless you have the discord window active and/or a xwayland window. This is a major deal breaker

[anna_chi-jh]

I just switched back to X11 on my laptop. I had only tiny issues with Wayland, but they did bother me in the long run (WINE program windows starting in the background, VICE emulator not being able to play audio when unfocused ...). I never had any issue with X11 that using Wayland would solve. On my desktop I never bothered trying Wayland anyway. I'll stick to X11 until it's dead and buried.

[taidee]

I've been an Arch/Qtile user for a long time, and recently started having issues on X11 session and so moved to the Wayland session, however still have 4 or 5 things that didn't work even though speed was much improved. In fact it was so smooth that I immediately decided I was done with X11, I'm not a gamer on PC. I then tried Arch/Hyprland and mind blown, those few holdups I had work now, Hyprland is much easier to configure. So I'm full on Wayland now.

[Aoitori]

kde wayland is better than gnome wayland

[lemonsh]

I've recently switched from i3wm to SwayFX and was honestly really surprised how smooth everything is.

[maximilianmoser]

as soon as ori was mentioned, i knew it's got to be a fellow austrian :D

[iFlxy]

For me, X11 is not ready (and most likely never will be). I have two monitors with different refresh rates, and my high refresh rate monitor is being limited to 60hz on X11, no matter what, and it's just too much of an issue for me to use it.

[thepi]

Wayland support has definately improved over the past year. I use a gtx 1660 super, and I was unable to get Hyprland to work before and even got myself stuck on a black screen upon boot because of an attempt to get it to work. Now it is working and really stable. I get about the same amount of crashes as I did on gnome xorg, which is almost never. I still get a lot of sutter when I play games, but I just switch to xorg when gaming. I use tmux for 99% of my work, so I just quit hyprland -> switch to gnome -> play games -> switch back to hyprland -> tmux attach and start working. I am really looking forward to mesa 24.1, so I can use nvk instead of the proprietary drivers. I hope those would be enough to make gamescope run for nvidia, and it would basically solve my problem.

[KingKrouch]

I'll be honest, most of my issues with Wayland were NVIDIA specific, or strange stuff like Steam not updating the mouse cursor position when using a Steam Controller or emulating a mouse, or Sunshine (A streaming client for Moonlight) constantly asking for a screen to be shared through Pipewire when it starts (even if you already told it to remember that). Or there not being a good way of disabling the DualShock/DualSense trackpad emulating a mouse (like on the Steam Deck).

There's also Steam and Spotify not respecting fractional DPI scaling on KDE Wayland for some reason, or the weird UI issues with GOverlay, but those are the most of my issues with it. I'd actually argue that fractional scaling is better on Wayland than Windows simply for the fact that I don't have to constantly mess with DPI compatibility settings to get games displaying right on my 1440p monitor or 4K TV.

NVIDIA is probably the same issue that's holding back SteamOS 3 from being released publicly, because based on what I've seen with HoloISO and their proprietary drivers, and how the DKMS module only supports the 20 series cards and onwards, it's frankly embarrassing.

[vanodon]

No granular per software permission yet...