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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Using Wayland with KDE Plasma 6 on Arch btw. But I installed the old NVIDIA driver 535, waiting for explicit sync in 555 to fix flickering in games.
I couldn’t get the trackpad working right on X (why tf is acceleration on by default?), tried switching to Wayland in the first few hours of using Linux, and haven’t had significant issues since. At that point I had no reference on performance, so no way to tell if X would be better.
There’s maybe one bug that causes an unrecoverable GPU hang when using certain applications, but that may have been fixed in the kernel already, and I just need to use something newer than 22.04 LTS.
Every update of plasma I switch to Wayland so far my record is 1 week before running into a deal breaker issue.
Though Plasma six is so close to working for me. The only issues I’m getting on wayland is flickering in games, an issue where some windows don’t show up on the task bar, awful screen tearing when using two monitors of different resolutions, keyboard lag.
Same here. I’m on garuda dragonized, and tried out Wayland for a few days and everything you mentioned happened to me. Throw in some mouse focus issues for extra fun!
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
I’ll adopt it when it becomes Linux Mint’s default
I don’t use it because it makes blender run at like 5 fps for some reason.
I use Wayland on my laptop running fedora 39 kde spin and it mostly runs fine. When I browse gifs in discord the screen flashes white and I can’t maximize jellyfin on connected TVs but other than that no major issues.
No. I plan to switch when I replace my 3070 with an AMD chip.
I daily drive wayland with nvidia and I play games modestly. I have Xorg installed as backup for when issues happen, but it’s been pretty rare in the last couple months.
I have for more than a year. I’ve never had a single problem, but I’m on an all AMD system.
Been running Wayland for 5 years on my development laptop (sway, Intel GPU, blacklisted the nvidia gpu). At the start I’ve had a couple of issues, nothing too bad. Haven’t had any issues for over 2 years. Switched to Linux on my gaming PC about a year ago, KDE plasma on Wayland but do most of my gaming from a steam gamescope session. Very happy overall with Wayland, glad it exists. Sharp text on a fractionally scaled display for reading code was just too compelling at the time and it only improved.
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.
I could switch tomorrow if I could do my current setup:
- Tiling Window manager (sway?)
- simple status bar to output text from a script with clickable applet icons (waybar?)
- the way to show/hide windows on a button press - I have a script that I use to quickly toggle 3 dropdown terminal windows
Last time I tried Wayland in December, I had issues with waybar not supporting clicking tray applet icons. Also I’ve ported my dropdown terminals script to support sway - and it worked half the time, like, literally every second key press was ignored.
On one hand I have X session that currently has no downsides for me, on other - wayland that has no upsides. Tell me, why would I switch?
Message me on matrix if you want help setting all of that up, but waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons.
You should switch if you value any of the following:
- Security
a. Any x11 client can record your screen without notifying you
b. Any x11 client can record all of your keystrokes without notifying you
- Better configuration
a. Tighter integration with input/output configuration, which results in things like per-input settings are very difficult to do on X11, I have a mouse that only works on one screen and another mouse that works on all my screens, which makes it so that I can have my TV pointed away from my desktop and use a wireless mouse and never lose the position of my cursor while still keeping my other displays active, for example
b. You can’t modify mouse sensitivity on x11 (except in a hacky way with acceleration)
c. After switching to sway I just noticed so many hacks that I configured went away.
- Significantly better rendering
a. x11 can’t support monitors with mixed refresh rates because how it handles rendering is fundamentally flawed
b. on x11 most animations are fundamentally broken (try resizing) because of how rendering is handled, check out the animations on hyprland and how smooth they are, that’s not something that can be done on x11 for a low performance overhead
c. so many scaling problems, native wayland apps work perfectly in this regard nowadays.
- color management/HDR
Ok, because of this post - I decided to bite the bullet and try wayland again. And it was much better experience this time:
I’ve installed sway “pattern” on OpenSuse-Tumbleweed and:
- Previous time I had some issues with lightdm not supporting sway, now - it just works.
- I still use xdotool and i3-msg in my custom scratchpad script and yet everything is working.
waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons.
I confused it with swaybar, that’s installed with sway by default and should be an i3bar-compatible. Waybar doesn’t seem to support i3bar protocol, but anyway, after I configured it - it’s like 95% there from what I want.
- I had to force xcb platform for appimage of nekoray (qt VPN gui), because it’s complaining about missing wayland-egl plugin. But it’s a small problem with straightforward fix, so not that bad.
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.
