I could not turn off mouse acceleration, which was a deal-breaker for me.

Actually not Wayland’s fault if I remember correctly, something about libinput changing it’s format, and my window manager wasn’t compatible with it yet. After trying for several hours I found a bug report (can’t find it right now). The Devs thought it was a minor issue, but for me it was huge so I decided I’ll wait another year.

I must say, Wayland was smoooooth, didn’t even experience X as slow until I tried Wayland.

in my experience wayland is faster to log in and less input lag, problems are things like discord that don’t implement screen record, but it work on the browser, and sometimes i need to find replacement for some apps that work on wayland(like xdotool to simulate mouse etc) i use fedora so wayland is default

I use xmonad and won’t switch until there’s a viable alternative (probably never).

I switched from Arch + DWM into Artix + DWL and my Thinkpad with Ryzen 5700U doubled the battery life from 3-3,5 hrs to 6-7 hrs. Also if I close the lid, the battery won’t run out as fast it was actually used. I don’t know what explains all this so I don’t make claims either.

i switched my desktop to wayland a few months ago due to weird performance issues in some 3D applications

it went mostly flawlessly, i haven’t had much if any issues in terms of app support, as long as your wayland compositor supports xwayland, everything should work pretty great!
the application ecosystem isn’t as widely developped though, so you may run into issues if you try to use standalone window managers/compositors like sway, hyperland, etc… but besides that, everything’s been great for me!

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I wouldn’t be in too big of a rush, especially if you don’t have a lot of time to experiment. I gradually switched over when I realized that Sway was meant to be a wayland replacement for i3wm. There were some rough edges at first, but starting about a year ago I switched to Sway on most of my machines. I didn’t have any trouble installing sway alongside i3wm and xfce4, and I would highly recommend keeping an x11 option as a fallback when or if something doesn’t work.

Initially, I tried out Sway because I heard that most x11 developers were shifting their focus to Wayland and I figured that I should start experimenting with it. I like getting out in front of change. Eventually, Sway shifted from interesting to good enough for daily use. I figure that I’ll have less time to play around with my computers in the future, so I might as well try new stuff out now before it gets forced on me.

If you’re not having performance issues, then I don’t see much reason to change. Sure, Xorg is basically in maintenance mode, but so what? Your setup works for you, so do your thing.

That said, Sway is a window manager intended to be a drop in replacement for i3 on Wayland, and is pretty close from what I hear: https://swaywm.org/

Plasma is very good with Wayland, although you might want to wait for Plasma 6, since they’re apparently making several improvements, and it’s due out soon anyway: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6-Wayland-Great

You can install Wayland and switch sessions during login too, so you can check it for yourself and see if your i3 dotfiles work with Sway.

What are the advantages of Wayland?

The big one is proper support for diffrent refresh rate monitors and VRR. Also some security improvment and long term support (X11 probably has only a few years before development stops).

What are the disadvantages?

Its still a little buggy in some cases (especialy when using Nvidia hardware) but with an AMD or Intel GPU its more then usable. Some apps don’t play nice with Xwayland but its pretty rare.

How’s gaming?

I haven’t encontered any major issues with games. Some games might need launch parameters but usualy you can just google it and find the answer very quickly. Performance its exactly the same as on X (maybe even slightly better)

What would be the best way to switch?

On your desktop with KDE you can just select “KDE (Wayland)” in your display manager and KDE should just run like normal but with Wayland. On you laptop you’d need to switch to a diffrent WM since i3 dosen’t support Wayland. Your best bet would probably be Sway since its compatible with i3 configurations.

Why have you made the switch?

I wanted to check out how well Wayland works and found that it works fine for me, and so i decided to move. Also X was giving me issues with screen tearing and multiple monitors.

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Yes switch

Plasma is slick as butter on Wayland.

• Wayland has several new features like, say, removing screen tearing, but it’s not necessarily “advantages” that are the reason to use Wayland. It’s sort of a redo of how graphics should work in the Linux world, and it will be the standard going forward. X11 development has more or less ceased with those developers moving to Wayland (in fact, Wayland was created by X11 developers to address issues they had with the architecture of X11). It’s not a matter of should you switch to Wayland; it’s a matter of when should you switch to Wayland. The answer is, as soon as you can.
• Gaming varies drastically. Some games are fine. Some games make me launch Steam via Lutris to start (not sure why it works, but it does) but run fine after. Some games can’t reach higher framerates. That said, no screen tearing is a plus. When it works, Wayland is very smooth, but it doesn’t always work yet. An example off the top of my head, no matter what I do, Street Fighter 6 doesn’t get above 45 fps on Wayland. It’s a good idea to have an X11 option as a backup still imo
• The best way to migrate is just to install a Wayland compatible DE/WM. I’ve used both GNOME Wayland and Hyprland extensively and they both work great. If you’re used to i3 (that’s what I used to use and is still my X11 backup), Hyprland is great. KDE like you have on your Desktop already works good on Wayland from what I’ve heard.
• I have made the switch because most of my apps can run on Wayland, and it’s the future. I still have a backup in case there’s a game or something that doesn’t quite work for me. For instance, I can’t share screen on discord. It won’t even recognize the pipewire route. Thus, I’ve gotta switch to X if I want to do that.

Wayland has much better multi touch support on many laptop touchpads. I would definitely recommend trying it out on your Thinkpad.

You’re not running Nvidia so your desktop would probably work fine on Wayland as well. Wayland has improved privacy protections so it’s possible screen recorders that haven’t been updated in a few years break; most standard KDE tooling should work without issue, though. Wayland is missing some features X11 already has, and things like colour profiles are stoll in development; if your display needs a specific color profile to look right, you may want to stick to X11.

Performance should be very similar. I haven’t noticed any difference. The scrolling and gestures are a lot smoother but that’s not necessarily a performance issue, that’s just X11 not being able to cope with modern touchpads. Wayland itself isn’t a performance problem, in fact the Steam Deck game UI runs a custom Wayland implementation and that’s basically a games console.

You can just install Wayland support on KDE (if it’s not installed already) and select it from the desktop environment drop down on the login screen. If it doesn’t work or isn’t to your liking, you can always log out and log back into an X11 session.

As for i3, you’ll probably need an alternative such as Sway as i3 is very much X11 only. There are a few very fancy i3-like environments for Wayland but it’s up to you which one you want to give a go.

I’ve mostly switched to Wayland on my laptop, but that does cause some Nvidia related problems every now and then. The integrated Intel GPU works great, but as usual Nvidia makes life harder for everyone. My desktop has an Nvidia card so enabling Wayland causes video decoding issues and weird performance issues.

The only system I have where X11 is still better is a Raspberry Pi. The whole Broadcom software stack there is horrible and should diaf anyway.

Your laptop is old enough that it’s probably not worth teaching the old dog new tricks. I have an 8th gen L480 that Lenovo already doesn’t want to sell a new battery for.

The desktop would definitely benefit from a windowing system that understands “multi-headed” beyond being one weirdly large framebuffer. Wayland is architectured to deal with multiple screens with multiple DPIs and different refresh times.

For gaming, Wine/Proton currently targets X (with magical Xwayland protocols to bypass the worst of it), but it’s going to be Wayland-native before you know it. Valve has a lot riding on making Linux/Wayland gaming better, and they’re going to keep on plowing development into that. Intel and AMD are 100% on the train, and even Nvidia is being less bad about it.

https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/