Switching to modern Wayland, is it worth?

g-virus · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Aug 2017 Posts: 113

Hey folks

I remember I had a discussion about migrating to Wayland a time ago, but things could be changed since, so I'm wondering if it's worth to switch to Wayland nowadays with the following preferences:

1. I'm going to use NVIDIA graphics card
2. I'm gonna use Sway or similar tiling window manager, no pure KDE/Gnome DE
3. I'm using no-multilib gentoo profile
4. I'd like to avoid X-only apps and keep the system minimal, but still usable as a daily computer

I have a laptop with Intel-only graphics and I use Arch on it with configured Sway/Waybar and other things, looks very usable, but there is no NVIDIA card/G-Sync.

So the question is: can I use Wayland-only environment with no-multilib gentoo profile, as well as with the NVIDIA card, and would you recommend to switch to Wayland to use a technology, that will potentially replace Xorg soon?
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"A computer is like air conditioning: it becomes useless when you open windows" - Linus Torvalds.

Zucca · Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2024 1:00 pm Post subject:

There has been a lot of discussion about this.

I'd say try it out, if it doesn't work then revert back.
I, myself, have been using wayland (first sway then wayfire) for some years already. Your mileage may wary.
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..: Zucca :..

Anon-E-moose

g-virus · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Aug 2017 Posts: 113

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2025 11:42 am Post subject:

Reviews (especially nvidia/wayland ones) the more current the better chance of it being true.
It's only been in the last year or so that nvidia has gotten serious with wayland support in their drivers.
The latest if preferable, though if I was an nvidia user I'd check the nvidia linux forum for any problems.

The only advice that I can give you is to try it, you can have both X and wayland installed at the same time.
You just start one or the other, that's how I started using wayland, then when I was comfortable that wayland worked (for me) I removed all X stuff.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

ChrisJumper · Advocate Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2403 Location: Germany

antonone · n00b Joined: 12 Jan 2008 Posts: 8

No other way of finding out than checking it for yourself I guess. I was using Wayland for several months on proprietary drivers and GTX 1060 until I had to finally revert to X.

A lot of things worked *better* for me under Wayland (general snappiness), some worked equally well (screen capture), but some things were simply broken: Electron apps don't work well (e.g. CURA slicer; but VSCode is an exception, it worked after some environment variable tweaking), apps like Signal for some reason was throwing I/O errors, Vivaldi browser didn't work on Wayland for me (drawing corruptions all over the place), remote desktop software TO wayland didn't work well (NoMachine), remote desktop FROM wayland to other systems didn't work well (e.g. remmina, when started in X11 compatibility mode it corrupted VNC connections while RDP worked, and when started in Wayland mode it corrupted RDP connections while VNC worked), proprietary software like BricsCAD simply crash on Wayland, they run on XWayland but crash in other random places, so the software is not usable.

But my last straw was missing the ability of programmatically moving the mouse cursor under Wayland.

But I guess if you limit yourself to non-X apps, then Wayland experience would actually be better for you.

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3468 Location: Canada

It all depends on how you measure "worth". Wayland abilities is not a superset of X. There are tradeoffs