Hey Community,
Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.
- What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
- I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
- what would be the best way to migrate?
- why have/haven’t you made the switch?
Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor
laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps
What are the advantages of Wayland?
More modern and in some cases better performance (as if Xorg performance were bad … but hey)
What are the disadvantages?
Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications). Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.
why have/haven’t you made the switch?
I did not find one single floating WM that is as good as Openbox for Xorg. Also: Screen recording with OBS is problematic in some constellations.
you’ll need a special Xorg implementation
Ok it’s true that op would need XWayland for some things, but that will be installed alongside the rest of the Wayland packages, and will run seamlessly.
Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation
This isn’t true. Some applications will use features that aren’t available in all Wayland compositors, but they are rare. The main offenders are apps that interact with other apps, apps that take screenshots or record, or apps that draw outside of a window (like docks).
Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications).
I’ve never seen any distro with Wayland that didn’t have XWayland set up and working out of the box, so that’s not something the end user needs to worry about. And “Basically None” is also not true anymore. Practically anything made with GTK3/4, Qt5/6, SDL2, recent Electron versions etc. natively runs on Wayland. It’s mostly games, Wine and a lot of proprietary software that doesn’t.
Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.
Wdym by that exactly? I mean, a KDE application will run just fine on GNOME or Wlroots compositors.
I did. It misses (or missed?) most of the functionality I use with Openbox.
- shading (rolling up) windows
- “resistive” window borders
- menu icons
- pipe menus
- freely bindable key-and-mouse combinations for window movement (including all buttons and including all 5 wheel directions/clicks)
- customizeable decorations (no minimize/maximize buttons, for example, size, mouse interactions, etc.)
- and some other minor issues.
Especially the menu stuff makes me not wanting to use it. Since my Openbox menu uses icons for 100% of the entries and 95% of the menus come from pipe menus this is an absolute deal breaker.
No, you shouldn’t.
If you need Wayland you will know, if X worked for you well and you didn’t search for how to sandbox it or maybe for some other functions that Wayland has then don’t switch and don’t break what works for you.
I can`t give you any technical details, but real-world ones – it (drastically) decreased my cpu temps and cpu usage, while providing a slightly better performance overall.
t. Tested this on a rpi 4 while running Doom 3 (the closest of a “Crysis for rpi 4”) a couple years ago. Pretty sure its even better right now.
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
Can’t say anything about x11 but I use Nobara KDE with Wayland and it works pretty flawlessly. I found an article that’s a good jumping off point.
