Been on Wayland since 2016 and to this day my only issues (apart from when I had an Nvidia card for a few months, that is…) was video sharing in Discord/steam in-home streaming, both of which still don’t work right.
Other than that, it’s been great. Multi-monitor works way better, far fewer bugs, my desktop feels a lot more fluid and smooth.
On laptops, Wayland+Gnome gestures are exceptional, putting even Apple’s gestures to shame. I cannot stress enough how good of a job Gnome+Wayland does with trackpad gestures. It makes other gesture systems, especially ones under X11, feel like they were cobbled together by a Fallout 3 modder.
Overall Wayland has been great for me. I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app.
If you just want video sharing with audio in discord, vesktop implements that. https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop
Been using Wayland since 3’ish years ago and my desktop experience has been really smooth – no crashes, errors or anything of the sort. Everything “just werks” just as if I were on Xorg instead. Even on a completely obscure/zero linux support single board computer (Orange pi zero 3).
Graphics drivers are what matters. Your orange pi uses a mali GPU which is well supported by Linux (thanks ARM).
nVidia is just barely at the point where their most recent gpu drivers aren’t terrible under Wayland. It’s taken a while to get there.
GPUs with good open source drivers will fare fine.
Not as bad as you might think. The nouveau drivers have come a long way for maxwell. You should give it a shot if you haven’t. But, unfortunately, if you are using anything new then nouveau sucks. It’s a fun game where you get to wait until nvidia no longer wants to support your GPU and hope by that point that nouveau has progressed far enough that you won’t be looking at noman’s land.
I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
- Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
- RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
- Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
- Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
- VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
- Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
- Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
- Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
- Video tearing has basically disappeared.
- Video timing issues seem to be improved.
- Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
- Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.
Which app do you use for screen recording? That’s the only thing keeping me on X11.
OBS Studio mostly. It’s not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.
My experience with Nvidia+ Wayland was… Less than desirable. Enough to make me pickup an AMD card.
However, once I did that my experience instantly better. Hell, even X11 worked better - I was never able to get the desktop to stay at a consistent 60FPS (I’m still on a 60Hz panel which I’m just now getting around to upgrading shortly) in X until I moved to my AMD card.
The 545 driver update just made things so much worse. So I’d say Wayland+Nvidia is not great (for others it works fine so maybe it’s down to what card you have?) however on my AMD card (and my old MacBook with Intel integrated graphics) it’s fantastic.
How do we as the community turn hope into help? Is there a way to contribute directly to the NVK developers?
I wouldn’t say it breaks everything. Franky it fixes / handles better issues that are common usecases today that was not the case during the time X11 was still the norm / actively maintained such as:
- Multiple monitor support with varied refresh rates
- Hybrid GPU setup (including being able to use your motherboard’s hdmi socket and your dedicated gpu hdmi at the same time)
- Display scaling
- Better isolation of applications (to the deterrence of existing linux applications)
Of course granted its a new protocol, it doesn’t support all the usecases that X11 was designed for due to variety or reasons (including controversial decisions)
Mind you, Wayland isn’t perfect either. For example, I found out that despite Wayland having better Hybrid GPU setup support out of the box, there are applications that ended up having broken multi-gpu support (where the application in question can choose which gpu it would utilize for its processing) where it works fine X11.
With the state of the hardware we are having, it is understandable why distros have been focused on pushing Wayland as the default, although honestly, it would be wise for these distros to not completely phase out x11 because currently, Wayland isn’t perfect.
