WAYLAND in 2023: how GOOD (or BAD) is it? Apps, GPUs, desktops, gaming...

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Head to squarespace.com/thelinuxexperiment to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code thelinuxexperiment

[@deepin2u]

What os are you using in this Wayland video please? Thanks in advance

[@JeffGeerling]

Considering Raspberry Pi just swapped over to Wayland in Pi OS 12 (Debian Bookworm), I think there will be a large chunk of new users who have no idea they're using Wayland running into some incompatibilities... and hopefully getting them resolved!

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Yeah, the more users there are, the more likely devs will work on fixing these remaining problems!

[@tonysheerness2427]

I have a 3.5 inch screen that will not work on bookworm.

[@ernestuz]

@@tonysheerness2427 Hi, for what I know Wayland talks to the graphic driver et al. in the kernel, I am not doubting you by any means, but can you elaborate why it won't work?

[@tonysheerness2427]

You load the drivers and nothing happens, but works with the previous release. Other people are experiencing the same thing as I googled the problem. @@ernestuz

[@aeaeaeaeoaeaeaeaeae]

Had that issue just about a week ago, all of a sudden the option to enable underscan was gone! (Im using a CRT) Edit: important thing to note is raspi config makes it easy to switch back to X, really handy!

[@that_leaflet]

6:04 Portals also have a few other uses. They allow for software to better integrate onto the system. For example, Firefox used to use the GTK filepicker even on KDE. But with portals, Firefox calls to the file picker portal and it will use the GTK filepicker if you're using a GTK-based environment like Gnome or the QT filepicker if you're using KDE. Portals are also used for sandboxing. An app can have no access to your filesystem, but using portals, they can be temporarily granted access to specific files or folders.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

True!

[@talkysassis]

What lib I import to use portals? portals.h?

[@summerishere2868]

that's a great feature, it always annoyed me that some programs would use the gtk picker on kde.

[@merthyr1831]

Portals allow Flathub and other apps to integrate seamlessly with minimal dev effort. I hope they become the standard for Linux app programming!

[@charliesumorok6765]

Another way to do sandboxing is namespaces.

[@drawerganizer785]

The unmaintainable aspect of X11 is, to me, one of the most damning things about it. I do fpga development for a living. I've very often just straight up deleted chunks of code and rewritten them from scratch because I didn't want to deal with them. And the other engineers are surprisingly not upset when I do that. They'll tell me how much of a pain those functions were to integrate and update, and how they spent months getting it to work after trying to shoehorn a simple feature into it, and were constantly finding bugs with it, and nobody really knows how it works or wants to touch it. And it takes me all of about a week to rewrite it, it's a fraction of the size of the old code, and it works perfectly save for a few minor obvious bugs. It's not viable to fix bad code. You'll spend so much time trying to understand how it works, and so much time discovering and fixing random bugs, and fixing those bugs is like playing jenga where your fix is going to make the code even more fragile and might break something else. It's much less effort to take what you've learned and start from scratch.

[@aziskgarion378]

X11 is what we call legacy system. Having a new display server is way over due.

[@escapetherace1943]

@@aziskgarion378 the fact xorg is still a thing just shows how incompetent the devs behind Linux really are

[@lucass8119]

@@escapetherace1943 Lol, Linux is the kernel. X11 is userland. The people who write userland software aren't "linux devs". X11 also runs on BSD and other Unix systems.

[@escapetherace1943]

@@lucass8119 I'm aware of that genius but you didn't think that because they are separate modules of something they don't have any crossover? The point stands xorg has been bad for so long with nobody caring to use something else. Wayland has been taking almost 2 decades now, it's a joke

[@Soundwave142]

As you said, it is not meant for modern hardware. It's true that X11 is old, too old even but even though it is a system made for computers back in 1987 it actually impressive that it has lasted this long and has not been decommissioned already. But, yes a successor is necessary for modern systems and it is surprising that one has not been developed and implemented already. I hope Wayland support for Nvidia will have a complete arrival soon.

[@cameronbosch1213]

Considering the fact that even Linus Torvalds hates working with them and that they ONLY would use EGLStreams when every other open source GPU driver (in Mesa) used GBM until Nvidia eventually gave in and switched to GBM (and KDE Plasma subsequently dropped EGLStreams support once this happened), I'm honestly not surprised why it's taken so long.

[@lsatenstein]

My Fedora 38, 39 systems, with Waland, crash and provide the black screen death. I switched to using xorg, and all is well. Today, Wayland is, in my opinion, not reliable. It just doesn't work for me as a well proven xorg replacement. Perhaps it will, by 2025, replace xorg.

[@thelakeman2538]

The problem is more that no one wants to maintain it, than it being old per se. It being old is a reason for that (since that means there's tons of legacy code that no one wants to touch for the fear of breaking something), the reason why it has lasted this long is because of developers hacking together something that works for a modern system, but the project itself has been on life support with some occasional security/bug fixes for many years at this point.

[@aladdin8623]

Here we go again with nvidia owners failing on wayland and blaming the latter for it. Because hey it is a sacrilege and capital sin to blame nvidia's drivers for their wayland problems. Nvidia can't be the issue right? Fact is even very old amd and intel gpus run very well with wayland. Only nvidia causes issues after issues with their obstinate behavior. And the community can nothing do about it due to closed drivers. Instead of blaming wayland, it would really help if way more nvidia owners got more critical towards nvidia and demanded them to improve their wayland compliance. A linux standard that exists for more than ten years now while nvidia only started to support it about two years ago in a mediocre manner.

[@cptive]

​@@aladdin8623It's not just Nvidia, there are plenty of issues and missing features in Wayland. Developer actively not implementing necessary features for YEARS because his ego refused to admit it was necessary... You're trying to tell me that's the future?

[@WilburJaywright]

“XWayland works fine. You won’t notice it at all. But actually, you will, and on NVidia it completely fails.”

[@alexhajnal107]

I personally haven't experienced any XWayland bugs but that's due to Wayland not running at all on any of my machines.

[@Grapevin]

This is the entire video lol, he lists out so many major issues and then he's like "but if that doesn't affect you it's great!" I have no idea why this is shipping default now as if it's even remotely ready

[@lucass8119]

@@Grapevin Because if it doesn't ship now then it never will. There needs to be users to actually resolve issues. We can't stay on X11 forever.

[@BaremetalFlesh]

F*** you, Nvidia -Torvalds

[@notbdour]

@@lucass8119I semi-agree but they need to make some changes, quick. For example, fractional scaling is basically unusable on it for any apps that were built for X11.

[@nintendowiids12]

I'm pretty hyped out for Plasma 6 / Qt 6.6, SO many Wayland fixes/features that are sorely needed.

[@MrQuay03]

Plasma 6 will be buggy for at least 2 years. Can't really looking forward to it anytime soon

[@catto-from-heaven]

@@MrQuay03 The whole point of plasma 6 is bringing stable wayland support for plasma

[@MrQuay03]

@@catto-from-heaven my freaking NVIDIA sucks with Wayland. I'll buy only AMD

[@catto-from-heaven]

@@MrQuay03 👍

[@cameronbosch1213]

​@@MrQuay03Nvidia can go 🖕 themselves. The ONLY reason I use Nvidia on my desktop is because at the time AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX was announced but not out yet.

[@Sonic6293]

I use Wayland with very little issues, but i do use an AMD GPU, and I do wish there was a good application or utility to control resolution and scaling for window managers like Sway.

[@un_tizio_a_caso2701]

You may be looking for wdisplays

[@flarebear5346]

Have you tried wayland-displays? Atleast it provides a gui for monitor related stuff

[@Sonic6293]

@@flarebear5346 I couldn't find a program called that, but I did find one called wdisplays, which does provide a GUI, but none of the changes stick! I'm going to have to dig into it some more.

[@ironfist7789]

I tested wayland again with wine/world of warcraft and all I can get is a black screen with the "improved" nvidia 545 drivers, whereas x11 works. It seems to have gotten worse. 6 months ago I was able to use it but just with some weird visual issues and flashing.

[@shizuvoice]

As someone who tried Wayland with an NVIDIA GPU and live streaming, there are few issues I encountered that makes my display (1080p165Hz) runs at 60fps where my OBS frame rate is set to. This is not an issue with X11 and I fallback to it just to avoid that annoying locked FPS when using OBS and streaming a competitive game. But for normal use, this is completely fine.

[@uzefulvideos3440]

I didn't know OBS worked with Wayland now...

[@ssokolow]

@@uzefulvideos3440 Yeah. I remember hearing mention that it has screen-sharing portal support now, though I can't remember if it's native or via a plugin.

[@alvallac2171]

*makes my display […] run (bare infinitive, because of "makes")

[@shizuvoice]

@@uzefulvideos3440 It works right now thanks to PipeWire which handles both audio and video streams. It does its job capturing video but in some instances it breaks when I try to capture a specific game.

[@Czarmzy]

Can't wait for full wayland support in wine. I play osu so its very latency sensitive. Sticking to X for now but already ricing a river based wayland setup for when it's ready for me. HDR and better hdpi handling are an icing on the cake. Feels like linux desktop is gonna be a lot better in the next 5 years to what it is now.

[@m4sterred853]

@drunkrhythmgamingSoonTM

[@shizuvoice]

@drunkrhythmgaming I use osu!lazer, kinda tired of farming pp and I'm enjoying lazer

[@vram1974]

It's not like I could do better, but it's kinda nutz that Wayland as a replacement for x11 hit 1.0 back in 2012 and we're in 2023 and it's still not fully replaced it. Even more surprising is there isn't 8 different alternatives to Wayland in competition with each other like snaps, flat packs, appimages, etc.

[@johnwayne-kd1pn]

There were a few actually, but they didn't quite make it.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Well, there was MIR but that's mostly because Ubuntu/Canonical suffers from a very strong NIH syndrome and can't stand the idea of contributing code/resources to something that they don't control or benefit the most. And by most accounts, MIR was a knee jerk reaction from them not understanding Wayland design goals. Once they realized it was a dead end and that they failed to attract attention from the X11 developers to get it going, they quickly tossed it aside.

[@vram1974]

@@johnwayne-kd1pn I meant alternatives in active competition with Wayland.

[@АлексейГриднев-и7р]

Well, no one wants to invest money in such an alternative given how much it would cost and how little Linux desktop actually matters. If there was any money in Linux desktop, I guarantee you there would already have been a server/protocol/whatever which would actually work and provide compatibility with both X11 or Wayland apps.

[@MikhailT]

System76's upcoming Pop release with Cosmic is going to be wayland-only with xwayland. It will be interesting to see what they can do to help with Nvidia situation as they use these GPUs in their hardware.

[@enzokaradok]

What impress me the most is that the videos you and other linux chanels do, the great content and information is not just on the minutes of recording, but also in the comment section, where are several different information and discussion that always tends to get a more complete vision on the topic. Very nice and thanks for the videos you do, can't believe this world where me in Brazil, watch videos in English from a guy at France with several people from different continents participate on comments and other things

[@SkyyySi]

As for my personal use, there are two reasons why I won't be using it any time soon: 1. I use AwesomeWM, which does not, and most likely never will, support Wayland. Having a simple, imperative window manager like it under Wayland is tough to say the least. 2. While I tried to switch to a DE (at least on my Laptop), the blurring issues with fractional scaling made immediately leave them. You tend to call this a little bit of blur, but to me, this is totally unusable. It feels like I try to read a far away road sign while having forgotton to put on my glasses. On Xorg, I've configured it to use 150% scaling and it's all super crisp.

[@AcidHotpocket]

Have to use X11 because I like to play video games and have an nvidia card. I initially tried Wayland when I set up my new system, but I was getting a lot of after images moving stuff around, while X11 just werks. I hope nvidia decides to make some more updates for Wayland compatibility sooner rather than later. Lesson learned: do all the research!

[@makzevu]

This is exactly my experience on Wayland, unfortunately. I'm fairly new to Linux; I've been running Kubuntu on my gaming rig for over 2 months after running Kubuntu on my laptop for 2 months prior. My laptop has basically no issues (other than the fact that Discover likes to crash after updates, but it tends to fix itself later). My desktop on the other hand has this exact same display issue, and it's jarring sometimes. However, the system fundamentally works, and I can still play games, so I'm still sticking with it.

[@comrade171]

well if you think wayland is bad with the nvidia drivers take a look at wayland with the nouveau drivers, totally fucked!

[@Watchandlearn91]

One of the biggest issues with Wayland (which is not the fault of Wayland itself) is the blurry text when using fractional scaling with XWayland apps. I use the Jetbrains suite of apps for my development needs (mainly IntelliJ, PyCharm, and CLion) and they still have not been updated to work with Wayland natively. This means that using fractional scaling in a wayland session leads to blurry text on those apps. I noticed the same thing in FF until I set the experimental property to enable wayland support. I ended up having to revert to X11 and simply can't use Wayland on a 2560x1440p laptop screen until they fix that.

[@_ianjms]

I recently switched to KDE and just found out that they have (mostly) fixed this problem already. In Plasma 5.27 Display Settings, you can allow xwayland applications (notably IntelliJ apps like Android Studio, PHP Storm, Web Storm etc.) to scale themselves without being forced by the system. I am using 125% scaling and the text look crisp and it has been a good experience for me so far!

[@sashimisub8536]

Same

[@gokhanyildirimlar]

I want to make a small correction about Deepin. Deepin is working towards v23 release and beta version of it has actually Wayland support. So we probably will see Wayland in Deepin v23 even though I am not sure if it will be the default one.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Oh nice, I missed that!

[@ozonegamedev]

As a new Linux user, I have never even touched the X11 session on my PC. From my experience I can say that Wayland is suitable for daily use and even gaming. I only had one major issue, because kwin crashed once, but it wasn't too serious.

[@nguyennguyenkhang5800]

Wayland can only suitable for average american. If you are japanese or chinese and need inputmethod. Throw away wayland after few hours play with wayland

[@alexhajnal107]

You should try running KDE under Xorg instead of Wayland. Such crashes are pretty-much unheard of under X11.

[@pyp2205]

Ever since the Fedora Project announced the removal of X11 in a future release of Fedora, I moved to Wayland. So far it's good, the only issue I had was my '/etc/profile' containing paths of programs was not being read. But I fixed it by having the file read when ~/.profile is read.

[@JoshuaStrobl]

Small correction to what you said: Per the quote on the Buddies of Budgie blog post, Magpie "v1" and later releases (which will be the wlroots-based Wayland compositor) will be used in both Budgie 10.x and Budgie 11, in the case of Budgie 10.x it is as soon as porting of Budgie 10 from X11-specific code to libraries like libxfce4windowing which supports both X11 and Wayland, and of course when Magpie v1 is actually released. At that point in time, Budgie 10 will be Wayland-only, and Budgie will continue being Wayland only going into the future and all parts of 11 are designed with Wayland-only in mind.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Thanks for the correction!

[@ToyKeeper]

No keylogging, and no network transparency, are two of the main reasons I don't use Wayland. It gives drop shadows and slightly higher frame rates, but it doesn't provide core features I rely on every day for basic computer use.

[@dnlov4]

As fractional scaling is still considered experimental in GNOME 45, there is a big trouble with Xwayland apps. All of scaled X applications are blury, and I'm still looking for solution. If the app doesn't support Wayland natively (like Chrome does), there is no way to solve that. Workaround I've found is not to scale the whole interface but just the text using GNOME Tweaks or Accessibility settings. For my 14-inch 1080p laptop it makes text bigger keeping all the other UI smaller, so there is more useful content on the screen. But if there are any ways to use fractional scaling in a proper way, I'll be glad to read your replies on that, guys!

[@novantha1]

I'd just like to note that I think this take is a bit *too* pro Wayland, at least in the introductory X11 vs Wayland part. Wayland has less code...Because they're offloading a bunch of functionality from the Display server to other projects. This is causing a huge schism where there's plenty of scientific software that requires certain functionality afforded by X11, that literally cannot be ported to Wayland in any practical sense. This could drive many researchers and professionals who used to use Linux to Windows. Wayland *fixes* screen tearing...By forcing Vsync, which eliminates the latency advantage you mentioned. This one is baffling to me, personally, as plenty of people with high refresh rate monitors accept screen tearing for the lowest possible latency. And yes, X11 has a lot of legacy code. But the thing about big projects with lots of legacy bits of code is that people think "oh, we're going to make a new standard and it'll be better", but they end up having to engineer a very similar looking end piece of code because those legacy bits of code *were there for a reason*. Those asterisks that make the code look unreadable aren't there because the developers were stupid, they're there because they fixed a problem that probably took hundreds of engineering hours to sort out, and will take hundreds of engineering hours to sort out in the new protocol. Also, I would absolutely not agree the Gnome has excellent Wayland support. Gnome was one of the first adopters of Wayland, but an issue with that is that plenty of features they adopted were then adopted differently by most other projects looking at Wayland (try playing a VR game in Gnome. I'll wait.), so they're in a weird spot of being mature but in all the wrong areas, and a great deal of their implementation is overdue a fundamental re-write. Beyond that, this is not something covered in the video, but in my experience X has had better hardware support in my individual case, as when I've had to install a distro with a Wayland session by default in my setup (I use a 4k monitor, but drive it at 1440p for cost of GPU reasons, and currently have to convert from mini displayport to HDMI), it's caused a massive issue where certain distros literally will not boot without adjusting certain parameters related to the initial splashcreen that displays before the login manager starts. I literally cannot log in on distros that use Wayland by default. I spent almost an entire day trying to get an Arch Linux installation working (I was guided by someone more experienced with the distro) but the script they gave me to run installed Wayland by default, but I gave up and just installed a distro that used X by default instead, and I only found out the issue was with Wayland after the fact. That's a horrible and frustrating experience that could seriously prevent someone with a similar setup from installing Linux for the first time in the future. But all of the above are just bellyaching. They're reasons that a person might be a bit put off by Wayland, but not necessarily a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. My primary issue with Wayland: The developers are way too opinionated about "what a display server should be" and are focused on implementing their vision, and dragging the entire ecosystem with them kicking or screaming. This is absolutely not an attitude I can condone, because it's causing massive issues with adoption of Linux apps on Wayland and might drive certain important sectors from Linux to Windows. Linux is already on shaky footing and I don't really think we have the political clout in the software world to be breaking backwards compatibility in such a dramatic way. It's possible that in ten years Linux would have a strong enough adoption and community that moving to a more modern protocol would be viable, but I think we're right on the edge of being a viable option, and I don't want to throw that out because a few developers jumped the gun way too early and in too opinionated a manner.

[@johnwayne-kd1pn]

Well, the good thing is that Wayland is built with Xorg compatibility, not only can you run Xorg stuff inside Wayland, but also separate from Wayland (at the same time).

[@alexhajnal107]

@@johnwayne-kd1pn XWayland is far from being complete.

[@stefmyt5062]

Migrated from DWM to Hyprland a few weeks ago, and it's honestly working much, MUCH better than I thought. I even get more FPS when gaming, which was definitely a surprise.

[@archgirl]

Hyprland has changed everything for me. I’d never used a TWM before, but my experience with Hyprland has completely killed the traditional desktop paradigm for me.

[@NerdistRay]

Hey, I've been using DWM for a couple of years now and also thinking of switching to Wayland and Hyprland makes the most appealing choice.

[@cephi_sui]

​@@NerdistRayHyprland is by far my favorite choice. It looks super clean out of the box and it's really easy to configure!

[@powderypastor1242]

I've been running Sway in VMs for a year or so until I got the new AMD Framework 13. Haven't tested everything that's known to cause issues but so far it's very stable and does everything I need it to. I might try Hyprland later but I don't need the extra features and I love Sway's minimalism!

[@totoshampoin]

You have been claiming that Wayland is ready for months (or years, idk)... So I am glad you FINALLY put the spotlight on the parts where it's not (especially Nvidia, which is still very widespread, especially in the laptop market (even with Tuxedo))

[@lnklnx]

I cut over to Wayland for my everything -- gaming included -- and have been pleasantly surprised at how little disruption there has been. Like others a lot of this may go back to the fact that I choose AMD graphics whenever I can, but I also think it demonstrates how much work has been done by the Wayland developers.

[@tux_the_astronaut]

Ye every since i got a new computer with AMD gaming on wayland has been pretty seamless only thing i spend extra time configuring is forcing apps or games to use wayland instead of preferring X like for example making unity unreal and source games use wayland with the SDL environment variable to force wayland

[@peterschmidt9942]

I ended up having to go back to X11 for a couple of reasons. Mouse movements on Wayland were sketchy and I was also having screen tearing. The big selling point of Wayland was that it could scale up or down (down being my preference). However when you do this, fonts weren't rendered correctly and looked blurry. This might be a KDE thing, but in the end it's not working too well. I look forward to seeing what happens with Plasma 6

[@johnwayne-kd1pn]

Probably it is a KDE issue.. From what I gather Wayland doesn't really do much aside from the basics, which is display server and protocol for things like KDE. I had some mouse behaviour issues with KDE on Wayland too, which made it unsuitable for daily use for me.. I think it had something to do with touchpad and tapping not working, so I had to click the button instead, and after decades of not using Windows, I just can't handle crappy design and inconvenient desktop use like that. I get sore just thinking about double clicking in Windows.

[@peterschmidt9942]

@@johnwayne-kd1pn Thats the way I felt about Linux for 20 yrs LOL. I finally switched over a couple of years ago when I found KDE distros and thought this is great, Linux has come so far over the last few years. Then they introduce Wayland and it feels like many steps back. Although, I find it interesting that its supposed to be the future of Linux, yet they started it back in 2008 (15yrs ago) and its still not up to scratch. While I'd love to swap over 100% to Linux, its just not possible for some things and I'm resigned to the fact it probably never will.

[@johnwayne-kd1pn]

@@peterschmidt9942 For quite awhile decades ago, I was dualbooting GNU/Linux and Windows. But you don't have to abandon Windows fully to really move to GNU/Linux. I moved fully to GNU/Linux and started using Windows only as a virtual machine with Virtualbox, and eventually I've stopped using Windows alltogether. You don't need Virtualbox, you can use the native KVM/QEMU for virtual machines. Virtual machine is very convenient if you still need Windows for some things, as you don't need any reboots, and you have quick access to Windows on your GNU/Linux desktop.

[@tux_the_astronaut]

Might be a driver issue or kde depending on what version. im on nobora/fedora and kde works great on wayland for me

[@Goodwarrior12345]

I was trying Wayland with KDE not too long ago, can confirm the part about mouse movements being sketchy. I don't think it's a KDE thing to have issues with Wayland, because before trying KDE I was using Gnome with Wayland and that worked far worse for me - lots of outdated frames being rendered in applications when scrolling or navigating through them. It's just not ready yet, at least on Nvidia

[@BiserAngelov1]

So the X11 Killer Feature, that Wayland can do exclusively, is still just rotating windows? It's a such an important feature. Rotating windows versus remote desktop! What a joke!

[@jacekpoz2203]

I agree that hyprland is the fastest moving wayland tiling compositor, at this pace it will overtake gnome in approximately 3-4 months

[@ukaszpalczewski7588]

Thx for the update on Wayland. I am using it on nvidia and I see some issues with soma app like for example Discord going black when it is not focused and on the non main screen... But generally I like it.

[@wenderajade]

Recently had to switch to Wayland for real because of my current game obsession that for some reason only runs well in Wayland. My one big issue so far is that Krita doesn't work at all and just crashes immediately 😭 Other than that, I will occasionally get some weird refresh rate issues with KZbin , but nothing major. Not like just earlier this year when Wayland would randomly crash the whole computer every session.

[@cameronbosch1213]

For me, KDE Plasma 5.27.0 would constsistantly be unusable upon log in, but as of Plasma 5.27.6, it now mostly works. (And yes, I'm using an Nvidia GPU because of CUDA.)

[@Wampa842]

Speaking for myself, I've had a significantly improved gaming experience on Wayland (Hyprland) compared to X (KDE and Qtile). My main issue on X was the massive input latency introduced by the compositor (Kwin and picom respectively), so any time I wanted to play a game without a 50-100 ms delay on the mouse, I just had to deal with screen tearing.

[@baumkuchen6543]

Same here. Cyberpunk2077 works for me a lot better under wayland. X11 gave me a horrible screen tearing.

[@Durayne]

Well I just turned of the compositor, because i dont care for fancy desktop effects.

[@tux_the_astronaut]

Same here even with vsync on games running natively on wayland i have much less input lag than on x with vsync off

[@FelixianFox]

The problem I have when running Wayland is on KDE with an NVIDIA gpu. Upon logging in, everything technically works for abaout 15 minutes, then the taskbar freezes, and once it's frozen, it can't be unfrozen without restarting. Then, if it goes to sleep, I wake it up only to find that the login screen is glitched. Then the whole desktop freezes with no ability to unfreeze without shutting off and turning back on. So, I'm convinced Wayland is still not ready.

[@alexhajnal107]

Wow, Wayland runs *way* better on your system than it does on mine. On the current Wayland release I only ever got a black or corrupted screen.

[@ubercorey]

You rock! I learned a lot about linux in general, but everything about the past, present and our future was really clear. Thank you!

[@Martin4982]

My laptop is about 10 years old and relatively low spec. But I never had issues with Linux, until recently I tried Ubuntu 23.04... Fresh install and at first login I started experience issues, software would take longer to launch, apps will not render correctly and or become distorted when moved. At first I thought something else was at fault, but after reboots, drivers up to date, it still was doing the same. Then I remembered it starts by default in a Wayland session. So I restarted in Xorg session and all issues were gone... Maybe my computer is to old for Wayland? But seems I'll have to Xorg as long as I can. BTW, my laptop does not have a NVIDIA GPU of any sorts, it's a basic laptop...

[@John223]

I run wayland on all of my machines except for a media server connected to a projector. For some reason a 1080Ti with 16Gb of ram is not enough to project a movie and it stutters on wayland, but X11 works because it allows the screen to tear and keeps the video smooth.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Probably an Xwayland + nvidia drivers issue :/

[@turtleidiot3324]

That's due to the fact that wayland does not allow for screen tearing at all as of now but i think it's being worked on. brodie robertson made a video about it iirc

[@John223]

There is a proposal to add screen tearing to wayland, but until that's added I'm keeping at least one machine on X11

[@cameronbosch1213]

Linus Torvalds: Nvidia, 🖕 you!

[@riskin620]

Pretty sure the 1080Ti topped out at 11gb (I have one) and I agree that tearing is unacceptable.

[@CookiLover311]

While I don't use any such tools myself, I have heard a few times that accessibility tools like screen readers are basically unusable on Wayland, which makes Wayland completely unusable for some people with disabilities

[@d.wolfin152]

I run hyprland on my laptop, and you used to be able to set your screen to 125% size in the config file and it would scale perfectly (while using the scaling variable for the exact same thing would make text blurry). A shame they “fixed” it with an update and now the display just becomes bigger than the screen. It wasn’t a bug, it was a feature 😭

[@RiDOU-p2g]

small correction, the lack of screensharing support for wayland isn't related to the app supporting wayland natively or not supporting wayland screensharing is another thing, for example there are xwayland only apps that support wayland screensharing (signal desktop for example), and wayland native apps that do not support wayland screensharing

[@FrankJonen]

I hope the x11 network view comes to Wayland. Working directly on the renderfarm with the full GUI would be amazing.

[@AstralPhnx]

Currently running Fedora 38 on my Laptop and Desktop, both on Wayland, both full AMD. Brilliant experience. I've needed to tweak a few things here and there but overall my experience with Wayland has been extremely comfortable and performance with it and XWayland is really great. Games run fine, scaling between my two monitors works great and it all just works quite well. Of course it still has some jank here and there but it's making fast progress!

[@kilgoretrout6810]

Any decade now..

[@shanent5793]

It was incredibly short sighted to omit network transparency and remote rendering. It's hardly "niche" these days and the abstraction would have spared them the trouble they are having with HDR and scaling. The reason given for not wanting to define a rendering API doesn't make sense, those APIs already existed from the start. Anything, even PDFs would be better than Wayland's dumb bitmaps

[@johnwayne-kd1pn]

Actually, you're probably right. Today that might even be more important than ever, considering the increasing popularity of virtual machines and namespaces (containers).. There are so many potential use cases for remote rendering.. Even game companies are talking about it, things like offloading game rendering partly to servers and whatnot, all kind of things like that.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@johnwayne-kd1pn As far as I can tell the only real plan Wayland had was to provide a workaround for DRI's shortcomings.¹ Since then they appear to have been winging it. ¹ Ironically, DRI2 fixed these issues... 6 months before Wayland was released.

[@cjcox]

Is Wayland ready? No. Back in 2019 when I gave an assessment of Wayland and compositors at the time, I was community crucified for saying it was at least 2 years off. And here we are, more than 2 years later, likely still looking at least at another 2 years. Anyway, it's good to see the progress. I'm just not going to "sugar coat" it. In all fairness, I should have been crucified for saying "at least 2 years off" because I was so so so very wrong. I should have said 5 to 6 years off (and even that in 2019 would likely still not have been enough). No shortage of work to do. Remember, Wayland + compositors isn't Xorg/X11, not even close. The fact that Xwayland works mostly is pretty amazing. We're not talking about two different kind of cars, gas combustion engine vs. battery electric. More like two modes of transportation, one being "house cat" and the other being "aircraft carrier". That is, while there is a way of looking at the two for similarity, they are pretty radically different. And this is the biggest reason why it's taking this long. So, no harm, no foul to the (evil) crucifiers from 2019, but there is a realistic view that needs to be kept in mind. And yes, there will absolutely positively be loss and some of that loss will be permanent (never fixed/done in Wayland + Compositors). At the same time, there are certain things that will make more sense using Wayland + compositors, but since that's not the "here and now", it's not something we get "mad about", because it's something yet unseen. Anyway, nothing that hasn't been stated, just they way it is when making a radical change, which is what this move is. So, try it out, realize there's still more work to do. Realize that not everything "of old" will still work moving forward.

[@movax20h]

I will try Wayland next decade. It is getting there, but progress is super slow. Since like 2008, I do try to use Wayland every few years, and it essentially was always a disaster. It is now finally usable, but I still cannot switch on most of the systems (some older Laptops I have, with Intel graphics; and some remote VMs, etc), because it just does not work, or not support what I need. Also my favorite desktop manager does not support Wayland. They are working on it, but the most favorite feature of that desktop manager is being reworked and essentially removed, because it cannot be easily supported on Wayland. So no. I will continue using X11 for very long time.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Same.

[@alexhajnal107]

A few years ago Wayland at least used to run (and then promptly crash) on my machines. Currently it won't even start on any of them.

[@mausmalone]

I really wish I could get Visual Studio Code to work with with fractional scaling in Wayland. Every time I try the assorted command line options to try and force ozone to use wayland, VS Code just crashes on startup instead.

[@sashimisub8536]

Seems the problem is from the electron

[@SeralyneYT]

10:40 - Aand this is where I'm a bit stuck up, I guess. I refuse to make my hardware fit my software - I'd rather do it the other way around.

[@WilburJaywright]

You kind of talk like we choose Wayland first and then pick GPUs. I’m not going to buy a whole new GPU and change my compute workflow just to get Wayland support.

[@alexhajnal107]

Don't forget also loosing a crash-free environment, CUDA support, and a whole slew of features.

[@yasminesteinbauer8565]

Hopefully, with the switch to Wayland, we'll get better RDP support at some point.😊

[@alexhajnal107]

I'd doubt it. They've dabbled with (and then abandoned) screen-scraping network support something like four times now. They seem to have no interest in actually implementing remote application support. In fact, per the Wayland developers, the currently-recommended method for running remote Wayland applications is to tunnel them over X11!

[@michadybczak4862]

Today, at work, I had to plug in another screen, and it was horrible - it was blurry and the picture was jumping visibly, while some lines were distorted. I switched to Wayland - all issues went away. The screen had crisp image. It shows that multimonitor support is superior on Wayland.

[@vadymmudryi7978]

I’m still struggling with virtualbox under wayland on hidpi display. Almost all electron apps (discord, telegram, Skype, chrome) require changes to startup options. IDK 🤷‍♂️ how to fix it.

[@connivingkhajiit]

Only two reasons i still care about X: nvidia, and the ability to forward x11 over ssh so i can copy and paste across two machines with ranger and xclip.

[@alexhajnal107]

I'd add stability and having a sane, non-brittle architecture to that list.

[@warrenvanwyck2765]

"In summary, the inability for applications to control their own window positioning on Wayland is an intentional design choice, ...." Wayland -- broken by design. X11 for me.

[@cheebadigga4092]

Finally! Cinnamon with Wayland is the only thing I'm missing on Linux. Switched to Gnome in the meantime, but just temporarily.

[@charliesumorok6765]

3:30 Keylogger protection can be implemented by extending grabs to have an option to also report to parent windows.

[@Emc-it4lg]

Wayland is unusable for me, it just doesn't work. I have been using Linux as my desktop system since 2013. I have tried again and again to switch to Wayland, but it just doesn't work. It's slow, some applications don't open at all, it crashes. With Nvidia it does not work for me at all! I recently switched from OpenSuse to Debian and there Wayland crashes completely. If Gnome and Plasma 6 completely abandon X11, I will look for an alternative desktop environment. You can't do away with something as long as the new thing doesn't really work! I would be happy if Wayland would work, but it does not work for me! For 10 years I try to switch! Just the name Wayland triggers me, because I have only made bad experiences with it!

[@alexhajnal107]

This. The current version of Wayland won't even start on any of my systems. This is in contrast to a few years ago when at least Wayland would run (albiet very poorly). With the recent push by Redhat to ditch X I've been looking in to Wayland's architecture and from what I've seen it's really bad. It's really not clear exactly what Wayland is trying to achieve or what problems they're trying to solve. It really feels like it was thrown together without any real plan beyond fixing DRI's shortcomings (ironically, DRI2 fixed DRI's issues and was released before Wayland was). Beyond that it seems to have been cobbled together on the fly.

[@emanuelemorozzi8123]

Thank you for what you do. I have been using linux as desktop os for almost 20 years. Currently I have been running PopOS for the last 3 years more or less. After the video I have tried to enable Wayland and logged in using the proper session type, but unfortunately it does not work very well, I have tried gaming and the experience is awful and also the fractional scaling with the configuration I normally use is not working. The positive thing is that all this can only improve 😅

[@Romaoplays]

Still waiting for it to support my hybrid graphics Gtx 1060 laptop. As soon as that happens I’ll be all in on wayland

[@lorduggae]

running Wayland on Gnome with an AMD gpu...... pretty much smooth sailing. I can feel a difference in responsiveness of my desktop if I switch to a x11 session

[@paimonbutter]

The BIGGEST issue is that if you try to change the volume of an app it will change the volume of the audio stream an app created, not the actual app volume, so when you click another video in a browser or skip 30 seconds for example, it will reset the app volume to 100%, which makes per app volume controls completely unusable

[@alanraftel5033]

Whenever I choose Wayland, I get a black screen on my hybrid GPU laptop (5800h/3070 mobile)

[@alexhajnal107]

Same for me on an Nvidia 3050 desktop and an Intel laptop.

[@zparihar]

It's unfortunate about the network transparency. I like doing x forwarding for some of my apps in certain use cases, and I like x2go the application. Giving me full access to my desktop from anywhere at any time.

[@armanillo4695]

can we hope for remote desktop support in wayland in the future? or is it just at odds with wayland's core?

[@MyReviews_karkan]

I've been using Wayland on kde on and off for a while now. It has been great so far. Literally the single issue that is preventing me from using it full time is that virtualbox doesn't work with it out of the box. I have to run it from terminal with a command. 😂 I'm just too lazy.

[@lodriguez]

I don't remember ever having a problem with wayland/plasma/vbox.

[@jan-lukas]

On my Kubuntu machine with Wayland and yes vbox I have no problems at all. Been using Wayland now since it became an option directly on the login screen

[@MyReviews_karkan]

​@@lodriguezon my end, I can open it and run the VM but then I can't click on anything anymore. The whole thing just freezes and nothing can be clicked. I'd have to end it from system monitor. It's so weird. Are you doing anything special to make it work, or just out of the box?

[@MyReviews_karkan]

​@@jan-lukasIs it an arch thing then? I run endeavourOS

[@esra_erimez]

It seems to me that Wayland is a good example of the Dunning Kruger effect. They didn't know what they were getting themselves into and never really got their act together. Maybe its time to start a new replacement.

[@dragofx_5472]

Most of the Wayland people came from the X11 development team, I think the one who doesn't know what they're talking about is you...

[@esra_erimez]

@@dragofx_5472 I have to admit that I do not know what I'm talking about. If the development team did come from X11, then why are they still playing catch up on basic features? But as someone that's been a Linux user for over 10 years, it *appears* to me that Wayland is never quite ready.

[@jasonwilson9446]

I left LTS for Ubuntu Studio 23.10 for the Wayland support and I absolutely love it. I was actually going to hop to a new distro but took a chance on 23.10 and now I'm not going anywhere for a while.

[@SaHaRaSquad]

What I would like to know is how resource usage looks. For example if I want to run a lightweight Linux system on old hardware with 512MB RAM, how does e.g. Wayland and Sway compare to X11 and DWM? In other situations I don't really care as long as global keyboard shortcuts work, I've already used Fedora with Wayland and it's fine.

[@alexhajnal107]

If you're running any X applications then probably Wayland would be worse in that configuration since it would involve running two display servers (Wayland and Xorg) instead of one (Xorg). Another advantage for Xorg is that it can be run without a compositor; this would dramatically reduce the memory footprint.

[@walter_lesaulnier]

The key to a great Wayland experience is using a distro that comes with it natively - the developers have already fixed most issues and made sure it works (with the occasional exception).

[@actualhyena]

The fact Wayland started in 2008 and has taken multiple US Presidential terms just to become Almost Ready™ for use on a desktop computer as a daily driver really goes to show that X11 really isn't all that old, comparatively. The problem is down to keeping everything on X11 usable while working on Wayland, which for some has probably gotten in the way of actually getting Wayland working at all, but also! Sitting back and not upgrading your code - only sticking to XWayland support - should be considered bad practice!!

[@gwgux]

I was a holdout for the longest time. Then a kernel update started causing some weird lockup issue where if I moved the mouse over a video playing in my browser, the whole desktop would lock up. I troubleshot, and even distro hopped, and then decided to give Wayland a shot and the issue was gone. This was about a month ago and I haven't looked back to X11 since. I've been running Linux for over 20 years and remember having to write config files just to get X running and if I can jump on the Wayland bandwagon, I think everyone else will eventually too. It's not perfect (far from it), and I do notice the performance hit in gaming, but for me, it's time to move forward. It's probably still about 5 years out before it's really "ready" for prime time IMO, but what we have now is working really well. Graphics are complicated, and that's why it's taking so long, but I think Wayland is probably in a state that's "good enough" for a lot more people than it used to be.

[@trevorford8332]

I didn't notice i was running Wayland, until it was downloading the other day. Shows how much I pay attention. 😊

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Nice!

[@Alexander-ix2jp]

In what state are the new Nvidia open module gpu drivers rn; are these out of alpha state yet, do they support more cards and how do these perform with Wayland and gaming via proton?

[@gloriouschoices]

Wayland needs multitouch support. Can't use any three-finger, four or five, gestures in my workflow.

[@alexhajnal107]

The issue may be due to the compositor you're using. Unlike with X there are many different servers with vastly different (and disjoint) sets of capabilities. Yet another example of a superficially good idea failing spectacularly once the details and ramifications come to light.

[@galangtirtayudha3973]

I remember having borked system because of Kwin-wayland crashing during update. And it was like 4-5 months ago, very recent. Now, I rarely, if ever, having any crash at all. True testimonial of how fast the development.

[@alexhajnal107]

Wayland should stick to in-car entertainment systems. Its design is not really suitable for general-purpose use.

[@enzokaradok]

My metric for switching to Wayland it's when it gets shipped in xfce, I think that they will only put that as an option when bugs aren't everywhere and nvidia cards don't cause so much trouble. (sry for bad English)

[@Francehelder]

I use MATE and it has not Wayland session yet.

[@ari-el3702]

Nice video,Following his speech and and knowing how Linux's characteristics are, why does Wayland only work in a large limited amount of distributions, desktop environments and window administrators?

[@k024x]

For the gaming topic: Wayland doesn't give me just a "small performance impact" - nearly every game tends to stutter or lag using wayland instead of x11. Even older ones and sometimes even simple 2D games. On my PC which has a mid range graphics card from nvidia it was no smooth experience, but it's even worse on my laptop with onboard AMD graphics: some games that work great with x11 tend to lag and crash with wayland. Gnome with wayland got unbootable multiple times on fedora and ubuntu in my case and my nvidia pc can't even start a wayland session anymore since the upgrade from Kubuntu 23.10 to 24.04. I like to use and test new or at least newer stuff that seems to have benefits, but in case of wayland I think it still needs a year or two before it really works without randomly breaking.

[@buckysrevenge]

I've been using Wayland on my hybrid GPU laptop with Nvidia proprietary drivers for a while and it works well enough, but I can't use it on my game system yet (also Nvidia GPU) because of a couple issues like Steam's new BPM doesn't start in full screen even if it is set to it and the mouse cursor becomes invisible while using a game controller with Steam Input when using Wayland(unless there's been a change in the last few months).

[@CookiLover311]

10:08 I feel like it can be important to note how crucial some settings in the Nvidia control panel can be I, for instance, have an older display that needs a limited color space, but that simply isn't an option on Wayland. So if I don't want all colors on my display to look completely off I can't use Wayland

[@linuxgameplayxp6246]

I'll stick to X11 for now for a few more years and let the Wayland users beta test it some more.

[@alexhajnal107]

Wayland's not even in beta state yet. I reckon it probably won't be for at least 5 years.

[@uzefulvideos3440]

Display scaling on Wayland is terrible, just makes everything blurry, while on X11 it works perfectly fine...

[@RussTeeTrombone]

What desktop environment is being used in the demo here: 3:59 ?

[@derzw3rg]

Synergy (a kvm software) sadly does not work with Wayland - which makes now sense as it basically captures the mouse/keyboard and share it via the network

[@anafabula]

All windows being gone when the compositor crashes is not a KDE thing. That's true for all wayland compositors and even X11. If the X-server crashes, all windows die. I've been using KDE wayland for months and kwin has never crashed for me. (Plasmashell has crashed, but it just restarts and all windows are unaffected.) On the other hand, I've had significant performance problems with Cyberpunk & Control under XWayland, which play fine under X11 (+~50% fps)

[@szymonagiewka4513]

This. What we get in the video is misrepresentation of the state of things. KDE folks (mainly David Edmundson) taking care of this in KWin AND in toolkits will benefit ALL desktops. As all desktops share the issue.

[@alexhajnal107]

Yes, but when's the last time your X server crashed? Last time I saw it happen was years ago. With Wayland it's apparently a commonplace occurrence. (The -KDE- edit: Qt folks have even put in extra code to try to recover from Wayland crashes, something that was never needed under X.)

[@alexhajnal107]

@@szymonagiewka4513 Because of how Wayland is designed each desktop has its own code base. Fixes in one desktop's compositor *are not* carried over to other compositors; any fixes need to be manually applied by each compositor's developers. With Xorg though, when a bug is fixed in the X server all desktops automatically benefit (no per-desktop coding required).

[@lsatenstein]

I do not have nvidea drivers installed. My issue is with Fedora 38,39,40 who installed nouveau updates at end September 2023. Those updates have a bad pointer to the background image location, and when gnome tries to write the image, it overrwrites the keyboard and mouse software access. Result is a power on reboot to successful xorg. BTW, Ubuntu 2310 works just fine.

[@MrAlexFortis]

Plasma and wayland have two issues for me: - kwin crashes when you disconnect external monitor when internal screen is in powersave mode (turned off) - a few desktop icons that I have don't save their positions, at least widgets do stay pretty intact Minor nitpick: - 3rd party themes like Klassy and Inspire or even Aurorae-themes can have a few issues. (If you have panel on top)

[@wujcio1491]

As a nvidia hybrid graphics user with plasma 5. It's far from ready. Some wayland apps are crashing (today it was gitg), some xwayland apps like unity editor are laggy or tend to freeze. And as mentioned in video, if wayland in plasma crashes, everything is gone. From the other hand, wayland video playback don't stutter when you move cursor over it and touchpad gestures are just amazing. Can't wait for plasma 6 to polish things out

[@alexhajnal107]

If you aren't doing so already you should try the proprietary drivers (under X) instead of nouveau. Using them literally gives a 50× speed improvement which could solve the stuttering issues.

[@robertheinrich2994]

I have a laptop with a GTX 1070, and I plan to switch to linux within the next few days. the final contenders are mint and kubuntu (reason, actually, I want KDE). but the idea that the graphics card is unhappy with that setup is somewhat obvious. I know, that the step to wayland is unavoidable, I'm just not sure what the problems would be with wayland and nvidia.

[@mysterybiscuits]

The one thing missing for me is mapping external touch screens. On X11 I can use xinput map-to-output, but on Wayland that doesn't work - I know I can map the touch screen on Sway and KDE, but I prefer Cinnamon so I'll be giving Wayland a go in Mint 21.3. Plus I have a GTX 1650, but I bought that before I committed to daily driving Linux.

[@vorlock7149]

I have switched from Fedora 38 (X11) to Fedora 39 (Wayland). I have noticed that the setting for picture in picture windows, to always stay in the foreground, no longer persists. I have to enable it every time I activate picture in picture mode.

[@deepin2u]

@ThelinuxExperiment what Linus Distro are you using in this particular video please? Thx

[@user-dz3ph7dl4m]

Wayland will be able to go beyond x11's limitations!! Do everything easier and can do things x11 wasn't built for .. oh yeah except remote desktop. who uses remote desktop?? ahhh yes use it everyday... thanks for the video didn't know this was for certain til now :(

[@reybontje2375]

My biggest gripe with Wayland right now is that Wayland and the libraries for Wayland aren't stable. If you like customizing your desktop (I use Arch BTW) and you want to use Wayland, then you'll realize that there are a lot of compositors that use a bunch of different versions of Wayland with no interoperability... Because you'll have trouble finding a library with a Major version. Wlroots, for example, is on version 0.16, while there are a bunch of compositors that still use version 0.15... because it's a lot of work to keep up to date with how often Wayland and their libraries change. I've also been following the progress on HDR and it's one of those things that is eternally a year away... the Silksong of the Linux world.

[@Thru1n]

AMD GPU here, wayland feels much nicer, smoother and less clunky. I'd say some quirks are still present but in general it's the far superior choice, in my opinion ^^

[@braaitongs]

I am new to Linux. I just recently installed NixOs on a spare laptop. Does it make sense to have hyprland and Wayland on at the same time or do they do similar things? and what about KDe plasma as a desktopManager? Where can I read more about how compositors, window managaers and desktopmanager all work togehter?

[@ChrispyNut]

I switched to Wayland full-time somewhere around a year or so ago, with the occasional minor issue being a worthwhile price to get rid of the screen tearing when scrolling web pages and watching YT, but it's not like there were occasional issues with X11, so I don't know whether I've had a smoother or bumpier ride ... aside from the smoother experience.

[@cameronbosch1213]

3:25 And that's how XEyes works! 👀

[@livemadseason]

For nVidia wayland and x11 are both not good in my use case - 4k 120hz tv - scaling and 120hz are not working at all. For now I have to settle on 1080 and 120hz for good scaling and refresh rate.