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
My short answer:
Should I switch to Wayland?
Yes.
Applications that don’t cope with wayland still work via Xwayland. Go ahead.
You should, I think. You don’t have Nvidia GPU, so you can avoid almost bugs and better performance.
Advantages:
- Better performance. e.g. for Firefox, @lilydjwg got double performance in wayland.
- Better multi-screen with multi-DPI support.
- Better maintaince. Many DE has put more and more to wayland. And many new features will only be implemented in wayland. (That’s because implementing many new features will be difficult or even impossible in X11 old software architecture, as KWin developers said.)
Disadvantages:
- Some missing feature, such as remote desktop.
- Many bugs when you use Nvidia GPU.
- None of the compositors except KWin and Hyprland can use input methods with electron.
I don’t know which DE/WM you use. If you use Plasma/GNOME, migration is simple, just switch in SDDM/GDM. If you use i3, you can try sway, it’s compatible with i3 config. If you use others, you can try hyprland or wayfire. Wayfire has fantastic animations.
I switch to wayland because I buy a new screen with different DPI… But when I switched, I found I got better performance and video hardware acceleration in Firefox (this feature was introduced to Firefox Wayland first).
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Plasma is slick as butter on 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
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in wayland discord have video capture?
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You should, and you will :) X11 is legacy, and is going to die. The only question is whether you're going to try and hold on to a broken system riddled with security vulnerabilities for as long as possible until you're forced to switch, or whether you're just going to enable what is mostly already the default stack on most desktop Linux systems anyway.
I would switch if it worked at all I just get a black screen if I try a Wayland session lmao. If switching is such a hassle then I'll just stick with what works.
That's not to even mention all the things I use that aren't supported
If it ain’t broken don’t fix it.
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.
The biggest Sin by far of Wayland is making users think about the graphics stack. Does this feature or this app support Wayland or X? Does this Compositor support this GPU? Does this particular environment support this mixture of displays with this DPI? Do I need to set a particular env variable or change a setting to force this app to start in Wayland mode because under X11 its scaled funky. What works in each environment? What doesn’t work between environments?
Well before you reach the end of this flow chart you have lost virtually all of your users. This transition has single-handedly set the Linux desktop back by 20 years in terms of supporting more users whose level of interest in configuration is limited to clicking a control next to their monitor and making things bigger or smaller.
A saner design would have handled scaling correctly from the start and would have had a permissive mode which just made everything from the users perspective work while progressively adding a correct UI to provide features like global hotkeys, screen sharing, only to those apps users had authorized like android. If it wasn’t a such a clusterfuck to use it would have had orders of magnitude more users much earlier in the development phase and perhaps attracted more development interest as well.
Nobody’s requiring you to use Wayland currently, I mean realistically name a Wayland-only app (excluding the ones like remote desktop apps that are replacing X11 apps that don’t work at all on Wayland), they don’t exist. But with new technologies will always be growing pains, the X11 -> Wayland transition will still be another few years I imagine, I mean at this point we’re really only waiting on NVIDIA 🫠. It’s a painful process, but one that is only so painful because it’s been put off for so long, if we put it off for any longer it would’ve just been even worse.
It’s painful because the developers took 14 years to produce something semi usable while ignoring incredibly common use cases and features for approximately the first 10 -12 years of development
Nobody's requiring it until devs start not supporting X11 anymore and start saying things like "won't fix, use Wayland". Which is already happening
See: GNOME's response to a critical GTK4 bug on x11 that makes any program using GTK4 unusable on certain devices under x11
I think that's a little bit premature for GNOME to do, though I have to ask, what "certain devices" are we talking about?
certain hardware configurations. I have two computers on linux. One of them has issues with GTK4, the other one doesn't. The only difference between these machines is hardware.
And yeah, I agree that's premature for them to do
certain hardware configurations. I have two computers on linux. One of them has issues with GTK4, the other one doesn’t. The only difference between these machines is hardware.
Right, what are the "certain hardware" configurations? Are they really old? Are they really niche?
if I knew what exactly was causing it hardware wise I would have a way to fix it, and I don't
given GNOME's solution is "use Wayland" (which I can't for a variety of reasons) I don't think I can ever figure out what the problem is. Their attitude from the start is already non helpful.
all I know is my hardware isn't niche nor really really old. And Im not the only one experiencing this