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

  • Coelacanthus@lemmy.kde.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    You should, I think. You don’t have Nvidia GPU, so you can avoid almost bugs and better performance.

    Advantages:

    1. Better performance. e.g. for Firefox, @lilydjwg got double performance in wayland.
    2. Better multi-screen with multi-DPI support.
    3. 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:

    1. Some missing feature, such as remote desktop.
    2. Many bugs when you use Nvidia GPU.
    3. 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).