this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I feel like talk about Wayland being the next big thing, “coming soon” began back when I was using Linux as my daily driver over ten years ago.
It’s still not widely used?
It’s the default in most big distros, so it is widely used.
the usual exception is nvidia, a lot of distros fall back to X on nvidia
Not sure if that'll stay much longer, either. I'm using using dual graphics with nVidia and Wayland on KDE works just fine. The only annoyance is that KDE doesn't have very good touchpad gestures by default, but you also can't modify them. Boo!
It's extremely widely used. It's been the Gnome default (unless you used Nvidia) since 2016 or something.
Even in Debian on Gnome it's been the default since 2019.
On KDE a bunch of distros use it too.
Wayland is the future. But for most it's already the present too.
Nvidia has been decent on Wayland from my experience. Then again my experience has just been 5 days, but it feels snappier than X11 I kinda like the feel.
Nvidia on Wayland is usable but not much more than that. There are issues with Xwayland windows flickering and some general instabilities and glitches. But it works for the most part, and the 545 drivers supposedly fix lots of missing features and bugs for Wayland.
Yeah xwayland does has a lot of issues, with fullscreen wine games for example all you see is constantly zooming background instead of the game. But the finger gestures and the overall smoothness makes it worth it for me, even tho I play my games in a window. Hopefully 545 fixes that.
It's a very slow moving project by design for better or for worse. There also hasn't been a ton of developer interest in the DE space in supporting it until the last few years since it would necessarily take resources away from other work, and generally X has been "good enough" until recently. I don't have anything to back this up but I suspect that the increased accessibility of gaming on Linux as well as HRR and HDR displays entering the mainstream had a lot to do with this renewed interest.
I've been using Wayland for about 8 years at this point. Some people (especially in the Linux world) are just really against change.
The discord thing can also be seen as a good thing (it's a feature). Wayland is more secure and prevents apps like discord from spying on literally every keystroke you press. Especially if the app is discord, I don't want it to be able to look at what I'm typing in real time
The video card thing, if talking about NVidia, really is wayland's fault. The devs refuse to use the card and driver the way X did. I suspect it's because they don't like NVidia's licensing of the driver, and they're trying to make life a pain for NVidia users to for the business to make concessions.
This is the original developer/maintainer of Sway and Wlroots' opinion on NVIDIA with regard to Wayland. This doesn't seem like an unfair opinion to me. Gamescope breaks regularly due to bugs in NVIDIA's proprietary driver; even if they know what the issue is, they can't send patches to fix it because it's proprietary. The best they can do is open a bug and beg them to fix it, which is what they do. If there's an issue on Intel or AMD, they can just send patches upstream to Mesa, and I would guess they do.
Thankfully, with the heavy active development of NVK, this might change in a few years.
Mind you, I've actually had a better experience on KDE Wayland than Xorg. Categorically...with the exception of Steam. While the games themselves play fine, the client is very glitchy. But it's a small price to pay for all the other nonsense I've had to deal with on GNOME/KDE X11.
Maintainability is why wayland exists. The devs not putting up to nvidia’s special child complex in favor of a unified codebase really isn’t a surprise.
It's still got issues even now, but back then they were big enough that you had to really want to use it, casual users would have become quickly frustrated.
Also Steam.
"Coming soon" for me started when major DEs started abandoning xorg, not when they adopted wayland.
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Steamdeck's KDE desktop doesn't run Wayland, it's still X11. That being said, Valve has said they want to move to Wayland at some point.
Not sure about their gamescope mode. I know it's a custom compositor but beyond that I've got no idea what the underlying tech powers it.
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Ahhhh right, yeah not sure why they don't use wayland on desktop though. I can imagine they will in a year or so