I've been on Wayland for the past two years exclusively (Nvidia).
I thought it was okay for the most part but then I had to switch to an X session recently. The experience felt about the same. Out of curiosity, I played a couple of games and realized they worked much better. Steam doesn't go nuts either.
Made me think maybe people aren't actually adopting it that aggressively despite the constant coverage in the community. And that maybe I should just go back.
Yes. I've used X11 for far too long to have any rose tinted glasses for the piece of fucking broken shit it always was. a LOT of people don't realize how many hacks, workarounds and sheer tears and duct tape goes into making the piece of shit render the smallest line on the screen.
That's also why Phoronix comment section neckbeards are so infuriating for me. They talk like X.Org works like at all.
I've got three hard problems preventing me from using Wayland (sway/wlroots) right now:
- No global shortcuts for applications, especially legacy applications; I need teamspeak3 to be able to read my PTT keys in any application. Yes I know that could be used to keylog (the default should be off) but let me make that decision.
- Button to pixel latency is significantly worse. I don't need V-Sync in the terminal or Emacs. Let me use immediate presentation in those applications.
- VRR is weird. I'd love if desktop apps were V-sync'd via VRR but the way it currently works is that apps make the display go down to 48Hz (because they don't refresh) but the refresh rate never goes up when typing; further exacerbating button to pixel delay.
There's a portal for Global Shortcuts: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.html
KDE and Hyprland already implement it, and COSMIC seems likely to
On the app side, if we can get the major toolkits to adopt it, then hopefully that covers most actively-maintained apps (but it's unlikely to cover legacy apps): https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/38288
If I can get the portal to just forward every keypress (or a configurable subset) to an xwayland window, that'd work for me. (I am aware of the security implications.)
I'm not an expert, but my understanding of the Global Shortcuts portal is that it's very much designed for the push-to-talk use case where an app is not focused but still receives button events for exactly the keys its interested in and no other keys: I think this would cause problems if an app requested every key (e.g. if the request was approved then no keys would work in every other app)
It'll be interesting to see how the remaining compatibility/accessibility issues are tackled, either in portals or in wayland protocols
Yeah and that's great but my point is that I don't see an obvious way to use it for that in its current implementation. I'm sure you could build it but it's simply not built yet.
As far as I know xwayland in plasma/kde already does that. However as it's KDE, it is most likely configurable and might not be enabled by default :P
Probably never. X11 just works better. Wayland has bad design and bad implementations.
Feels good to hear someone else say this. I regularly try switching and always end up finding bugs in the DE or clients. Some issues I've found have existed for years with no fix in sight.
I worry we'll end up in a situation where X11 starts accumulating bugs due to lack of maintenance while Wayland takes ages to mature.
I use sway and the only issue I have had is screen recording.
No. I'll use it when it's stable enough for Debian to merge it.
Possibly in 5 years?
Debian's wiki states that "Wayland is used by default in Debian 10 and newer" (on gnome, It's also the the default for plasma 6 but that'll take some time to get into debian as you say)
Wayland has been very stable for me since 2021, never went back to X.
I never switched. Just doesn't seem worth the hassle.
Loads of broken features and extra work shoved onto the individual compositor / WM developers. I don't care about security on my own computer, I just want screen sharing and clipboards to work reliably.
That said, I use just one (ultrawide) monitor, so even the benefits aren't really there at all.
I use it on my Surface Pro 8 with PopOS as Xorg doesn't work properly
Still holding out for desktop streaming via SteamLink to work on Wayland. I use it almost nightly to mirror my screen to my phone so I can watch what's on my PC while cooking dinner via my phone.
I should check that out. Can you just stream any application to your phone?
It's essentially just a remote desktop app, so yeah kinda. Depending on your screen resolution it'll be either be more or less annoying to click on smaller UI elements, but it's certainly possible.
I keep my Bluetooth headphones connected to the PC, and there's maybe a split second delay. Otherwise it's perfect, because you can still navigate your PC with the touch screen as a mouse, and it even nicely supports my 3 monitors at once.
I’ve been daily driving Hyprland for almost a year now I think, my only complaint is that some of my electron apps act out a little bit (Discord won’t open links, etc). I don’t game as heavily as I used to, but I regularly am running Overwatch 2 around 200 FPS with no issues, and Bauldur’s Gate 3 is super smooth as well.
I tried Wayland out again last week and all it did was make my monitors flash white and black over and over again. Couldn't get it to stop unless I restarted. No idea how to fix that since I can't even do anything past the sign in screen lol. Maybe one day it'll work.
