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

  • moreeni@lemm.ee
    ·
    1 year ago

    No, you shouldn't.

    If you need Wayland you will know, if X worked for you well and you didn't search for how to sandbox it or maybe for some other functions that Wayland has then don't switch and don't break what works for you.

  • Coelacanthus@lemmy.kde.social
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    You should, I think. You don't have Nvidia GPU, so you can avoid almost bugs and get 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).

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

        It's reference implementation, but isn't suitable for daily use. Because it lacks some convenient features. It's used as a behavior reference when some one develop a new compositor.

        • PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          lacks some convenient features

          found out the hard way. haha.

          should have read your answer first.

          thanks anyway. Ive took time to try out sway in the meantime. firefox still doesnt want to run in wayland mode. but In general sway fells good (coming from i3 daily driver)

    • michaelrose@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      double performance in wayland

      Ya that is complete nonsense.

      Firefox accelerated decoding works in X11 as does mixed DPI

      • Coelacanthus@lemmy.kde.social
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        There is a benchmark use https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

        https://blog.lilydjwg.me/2021/11/12/display-tearing.215968.html

        • X11 + Intel card, 1080p 60fps, GPU fully utilized, one third of frames dropped! 4k 60fps is about the same. It turns out that the focus is not on the resolution (the GPU isn't used to its full capacity anyway), it's on the frame rate of the video.
        • Wayland + Intel cards, 4k 60fps, not even dropping frames, let alone anything else, and the GPU is used for about half of the graphics calculations.

        For hardware decode, when I switched to wayland, it was only implemented in Wayland. After they implememted EGL on X11, they implemented hardware decode on X11 as well.

        For mixed DPI, applications can implement it use screen information, but not all applictions will do this. But wayland ask them to implement this feature.

  • s20@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    If you're not having performance issues, then I don't see much reason to change. Sure, Xorg is basically in maintenance mode, but so what? Your setup works for you, so do your thing.

    That said, Sway is a window manager intended to be a drop in replacement for i3 on Wayland, and is pretty close from what I hear: https://swaywm.org/

    Plasma is very good with Wayland, although you might want to wait for Plasma 6, since they're apparently making several improvements, and it's due out soon anyway: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6-Wayland-Great

    You can install Wayland and switch sessions during login too, so you can check it for yourself and see if your i3 dotfiles work with Sway.

    • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      Xorg is in maintenance mode for the next few years (most likely), so it's really not something that anyone needs to worry about today.

  • michaelrose@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • michaelrose@lemmy.ml
        ·
        1 year ago

        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

        • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
          ·
          1 year ago

          Well, such is the downfall of OSS, I mean look at VR on Linux, Mesa straight up will hard crash if you try to run SteamVR on the latest versions, and the time it takes for VR related bugs in Mesa to get patched are insanely long.

          Just gotta make a hubub about it until someone with the knowhow can fix it.

  • mackwinston@feddit.uk
    ·
    1 year ago

    Debian (a very conservative distro) switched to Wayland by default in debian 10 if I'm not mistaken (we're now on 12).

    I didn't notice the change until I tried to run a niche program that really needs X11. Unless you're doing this kind of thing, then you can probably just use Wayland. At least in Debian it's really easy to switch between Wayland and X11 by selecting the session type when you log in.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      you'll need a special Xorg implementation

      Ok it's true that op would need XWayland for some things, but that will be installed alongside the rest of the Wayland packages, and will run seamlessly.

      Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation

      This isn't true. Some applications will use features that aren't available in all Wayland compositors, but they are rare. The main offenders are apps that interact with other apps, apps that take screenshots or record, or apps that draw outside of a window (like docks).

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago
    • Wayland has several new features like, say, removing screen tearing, but it's not necessarily "advantages" that are the reason to use Wayland. It's sort of a redo of how graphics should work in the Linux world, and it will be the standard going forward. X11 development has more or less ceased with those developers moving to Wayland (in fact, Wayland was created by X11 developers to address issues they had with the architecture of X11). It's not a matter of should you switch to Wayland; it's a matter of when should you switch to Wayland. The answer is, as soon as you can.
    • Gaming varies drastically. Some games are fine. Some games make me launch Steam via Lutris to start (not sure why it works, but it does) but run fine after. Some games can't reach higher framerates. That said, no screen tearing is a plus. When it works, Wayland is very smooth, but it doesn't always work yet. An example off the top of my head, no matter what I do, Street Fighter 6 doesn't get above 45 fps on Wayland. It's a good idea to have an X11 option as a backup still imo
    • The best way to migrate is just to install a Wayland compatible DE/WM. I've used both GNOME Wayland and Hyprland extensively and they both work great. If you're used to i3 (that's what I used to use and is still my X11 backup), Hyprland is great. KDE like you have on your Desktop already works good on Wayland from what I've heard.
    • I have made the switch because most of my apps can run on Wayland, and it's the future. I still have a backup in case there's a game or something that doesn't quite work for me. For instance, I can't share screen on discord. It won't even recognize the pipewire route. Thus, I've gotta switch to X if I want to do that.
  • robinj1995@feddit.nl
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    You're not using any NVIDIA hardware...? Hmm, nope, that's all hardware that runs under Mesa. Give it a shot, if it doesn't work, you can always switch back.

    The big advantage is improved support for new features, like adaptive sync, multi monitor support, display scaling, etc. You'll notice, new features (mostly gaming related features) will just work better on Wayland. There will be a performance hit though.

    I made the switch because it's just plain better, adaptive sync works (it never worked for me on X11), oh yeah and the night color actually works. Night color on KDE just does not work on X11, AMD or NVIDIA, least for me.

  • FluffyPotato@lemm.ee
    ·
    1 year ago

    The only advantage for the end user is better support for multi monitor systems with different refresh rates. If you don't have problems with that there's no real advantage in upgrading. Also avoid using Wayland on systems with an Nvidia GPU.

  • wallmenis@lemmy.one
    ·
    1 year ago

    Wayland is not ready for gaming/streaming since it lacks a few features on obs (mainly the docks) and there is forced "vsync" on the games and you can't have tearing unless the game is wayland native and you have a recent desktop environment version on your distro thag supports it. Also some other apps may be buggy but for general usage is pretty much ready i'd say.

  • Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one
    ·
    1 year ago

    What are the advantages of Wayland?

    The big one is proper support for diffrent refresh rate monitors and VRR. Also some security improvment and long term support (X11 probably has only a few years before development stops).

    What are the disadvantages?

    Its still a little buggy in some cases (especialy when using Nvidia hardware) but with an AMD or Intel GPU its more then usable. Some apps don't play nice with Xwayland but its pretty rare.

    How's gaming?

    I haven't encontered any major issues with games. Some games might need launch parameters but usualy you can just google it and find the answer very quickly. Performance its exactly the same as on X (maybe even slightly better)

    What would be the best way to switch?

    On your desktop with KDE you can just select "KDE (Wayland)" in your display manager and KDE should just run like normal but with Wayland. On you laptop you'd need to switch to a diffrent WM since i3 dosen't support Wayland. Your best bet would probably be Sway since its compatible with i3 configurations.

    Why have you made the switch?

    I wanted to check out how well Wayland works and found that it works fine for me, and so i decided to move. Also X was giving me issues with screen tearing and multiple monitors.

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
      ·
      1 year ago

      X11 probably has only a few years before development stops

      Development has stopped. The only things that see updates still are those that are needed to run X11 apps on Wayland transparently.

  • hellvolution@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    I didn't switch yet for lots of reasons, but I'll write one! Games; I lose 10%-15% FPS, when gaming on Wayland, compared to using Xorg. My hardware: Ryzen 3950 CPU, 64GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080, 12gb VRAM GPU! This happens on each n every game, around 10%-15% FPS loss!!!

    • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      The hit on NVIDIA is pretty rough, I only see about 5% losses on AMD. But it will depend on your hardware fs. Hopefully we can finally see native Wayland support in Proton soon