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.

  • janAkaliEnglish
    1•3 months ago

    I could switch tomorrow if I could do my current setup:

    • Tiling Window manager (sway?)
    • simple status bar to output text from a script with clickable applet icons (waybar?)
    • the way to show/hide windows on a button press - I have a script that I use to quickly toggle 3 dropdown terminal windows

    Last time I tried Wayland in December, I had issues with waybar not supporting clicking tray applet icons. Also I’ve ported my dropdown terminals script to support sway - and it worked half the time, like, literally every second key press was ignored.

    On one hand I have X session that currently has no downsides for me, on other - wayland that has no upsides. Tell me, why would I switch?

    • CommunistEnglish
      3•3 months ago

      Message me on matrix if you want help setting all of that up, but waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons.

      You should switch if you value any of the following:

      1. Security

      a. Any x11 client can record your screen without notifying you

      b. Any x11 client can record all of your keystrokes without notifying you

      1. Better configuration

      a. Tighter integration with input/output configuration, which results in things like per-input settings are very difficult to do on X11, I have a mouse that only works on one screen and another mouse that works on all my screens, which makes it so that I can have my TV pointed away from my desktop and use a wireless mouse and never lose the position of my cursor while still keeping my other displays active, for example

      b. You can’t modify mouse sensitivity on x11 (except in a hacky way with acceleration)

      c. After switching to sway I just noticed so many hacks that I configured went away.

      1. Significantly better rendering

      a. x11 can’t support monitors with mixed refresh rates because how it handles rendering is fundamentally flawed

      b. on x11 most animations are fundamentally broken (try resizing) because of how rendering is handled, check out the animations on hyprland and how smooth they are, that’s not something that can be done on x11 for a low performance overhead

      c. so many scaling problems, native wayland apps work perfectly in this regard nowadays.

      1. color management/HDR
      • janAkaliEnglish
        2•3 months ago

        Ok, because of this post - I decided to bite the bullet and try wayland again. And it was much better experience this time:

        I’ve installed sway “pattern” on OpenSuse-Tumbleweed and:

        • Previous time I had some issues with lightdm not supporting sway, now - it just works.
        • I still use xdotool and i3-msg in my custom scratchpad script and yet everything is working.

        waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons.

        I confused it with swaybar, that’s installed with sway by default and should be an i3bar-compatible. Waybar doesn’t seem to support i3bar protocol, but anyway, after I configured it - it’s like 95% there from what I want.

        • I had to force xcb platform for appimage of nekoray (qt VPN gui), because it’s complaining about missing wayland-egl plugin. But it’s a small problem with straightforward fix, so not that bad.