Hey guys, what are the pros and cons to wayland if I intend to use my PC for gaming + others?
Comparisons to X?
General impressions?
Your advice on if I should use it or stick with X?
My PC parts are arriving soon, and while Ive been a linux user since 2016 its the first time I intend to fully main drive linux, so I guess im just looking for as much information as I can get on it.
Feel free to post links to articles or anything that will answer if you prefer, we’re on a link aggregator after all ;) and I dont mind reading.
Thanks in advance :)
I personally love Wayland for my system. I use Sway for mine and with support for VRR with my monitor, a lot of the vsync problems people talk about goes away (at least for me). I will say, some things that rely on Xorg screen sharing (Like Discord) will only share Xwayland windows. This is fixed in most applications, but not all. Also screen recording in general is a bit lacking. My main pro for Wayland is I use multiple monitors, and unlike Xorg which caps the refresh rate for the full desktop to the lowest (which for me is 75hz), Wayland allows different refresh rates per monitor, which means if I drag a vsync game over to a different monitor, the fps cap changes.
Wayland is also vastly improved by moving over to PipeWire instead of Pulseaudio. I’ve never had a singular problem with PipeWire and it’s drop-in pretty much. I recommend that as well. PipeWire is compatible with applications that use PulseAudio so you shouldn’t even notice a difference at worst, and will notice an improvement in sound latency most likely.
I think the main drawback about Waypand right now is people have VASTLY different experiences. Which is why I say just try it out. Most big DEs like KDE and GNOME have Wayland sessions that you can choose if you just install the wayland parts. Worst case scenario you go “This sucks” and go back. Wayland is only getting better, though, and I find that a lot of the problems I had even just 6 months ago are pretty much gone. Check in often and just keep your Xorg stuff laying around. That’s the beauty of Linux.
This is probably what Ill do - have both and give wayland an honest chance, while not severely limiting my experience by being trapped in it. Thanks!
No problem! Happy waylanding! And out of curiosity, an update would be appreciated. I always like hearing how others’ experiences are. It helps when I help others with Wayland.
Honestly, depends on you GPU and the game. Nvidia has been quite reluctant with their Wayland support for a while, while AMD is often pretty even. Here are some benchmarks from early 2023. However, recently there were some improvements for XWayland which may improve performance significantly (there was a post on Lemmy just today or yesterday).
If you use a distro/DE that install both by default (like Ubuntu) I’d recommend to just test it and then decide for your case.
distro: just look at my instance xD
Its a full AMD build, so I shouldnt have any issues with the green goblin
I’ve had great experience with AMD GPUs on Wayland. Unless you run into specific issues, I don’t see a downside of running Wayland. With NVIDIA, chances are you will run into issues very quickly, unfortunately…
Then you should just try it out. If it doesn’t work for you, you can easily switch back from your login screen.
Try Manjaro Sway. Wayland can’t get any better than with Sway. Of you prefer to not read the docs and confog by yourself, then go with KDE. Literally zero reasons to use xorg anymore. I’ve used Sway 2-3 months after dwm and regret a lot I didn’t switch earlier to Wayland.
Wayland has a ton of issues on Plasma including but not limited to (Not including NVIDIA Issues) (Note that many of these will be fixed in Plasma 6):
- Applications don’t prompt to save unsaved work, causing data loss
- No session restore for native Wayland windows
- When the compositor crashes or restarts, non-Qt apps are killed — work is ongoing to fix this
- Not all Sticky Keys options work
- No color management or support for changing Gamma
- KFontView is unable to open or install a font
- Session-restored windows go on the wrong screens and virtual desktops
- When dragging files, to trigger a specific result, you have to hold down a modifier key before you start dragging, not after
- Installed Chrome apps are grouped together with Chrome windows in Icon-Only Task Manager
- Global Menu is broken for non-Qt apps
- When using a Chromium-based browser in native Wayland mode, dragging an image to the desktop creates a sticky note out of it
I used to use Global Menu stil 2 years and it was a mess. For me, Wayland is a gift from gods. The screen tearing went away and it feels more snappier. When I rarely need an external monitor, gone is the need of xrandr-plumbing to make different resolutions to work.
A few gaming related downsides for me:
There’s no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you’ll have some extra input lag. It shouldn’t matter if you play fullscreen games though.
Missing Xorg tools like xinput or xrandr. Maybe I’m too finicky, but sometimes I can’t find the exact mouse speed I want through the settings GUI (for example, in KDE Plasma there are 11 steps from slowest to fastest), and through xinput commands I can just type any speed I want, which is very useful if one step feels too slow but the next one feels too fast.
I also want to increase the screen’s gamma level sometimes and I haven’t found any way to do that at all on Wayland.
There’s no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you’ll have some extra input lag.
The reason compositors historically increase input lag so much is due to design flaws in Xorg. With VRR Wayland has comparable input lag to Xorg with no compositor, and it’s only slightly worse than Xorg without VRR. In the best case scenario Wayland can have better input lag than uncomposited Xorg: there’s a reason the Steam Deck uses Wayland in game mode.
I think as of recently Wayland with compositing might actually have better input lag than Xorg without compositing, but I haven’t seen any thorough benchmarks in the past few months.
Yeah; I’ve a trackball mouse with an unhelpful button layout. XInput gives me the power to change the button assignment (and indeed, speed if I wanted) for input devices on a manufacturer / model-number basis. The amount of flexibility it provides seems ridiculously over-done, until you actually have a use for it.
Wayland developers seem to have thrown out all the ‘cruft’ when they’ve started over, but not realised that a lot of cruft (even basics like on-screen keyboards, screen readers) is superfluous to many but completely essential for a few.
All very good points, thanks! I’ll need to look into the windowed games thing as I have 2 monitors, often one is the game and the other is any info for the game (e.g. 3PTools for Elite Dangerous) so the input lag will need some testing. I mean worst case scenario I simply go back to X while I can right?
One pro of Wayland is better multi-monitor. X11 can’t really handle mixed refresh rates, nor multi-monitor VRR, and per-monitor DPI scaling isn’t easily done. Of course, Nvidia doesn’t support Wayland VRR yet, nor does GNOME, but Plasma or wlroots on AMD should work. Wlroots btw is the Wayland compositor library e.g. Sway and Hyprland is based on.
Forced vsync has been a problem for gaming on Wayland, though that’s in the process of changing due to the tearing protocol, at least on Plasma and wlroots, doesn’t seem like GNOME has picked it up yet.
This (multi-monitor support) is exactly why I switched to sway from i3wm, and haven’t looked back.
Not a gamer, so I can’t speak to that aspect, but for everything I do there’s not much difference.
I do use a Dvorak_ES layout and it works perfectly fine in both Sway and Hyprland. I assume Colemark would too.
@SrEstegosaurio I use colemak from bigbagtrix that applies it via setxkbmap. Tried that on fedora sway spin, wouldnt work erroring cos it needed X11. Maybe should try out in other WMs like you said or try using kmonad.
xkb layout options are set in the sway configuration file in the
inputsection: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/sway#Keymap
except unfortunately sway doesn’t actually support VRR the way it’s suppose to be used. Currently VRR is active until you make a window full screen, once a window is full screen VRR doesn’t work anymore. So pretty much exactly backwards from how it’s suppose to work.
Hyprland does VRR right but it has several other issues that make sway the better choice for now, just with VRR disabled.
Do you uave any experience with bspwm and WL? Thats what I plan on going with
I do not. But bspwm looks like an X window manager, so doesn’t support Wayland.
Aha, that I didnt know. So i guess I need to find a bspwm-like WM for wayland (tiling in the same manner as bspwm. I never liked i3s way of doing tiling)
Really, what it should come down to as an individual is that all of the x11 devs left to work on Wayland because x11 is unmaintainable.
Use Wayland if it works for you, if you find something that doesn’t work, go back to x11 and find the issue tracker and switch back if you care for the benefits later.
The benefits:
- A better security model
- More efficient rendering
- Better animations
- Better support for multi displays (mixed refresh rate/dpi)
- HDR (soon)
- Better color management (soon)
The only problems I have currently is sway doesn’t support single window capture and the XWayland clipboard isn’t great.
Wayland is generally great. The only reason I’ve stuck with X11 is a few random bugs and issues that still aren’t solved in Wayland.
I’m planning on switching over to Wayland fully at the end of this year. Seems like every 6 months I try it and there are less issues than before.
Try them both, plenty of folks have no issues at all running Wayland right from the start, so give it a go and see what happens.
Many users seem to think that the only problem is nvidia, but it’s not true, app compatibility is still a very noticeable problem sometimes.
For example, as far as I know there are still no on-screen keyboards, except for those integrated into desktops, if they have them at all.Relatedly, pretty sure most autotypers don’t work. I know that keepassxc can’t do autotype in wayland
keepass (not xc) has a plugin for autotype. I have not tried it yet.
keepassxc seems reluctant to use this method and instead would prefer to push the work upstream https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 .
Unfortunately keepassxc has backed themselves into a corner where the upstream fix referenced in that issue is closed, and they are unwilling to implement a workaround themselves. So it looks like it won’t be supported any time soon.
EDIT: Seems as though there may be a way to do this with xdg-desktop-portal in the near future. But the sentiment about cutting out the middleman only to need more middlemen seems to be accurate for that direction.
What else have you noticed is incompatible, and what are the solutions in your opinion when we do encounter an incompatible app we want to use?
A major downside of even trying Wayland is that you need to throw away all the knowledge and all the little tools you built up over the years on X and start over from scratch. And that without a guarantee that you won’t have to come back to X due to the lack of hardware support on one out of two major graphics card vendors.
For new users this isn’t really a problem though, but I agree with the sentiment
For new users it is mainly a problem for blog posts and similar sources that now provide solutions to their problems that no longer work.
Good point
But that is to be expected when switching stuff.
I dont plan on using nvidia anytime soon so thats not an issue. As for tools, while ive been a long time linux user, this is the first time ill really be able to truly daily-drive/main a linux distro (previously my desktop was Windows and LTs were linux). So as for little tools, I dont mind either as Ill really start collecting/building them up now
I dont plan on using nvidia anytime soon
Neither was I but with recent AI developments and those being a lot better supported on CUDA than AMD’s ROCm it is a concern for some.
Im not aware of these, but either way I dont really dabble with AI so I doubt it would seriously affect me, at least for a very long time
Xorg is not even in maintenance mode at this point. It’s practically a zombie (and the devs are pretty clear that if you want that to change, YOU will have to step up to do it)
Wayland has the basics done bar Gnome being Gnome and Nvidia being Nvidia, and the uncommon use cases are having solutions built for them as we speak, although quality software will inevitably take time. Especially if we don’t want Wayland to end up an Xorg v2, but splintered.
So use it and wait for the standard to “catch up”? ;)
Try it. Easy enough to have both options on your machine. I poke into Wayland about every 6-12 months, then go back to X11 because I just can’t be fucked with fixing shit that works under X11 and is broken with Wayland. Plenty of people try Wayland and don’t have any issues. Eventually just about everyone will be on Wayland, if that makes a difference to you. I’ll check it again in maybe near the end of 2023.
Ive redid my arch install with 27 4k monitor and decided to go with gnome . Then switched to Wayland because their fractional scaling for hidpi works great comparing to x11. Overall I very much like it, I used to have various small artifacts on x11 and now they’re gone. Waiting for xwayland scaling fix and it’s all I need personally.
Wayland is great these days. Love Wayland for touchsceen. Only thing missing for me is software kvm like synergy. Looks to be on the near horizon though.
been on Wayland with amdgpu for several years due to multi monitor and haven’t looked back. endeavourOS with kde currently, 7900xtx, 4k/144 and 4k/60
This is something that I am sure will be solved eventually, but one of the major weaknesses of Wayland is the lack of lightweight standalone compositors.
For example, if I want a lightweight stacking window manager on X, I can choose between Openbox, Fluxbox, FVWM, IceWM, Pekwm, JWM, Window Maker, hell even twm if I were a masochist. I have tried out all of these at one point or another and they all have something to offer users. But using Wayland, there’s, uhh, labwc, and that’s it? Maybe I could try using kwin standalone?
The situation for tiling window managers is similar, with Sway being the only one that feels mature.
I plan on migrating from Openbox to labwc at some point in the future, once it’s ready. labwc itself is really good, but some of the other programs I need to recreate my setup aren’t there yet. Someday…
But using Wayland, there’s, uhh, labwc, and that’s it? Maybe I could try using kwin standalone?
There is a big list here (Although a lot of them are not mature).
Wayfire and hikari also comes to mind.
You seem to have experience with tiling window managers and wayland. Any suggestions for a WL compatible bspwm-esque one? I dislike the way i3 handles tiling, which is the only other one other than bspwm that ive tried. Also one which is reasonably well documented?
bspwm is probably my favorite general-purpose tiling window manager. I have not personally tried this out yet, but River is superficially similar, with the main configuration done through a combination of shell scripting and
riverctlcommands. I’m not sure how the tiling behaves in comparison though.
This is the #1 showstopper issue for me. Until it’s possible to do the equivalent of EXWM switching is not really an option for me. Somebody has presented preliminary work on this at EmacsConf last year but it still has ways to go.
Unfortunate that we have taken such a big backwards step in this area.
Wayland fixes a number of bugs and fundamental issues in X.Org. It is also much more actively developed, and it seems likely that over time new hardware will stop working with X.Org due to bugs nobody is interested in fixing (this is already the case for the Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers).
On the other hand, Wayland also introduces a number of additional bugs. However, some distros like Fedora have enabled it by default for years. In practice, most of the bugs relate to at least one of Nvidia’s drivers, DPI scaling, and DEs with less mature support. If you’re using an AMD GPU, 1080p display, and GNOME, you’ll likely have few issues and possibly even a better experience compared to X.Org.
