I just distro hopped to a distro that ships wayland by default and I've got from a near flawless linux experience to an awful experience. I am gonna have to be careful what distro I recommend to people because I dont want anyone's first linux experience to be with wayland. So many issues and every single time its wayland related with no fix. I ended up going back to x11. -NVIDIA graphics card user with KDE plasma.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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My short answer:
Should I switch to Wayland?
Yes.
Applications that don't cope with wayland still work via Xwayland. Go ahead.
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.
I am no fan of wayland, but if it works the software you use and your workflow, then it would probably be advisable to do so. It is not for me and my day to day workflow.
in my experience wayland is faster to log in and less input lag, problems are things like discord that don't implement screen record, but it work on the browser, and sometimes i need to find replacement for some apps that work on wayland(like xdotool to simulate mouse etc) i use fedora so wayland is default
Discord's video capture works fine for me. Some other applications (Zoom, for one) still haven't bothered fixing their portals, but Discord has had working video capture for ages. It's just lacking audio, but I don't think that works on X11 either.
in wayland discord have video capture?
Video capture works in either as far as I know. I remember Zoom being weird and only implementing the screenshot API rather than the video capture API but aside from that I'm pretty sure all applications can do video capture these days.
Audio capture doesn't work on Discord, though, but that's also the case for X11.
You can sort of make it work if you use Pipewire or Jack in combination with a tool like QJackCtl and redirect the output of the window you're capturing to Discord's audio input.
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.
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.
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.
touchpad pinch to zoom
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.
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.
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
Nobody's requiring it until devs start not supporting X11 anymore and start saying things like "won't fix, use Wayland". Which is already happening
See: GNOME's response to a critical GTK4 bug on x11 that makes any program using GTK4 unusable on certain devices under x11
I think that's a little bit premature for GNOME to do, though I have to ask, what "certain devices" are we talking about?
certain hardware configurations. I have two computers on linux. One of them has issues with GTK4, the other one doesn't. The only difference between these machines is hardware.
And yeah, I agree that's premature for them to do
certain hardware configurations. I have two computers on linux. One of them has issues with GTK4, the other one doesn’t. The only difference between these machines is hardware.
Right, what are the "certain hardware" configurations? Are they really old? Are they really niche?
if I knew what exactly was causing it hardware wise I would have a way to fix it, and I don't
given GNOME's solution is "use Wayland" (which I can't for a variety of reasons) I don't think I can ever figure out what the problem is. Their attitude from the start is already non helpful.
all I know is my hardware isn't niche nor really really old. And Im not the only one experiencing this
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.
I would switch if it worked at all I just get a black screen if I try a Wayland session lmao. If switching is such a hassle then I'll just stick with what works.
That's not to even mention all the things I use that aren't supported
I've fully switched to Wayland some time ago (it could be already a year) after I learned about how insecure X really is and I honestly do not experience any issues that I sometimes see on the internet. I've been using Gnome for few months, but now I switched to KDE. I think a lot of apps are working natively on Wayland, but for other cases you have XWayland that also works flawlessy in my opinion.
One of things that was issue for me was that I couldn't use Auto-Type feature in KeePassXC, because Wayland doesn't let apps pretend to be a keyboard or capture windows as easily as X does. Funnily enough, I've managed to get it working by running keepassxc --platform xcb, but it stopped working some time ago and I'm not entirely sure why. Other thing that is a problem for me is screen sharing. Wayland doesn't allow apps to capture screen as I mentioned earlier so it heavily relies on PipeWire for this and PipeWire has its own sets of problems. It seems working correctly for the most part, but I couldn't really figure out how to share screen with sound. Not a dealbreaker for me, and a workaround would be to route audio as a microphone input for example, but it is an issue nonetheless. This is only a problem on Discord, in OBS you can easily select video and audio sources.
If you're using KDE already, you could just select Plasma (Wayland) in your display manager and play with it a bit to see if you like it and experience any issues.