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
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.
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.
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
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.
My short answer:
Should I switch to Wayland?
Yes.
Applications that don’t cope with wayland still work via Xwayland. Go ahead.
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.If it ain’t broken don’t fix it.
