Should I switch to Wayland?

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

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

I switched recently and it’s still just a tiny bit rough around the edges. People have been saying to switch for years and that can’t have actually been a good idea until like half a year ago. KDE fills in some of the missing functionality with e.g. its screen sharing portal and global hotkeys emulator, so if you use something with less Wayland support/shims it might be rougher. The upside to me is FreeSync/VRR and security improvements.

Staying on X.org is fine for now if you don’t need any Wayland features - Wayland is very close to being completely polished so if you really can’t deal with one of its rough edges I’d check back in like a year and it will probably be seamless.

Performance is the same. Nothing has broken for me for gaming yet, and I’ve thrown some obscure games at it. Xwayland seems sufficient to fix any Wayland quirks that programs aren’t expecting.

themoonisacheese,
@themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works avatar

Last time I tried it, obs studio was unable to capture video on Wayland, which is a dealbreaker. Functionally they’re are the same point for a regular user, so I’ve been shown using xorg without issue but it is a point for to consider

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

I can do video on OBS on Wayland (as a Flatpak). KDE pops up a screen sharing picker so it works that way, or you can probably use this plugin. Like I said this seems to be a bandaid that KDE put in to fix this shortcoming, so if you use a different DE then it probably doesn’t work as nice.

themoonisacheese,
@themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works avatar

I last tried 8 months ago so maybe they added that in between but at the time it straight up didn’t work. Good to hear its been fixed, given how Wayland works in don’t think this being removed is happening anytime soon.

isVeryLoud,

OBS Studio has been working fine for at least a year. It was an issue on OBS’ side.

themoonisacheese,
@themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works avatar

Oh yeah definitely OBS’s fault for not upgrading but that still left me with no option but to use xorg.

Certainity45,

I switched from Arch + DWM into Artix + DWL and my Thinkpad with Ryzen 5700U doubled the battery life from 3-3,5 hrs to 6-7 hrs. Also if I close the lid, the battery won’t run out as fast it was actually used. I don’t know what explains all this so I don’t make claims either.

yukijoou,

i switched my desktop to wayland a few months ago due to weird performance issues in some 3D applications

it went mostly flawlessly, i haven’t had much if any issues in terms of app support, as long as your wayland compositor supports xwayland, everything should work pretty great!
the application ecosystem isn’t as widely developped though, so you may run into issues if you try to use standalone window managers/compositors like sway, hyperland, etc… but besides that, everything’s been great for me!

Knusper,

I think, it needs to be said that it doesn’t have to be a hard switch. With KDE, you can just install the Wayland session and then when logging in for the first time after booting, you can select whether to start X11 or Wayland. To switch back and forth, you just need to log out and log back in.

With i3, that isn’t as simple, since i3 doesn’t support Wayland. You’d need to install a WM which supports Wayland + customize it, to be able to switch back and forth.

s20,

With i3, that isn’t as simple, since i3 doesn’t support Wayland. You’d need to install a WM which supports Wayland + customize it, to be able to switch back and forth.

While it’s not as simple as KDE, switching from i3 isn’t that hard thanks to Sway. It’s a tiling window manager that’s intended to be used as a drop-in replacement for i3 on Wayland:

swaywm.org

michaelrose,

Sway doesn’t have a functional Xwayland implementation insofar as it doesn’t handle mixed/high DPI

s20,

Ah. I did not realize that. My bad.

Hexagon,

What do you mean? I’m using it with a high DPI screen and I don’t see anything wrong, Xwailand clients may get a little blurred but that’s it

michaelrose,

“A little blurred” You are probably one of the fellows who walks around with a phone with a spider web of cracks because it “still works”. Not sure why you imagine a blurry screen is a usable or acceptable thing. Excuse me while I return to using my 4k + 4k + 1080p 3 screen arrangement in which NONE of them are blurry and in which an app that is moved from a->b remains the same size because UI elements are scaled to the same identical size.

Hexagon,

Honestly it happens with just a few apps, and I try to fix or replace them when I find the time. Also, I don’t think that’s specific to sway, that’s just the way xwayland works

michaelrose,

Most people have more thinks to do than fix things that already work.

demesisx,
@demesisx@lemmy.world avatar

I use xmonad and won’t switch until there’s a viable alternative (probably never).

Upakae,

On voidlinux with recent Plasma, I switched to Wayland a couple weeks ago. (Always change a running system, imho 😄)
I am not recording anything besides a couple screenshots here and there using spectacle (plasma native app?) so I can’t say anything about this topic.
But I am using Steam and Lutris without problems with an older amd gfx card without tuning anything special.
Minor quirks here and there. Nothing fancy.

biscuits,

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.

MasterBlaster,

I’m using Wayland with Gnome and have no problem with screen capture.

biscuits,

Also no issues with to capture sound as well? For example, on Discord?

visor841,

Discord doesn’t have sound sharing on Linux whether X11 or Wayland. They just haven’t built the functionality.

biscuits,

Oh okay, that’s good to know! I thought it was something with my setup.

isVeryLoud,

Screen capture issues have been fixed for years now.

michaelrose,

Screen capture is taking a screenshot, Screen sharing is when you present shit at a zoom meeting. Did you mean screen sharing?

MasterBlaster,

You are right, i misread your text. I haven’t tried sharing.

Gecko,
@Gecko@lemmy.world avatar

On that note, screen sharing worked just fine for me on Wayland Fedora 38 with Zoom Flatpak.

Sh1nyM3t4l4ss,

I don’t think Discord screen sharing has sound on X11 either, does it?

isVeryLoud,

It doesn’t. You’re better off running Discord on the web to get those features.

Lantern,

Especially because you don’t have to deal with updates. I hate that pop-up every time I open the app.

Blisterexe,

Or vesktop

michaelrose,

You just said you don’t experience any of the issues I sometimes see on the internet then proceed to describe how an app you use didn’t work out of the box, you were able to work around the issue, and then it broke for a reason you don’t understand. You follow this up with the number one frustration: Screen sharing being broken.

You forgot mixed DPI being broken on everything but very recent KDE used by around 15% of Linux users. It’s not like buying a monitor at worst buy and plugging it into your laptop which has a different DPI is an incredibly uncommon thing at this point.

biscuits,

Well, not really. KeePassXC works properly apart from the Auto-Type feature, which is not that big of a problem because you can use browser integration or just copy and paste it. As for the screen sharing thing - it works, i’ve had problem with capturing sound with it but apparently it is just Discord for Linux thing and not really Wayland. I never had any issue with DPI, neither on Gnome or KDE. I don’t remember what is was on Gnome, but UI scalling on KDE works fine.

michaelrose,

On everything but plasma 5.26+ Applications running via xwayland are scaled in a fashion that makes them blurry when the desktop uses scaling eg high dpi, furthermore if you have monitors A and B which use different scaling the X app can’t be scaled differently on each monitor like X apps can be under X nor like Wayland apps are under wayland. If you use a single 1080p monitor you wouldn’t have noticed any of this but its ridiculously common if for no other reason that there are shit tons of high dpi laptops and low DPI external monitors

wallmenis,

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.

rosa666parks,

Can’t say anything about x11 but I use Nobara KDE with Wayland and it works pretty flawlessly. I found an article that’s a good jumping off point.

Why Use Wayland versus X11?

Vilian,

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

skullgiver, (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Vilian,

    in wayland discord have video capture?

    GustavoM,
    @GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

    I can`t give you any technical details, but real-world ones – it (drastically) decreased my cpu temps and cpu usage, while providing a slightly better performance overall.

    t. Tested this on a rpi 4 while running Doom 3 (the closest of a “Crysis for rpi 4”) a couple years ago. Pretty sure its even better right now.

    Vilian,

    same, i use wayland in my laptop because of that, better battery etc

    moreeni,

    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.

    Dirk,
    @Dirk@lemmy.ml avatar

    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,

    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).

    Sh1nyM3t4l4ss,

    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).

    I’ve never seen any distro with Wayland that didn’t have XWayland set up and working out of the box, so that’s not something the end user needs to worry about. And “Basically None” is also not true anymore. Practically anything made with GTK3/4, Qt5/6, SDL2, recent Electron versions etc. natively runs on Wayland. It’s mostly games, Wine and a lot of proprietary software that doesn’t.

    Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.

    Wdym by that exactly? I mean, a KDE application will run just fine on GNOME or Wlroots compositors.

    michaelrose,

    XWayland doesn’t mixed/high DPI properly anywhere but under KDE >= 5.26. On Void I found Plasma’s Wayland implementation somewhat flakey and sway completely useless as it didn’t handle scaling + xwayland.

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