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.
It’s not just about hardware compatibility. It has to be compatible with existing workflows, and it’s currently very limiting.
Which workflows? Asking because I’d like to experiment with some edge case stuff.
I’m running KDE with wayland on multiple different vintage machines with AMD and intel graphics and it would take alot for me to go back to the depressing old mess that was X.
The biggest improvement in recent times was absolutely pulling out all my Nvidia cards and putting in second hand Radeon cards, but switching to wayland fixed all the dumb interactions between VRR ( and HDR ) capable monitors of mixed refresh rates.
Even the little NUC that drives the three 4k TV’s for the security cameras at work is a little happier with wayland, running for weeks now with hardware decoding, rather than X crashing pretty well every few days.
For me it’s a million little details that just don’t work. Stuff like positioning windows, removing decorations from a window, remapping buttons on a trackball, setting a graphics output to tvrgb, disabling a display via ssh and enabling it again, etc.
Appreciate the reply. Which desktop environment are you using?
My only experience with Wayland is also with KDE. Wheres for the 27-ish years before that I’ve used all sorts of stuff with X.
I’ve scripted the machine that drives the frontend for our video surveilance ssytem to place windows exactly where I want them when it comes up.
I use a couple of dbus triggers that make the TV on the wall in my garage go to sleep from the shell, perhaps not tested via ssh though. They were pretty well the functional equivalent of some xset dpms commands that I used to use. Not sure if that is what you were meaning. I think I also had something working that disabled the output altogether. I think that was pretty clunky as it used some sort of screen ID that would occasionally change. Sorry I’m hazy on the details, I’m old.
I’ll try it all out when I get home, I’ve got to find some old serial crap for a coworker in the garage anyway.
I use gnome for the most part. I have been checking out kde recently to see how the newer versions stack up (gave up on it during the 4.0 days). As you mention kde supports dpms changes on wayland because they have their own protocol extension for that.
That’s actually my biggest gripe with wayland - the huge amount of fragmentation it has caused. I’m pretty confident that almost all the missing features I talked about are possible on one or two of the compositors, but not all of them. And definitely not on the one I use. I’m sure once some pragmatism takes hold that all the issues will be ironed out, but my plan for now is to stick to X11 until that happens.
Agreed, it seems like they should have put just a little bit more in the standard feature set so every little window manager doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.