I’ve been using it ever since Ubuntu switched over. No major issues, though I have to launch Calibre (the ebook manager) via the command line with a special environment variable because the developer is anti-Wayland. I’m looking for alternatives.
I use it with gnome on nixos without any problems AFAICT. Had the explicit sync issue with Nvidia initially but I ended up buying an rx6800 to use as the host GPU when I set up win11 with KVM. Been completely fine since.
I’ll probably make the jump when Plasma 6.1 releases with their “real, fake session restore” functionality, was hoping that would make it in to Plasma 6, and I am daily driving Wayland on my laptop now, but I kinda need my programs (or at least file managers and terminal windows) to re-open the way they were between reboots.
Thanks to kscreen-doctor, I’ve been able to port most of my desktop scripts that I use for managing my multiple monitors to work on Wayland, and krdc/krfb have been a decent enough replacement for x11vnc or x2go for accessing the desktop on my home server/NAS remotely (I know, desktops on servers are considered sacrilege, but for me it’s been useful too many times to get rid of at this point).
Where Wayland currently shines for me is VR, Steam VR works better, and more consistently on Plasma Wayland than X11 at this point, which is probably more of a Valve thing than a Wayland thing. When I first got my Index, X11 worked fine, but there have been times when Steam VR on Linux being “broken” has made the news on Phoronix/Gaming on Linux, but still worked fine on Plasma Wayland (which seems to be where Valve is doing most of their SteamVR Linux testing as of late).
As an end user, I do wish that the Wayland specification was organized better, because as an outsider, it seems a lot of the bickering that goes on has more to do with everyone having different end goals. I think if they would split out the different styles of window management to have their own sub-specs or extensions and then figure out what of that could be moved into the core after everyone has built what they need would be better than their current approach of compromising their way through every little decision that doesn’t always make sense for every use case. Work together when it makes sense, but understand that there are times when that doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you can’t please every stick in the mud, and are going to have to do your own thing without them. I do get the appeal of doing things right the first time too though, even if it takes more time. But it seems like usability is always the thing that gets sacrificed when compromises are made.
Since I mostly run Debian with KDE, I’ve been using it a lot since KWin is on its stable repo.
First time I really use it is on Gentoo, which exclusively runs Plasma. Since it’s rolling-release, it didn’t take too long to be available.
I’ve been moving this build from one computer to another, they all work fine. Currently it’s on a Thinkpad W530. Got some problems with multi-monitor that never happen under X11. Thankfully after I replace the firmware with coreboot, and opted for dGPU only, I never encountered any issue.
Currently, what keeps me from fully ditching X11 on KDE is the buggy SDDM support.
On the other hand, I’ve been using Linux Mint on my work PC. As you may have known, neither Cinnamon and XFCE has it at the moment.
I could switch tomorrow if I could do my current setup:
Tiling Window manager (sway?)
simple status bar to output text from a script with clickable applet icons (waybar?)
the way to show/hide windows on a button press - I have a script that I use to quickly toggle 3 dropdown terminal windows
Last time I tried Wayland in December, I had issues with waybar not supporting clicking tray applet icons. Also I’ve ported my dropdown terminals script to support sway - and it worked half the time, like, literally every second key press was ignored.
On one hand I have X session that currently has no downsides for me, on other - wayland that has no upsides. Tell me, why would I switch?
Message me on matrix if you want help setting all of that up, but waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons.
You should switch if you value any of the following:
Security
a. Any x11 client can record your screen without notifying you
b. Any x11 client can record all of your keystrokes without notifying you
Better configuration
a. Tighter integration with input/output configuration, which results in things like per-input settings are very difficult to do on X11, I have a mouse that only works on one screen and another mouse that works on all my screens, which makes it so that I can have my TV pointed away from my desktop and use a wireless mouse and never lose the position of my cursor while still keeping my other displays active, for example
b. You can’t modify mouse sensitivity on x11 (except in a hacky way with acceleration)
c. After switching to sway I just noticed so many hacks that I configured went away.
Significantly better rendering
a. x11 can’t support monitors with mixed refresh rates because how it handles rendering is fundamentally flawed
b. on x11 most animations are fundamentally broken (try resizing) because of how rendering is handled, check out the animations on hyprland and how smooth they are, that’s not something that can be done on x11 for a low performance overhead
c. so many scaling problems, native wayland apps work perfectly in this regard nowadays.
Ok, because of this post - I decided to bite the bullet and try wayland again. And it was much better experience this time:
I’ve installed sway “pattern” on OpenSuse-Tumbleweed and:
Previous time I had some issues with lightdm not supporting sway, now - it just works.
I still use xdotool and i3-msg in my custom scratchpad script and yet everything is working.
waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons. I confused it with swaybar, that’s installed with sway by default and should be an i3bar-compatible. Waybar doesn’t seem to support i3bar protocol, but anyway, after I configured it - it’s like 95% there from what I want.
I had to force xcb platform for appimage of nekoray (qt VPN gui), because it’s complaining about missing wayland-egl plugin. But it’s a small problem with straightforward fix, so not that bad.
Been running Wayland for 5 years on my development laptop (sway, Intel GPU, blacklisted the nvidia gpu). At the start I’ve had a couple of issues, nothing too bad. Haven’t had any issues for over 2 years. Switched to Linux on my gaming PC about a year ago, KDE plasma on Wayland but do most of my gaming from a steam gamescope session. Very happy overall with Wayland, glad it exists. Sharp text on a fractionally scaled display for reading code was just too compelling at the time and it only improved.
I daily drive wayland with nvidia and I play games modestly. I have Xorg installed as backup for when issues happen, but it’s been pretty rare in the last couple months.
I couldn’t get the trackpad working right on X (why tf is acceleration on by default?), tried switching to Wayland in the first few hours of using Linux, and haven’t had significant issues since. At that point I had no reference on performance, so no way to tell if X would be better.
There’s maybe one bug that causes an unrecoverable GPU hang when using certain applications, but that may have been fixed in the kernel already, and I just need to use something newer than 22.04 LTS.
I use Wayland on my laptop running fedora 39 kde spin and it mostly runs fine. When I browse gifs in discord the screen flashes white and I can’t maximize jellyfin on connected TVs but other than that no major issues.
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