trixie (aka debian 13) is about to get released with plasma 6.3. it seems that finally x11 is being left behind, which is good, but it worried me a little bit because

1. my nvidia graphics card is old: the 470 driver is the latest version that supports it (so no wayland support from nvidia proprietary drivers ever)

2. on bookworm (debian 12, the current stable version), nouveau works pretty well, but it crashed more or less daily when i tried to daily drive it at work

x11 is still very well supported by plasma 6, but the near future has no place to it and i worry i would eventually get stuck without updates to my system as the newer versions lose x11 support. i decided to try wayland+nouveau again on trixie to see if i had better luck this time

it all worked way better than i expected. performance is seemingly on par with the proprietary driver, i’ve had no crashes so far and i’ve been using it for a week and even screensharing, one of the most problematic aspects of the experience last time i tried, worked well. the one problem i had was with the slack flatpak, which didn’t support wayland for some reason, so it had to run on xwayland. screen sharing wayland applications from x11 apps is possible through the xwaylandvideobridge, which kinda works, but it crashed xwayland entirely at one point, killing both x11 applications i had running. i won’t blame that on the system itself and installing the slack deb package fixed the problem anyway

all in all, it seems like i can safely switch to plasma 6+wayland+nouveau at work