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

  • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
    21·
    1 year ago

    My short answer:

    Should I switch to Wayland?

    Yes.

    Applications that don’t cope with wayland still work via Xwayland. Go ahead.

  • robinj1995@feddit.nl
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Mnglw@beehaw.org
      01·
      1 year ago

      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

  • michaelrose@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Mnglw@beehaw.org
        0·
        1 year ago

        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

        • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
          0·
          1 year ago

          I think that’s a little bit premature for GNOME to do, though I have to ask, what “certain devices” are we talking about?

          • Mnglw@beehaw.org
            0·
            1 year ago

            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

            • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
              0·
              1 year ago

              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?

              • Mnglw@beehaw.org
                1·
                1 year ago

                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

  • Vilian@lemmy.ca
    0·
    1 year ago

    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