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'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.
I tried Wayland many times in the past ~6 years, usually with Sway (but I tried most other compositors, other than KDE's), but I always came back to X11 (using cwm).
Around two months ago I started using river, and I think I'll stick with it. There are enough Wayland protocols which now exist (and are supported by river) that using a minimal compositor feels pretty similar to just using a window manager on X.
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.
Yes, though "since when" depends on the machine. My last machine to switch over was one with an NVIDIA GPU a couple of months ago.
About a year ago I moved to Hyprland & Wayfire for my NVIDIA & Intel boxes. Moved NVIDIA to Radeon a few months back and had mixed results.
Recently tried Plasma 6 for experimental HDR and am impressed.
Plasma 6 fixed a lot of issues I had with Wayland, mostly multi monitor, but I've been using it since steam on X11 would cause your entire desktop environment to freeze up consistently every time. I read it was because steam was constantly pinging your display ports to see if there was another monitor connected, but I don't know how true that is. Moving to Wayland fixed that probably because of xwayland
I've been using it since Plasma 6 came out so about 3-4 weeks.
Overall, it's been a very negative experience for me. The main problems have been:
- Random scaling issues in apps: some apps show a slightly smaller cursor, other show a poorly upscaled one, others have random rendering issues like lines remaining on the screen after an option is no longer highlighted (gimp, libreoffice, many others), some apps have random flickering of parts of the UI, some apps no longer scale at all or are scaled twice. Plasmashell itself has blurry icons on the desktop but all other KDE apps don't. I know fractional scaling has always been problematic, but it has gotten worse to the point of being almost unusable
- Random crashes of GTK apps when using the wayland backend. Some GTK apps don't even start and segfault immediately with a wayland error in the terminal
- Some apps like okular and libreoffice lag like crazy or outright freeze when scrolling
- Some games not capturing the cursor properly (Proton)
- Inconsistent font rendering, some fonts look fine in some apps and atrocious in others
- Issues when resizing or moving windows, some times they "jerk" off the screen or resize to a very tiny window and I'm forced to use key combinations to resize them again
- Random issues with window decoration not appearing in some apps but randomy appearing for things like context menus
This is on a full AMD system with Arch Linux, the latest kernel and mesa-git. I hope for KDE's sake that there's something broken in my installation because I can't believe the KDE team released Plasma 6 in this sorry state.
I've been using Wayland since the end of last year, I haven't done any real benchmarking but games run about the same for me on either.
I use Wayland since I got a second monitor, since X can't handle mixed DPI. I'd use X otherwise, since global hotkeys work there
Global hotkeys work in kde wayland and hyprland!
A couple years(ish) on intel-only laptops. I run it with KDE Plasma. I only think about it when I see a thread like this one.
For me it Just Works™. I recognize that being intel-only may be a contributing factor, and my certification of Just Works™ is not to imply dismissal of any problems others may be having. 🙂
Yes, since Fedora 21 when it switched by default.
It hasn't really caused game breaking issues for me, however it is nice that the few nit-picks have all been resolved.
I get the sense that the majority of people use it on Workstations, there is just a vocal minority that resists the change. There are so many academic and enterprise users just using distros in their default state Wayland and all.
Yeah, I've been using it for a few years now. Not really given me any issues so I don't have any reason to use X again, but my use case is pretty basic 🤷
I've been dailying it on my desktop for a couple of years now (I want to say since 2022 but I forget exactly... there was a Plasma release where a certain feature finally became realised on Wayland and I switched then). Been running on my laptop for much longer, where I use GNOME. It's been great, but I don't have any Nvidia hardware.
Whenever Nobara moves to KDE 6, I'll probs switch over to Wayland. Likely sometime this year.
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?
Ye, since Plasma 5.24 I think. Used to occasionally switch to X11 for competitive gaming, but as of Plasma 6 their Wayland compositor supports fullscreen tearing, so now I have no need to use X11 anymore
Got hyprland running on the macbook, have tested it out on desktop. Not quite the daily driver, plasma 6 on X is still the norm there, but I think as soon as synergy works in Wayland I’ll make the switch everywhere
I'm running Wayland for many months now. Yust because why not. It just works. Debian sid with gnome here.
I've been using it since about spring 2022 and it's been way more reliable than X for me. The only times I've had trouble was one computer where I was missing one of the pipewire packages I needed for screen sharing and another time I tried to run it on a 20 year old Radeon X1600, but both of those were my fault and not something a normal user is likely to encounter. For context I've used Sway, Hyprland, GNOME, and Plasma although the usability has been the same between all of them.
When I can inject keystrokes to windows not on focus with scripts.
I need full screen share and I think it isn't there for wayland. But the track pad support is better in wayland.
I have a laptop with integrated Intel graphics and a desktop with Nvidia graphics. I use Wayland on the former right now as of KDE 6. I have noticed some odd behaviors, but overall it has been fine. The latter, however, just boots to a black screen. I have neither the time nor the desire to debug that right now, so I will adopt Wayland on that machine when it works with Nvidia to a reasonable degree of stability.
I've been daily driving it on some devices for maybe 6 months.
My only showstopper was input-leap, but I have not had to use it for two months. So I've gone all-in since. It works better in every sense - except for the input-leap thing.
input-leap
this software has wayland support already https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/109
Every update of plasma I switch to Wayland so far my record is 1 week before running into a deal breaker issue.
Though Plasma six is so close to working for me. The only issues I'm getting on wayland is flickering in games, an issue where some windows don't show up on the task bar, awful screen tearing when using two monitors of different resolutions, keyboard lag.
I've been using Sway for over 2 years, and for my workflow it works well, with one exception I just can't get vscode to scale properly for my display.
Using Wayland with KDE Plasma 6 on Arch btw. But I installed the old NVIDIA driver 535, waiting for explicit sync in 555 to fix flickering in games.
Linux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0