Let me guess… You have an Nvidia card.
I’m represented, but run AMD on desktop and Intel on laptop.
The latest Nvidia drivers have broken composition in Xfce, so I’ve been raw-dogging basic X11. It’s like I’m using WinXP again.
Guilty as charged
So you are living in an illusion of choice, while your options are obviously determined by the big corpo that you relied on for getting that card
(Saying that, I got an NVIDIA card like a dumbass too)
…more like a gifted old laptop, but yeah.
My 16G RTX-3080 Mobile works well with Niri
I’ve found it varies from compositor to compositor:
- Plasma? Mid on Nvidia
- Constantly I have issues and I can’t even solve them myself
- I have plasma working on Ubuntu Studio on a laptop I use for music making which has some Nvidia card, and that works fine, but not on my main Arch install
- GNOME? Works okay until you want to do something with portals like screen recording
- Even if I use a different portal, GNOME overrides it.
- Hyprland? Works amazing EXCEPT for random tiny issues
- Also I had to do a lot of tweaking
- Every now and then some program will not start or something
- But generally pretty good
- Sway? Garbo support
- Nvidia may not even boot. Lots of tweaking. Lots of issues
- Cosmic? For wayland - solid
- For everything else… it needs a little work still
- I also tried Cosmic Shell + Niri, and it just kinda didn’t work in some ways like theming, but Wayland worked great.
- Also performance with multi-displays is kinda poor, or at least it was when I tried it.
- But Niri? Perfect
- Absolutely FLAWLESS Wayland. EVERYTHING works
- And now that I have DMS there’s so much done for me. It’s really a great system
Since I love the scrolling aspect of Niri as well, it works out well that it has the best Wayland support. 10/10 project. I love it
When I was on X11 still I was primarily an i3 user, and the transition to Hyprland and Niri has been generally positive
But yeah, I’ve worked with Nvidia on Linux for several years now on multiple machines. I’m finally throwing in the towel whenever I buy a new PC. AMD all the way. It’s just better on Linux, even on X11
my old rtx 2080 worked perfectly for video capture on gnome wayland portals but had stutter on the desktop on both x and wayland. plasma ran better.
truth is you never know what you are gonna get with nvidia drivers.
Maybe ill check niri next. Any good distro to test it with?
CachyOS has it out of the box in their installer.
- Plasma? Mid on Nvidia
Didn’t they straighten out Wayland support? I thought this was a thing of the past as of 555, but I also haven’t run Nvidia myself in years and years.
NVidia on wayland is fine now. I’ve been running Fedora 43 for about a month on my gaming PC, even the boot splash works at native resolution
My work PC has a 3080 and the latest
nvidia-dkmsin the Arch repo. I haven’t had a single display-related issue for probably a year.I had an NVIDIA card when I switched to Linux about two and a half years ago and I’ve never had an issue AFAIK.
I was on 580 and had issues on CachyOS and Bazzite and Garuda Linux KDE Lite with an RTX 4080.
Wayland is a sports car - modern, tailor made for performance. X is like a '99 Civic that’s had the seatbelts stripped out and the airbags replaced with cameras that let all the other cars on the road see you naked.
It’s fine to prefer X, but the older it gets the more people are going to roll their eyes at you. XWayland is fine for random old stuff, but there is zero reason X should be running your whole display these days.
Inb4 someone mentions network transparency that gimps the rest of the system or some 5000 year old app that needs to sniff events sent to every other program.
And the network transparency argument is long gone. While you can indeed network windows over the wire, most toolkits use client side rendering/decorations. So you’re just sending bloated pixmaps across the wire when things like RDP , VNC, etc deal better with compression, damage to the window, etc. And anything relying or accelerated with DRI3 is just NOT network transparent.
Most modern toolkits have moved past X11 because the X protocol was severely lacking, and there wasn’t a good way as a committee to modify the protocol in an unified manner. I mean look at the entire moving Earth that it took for XFixes and Damage extensions. Toolkits wanted deep access to the underlying hardware and so they would go out of their way to work around X, because it just could not keep up.
Tell me you never deployed remote linux desktop in an enterprise environment without telling me you never deployed remote desktop linux in an enterprise environment.
After these decades of Wayland prosperity, I still can’t get a commercially supported remote desktop solution that works properly for a few hundred users. Why? Because on X, you could highjack the display server itself and feed that into your nice TigerVNC-server, regardless of desktop environment. Nowadays, you need to implement this in each separate compositor to do it correctly (i.e. damage tracking). Also, unlike X, Wayland generally expects a GPU in your remote desktop servers, and have you seen the prices for those lately?
Agreed. I was an early Wayland convert because once upon a time I started writing a WM and taking an interest in X internals… And then my face melted off like I’d opened the Ark of the Covenant.
Things are so much simpler now.
Plenty life in X11 yet.
Xlibre running around.
Pheonix on the horizon. (Zig!)
xlibre is xorg with some half baked commits that had to be removed from xorg for breaking too much and a guy who is kind of a nutcase.
An anti-DEI fork by a wingnut and a project that isn’t even half way ready to use starting from scratch in a niche language. Neither of which are capable of dealing with the fundamental problem of X, the protocol itself, without becoming something entirely different.
… I’m not holding my breath.
If you deal with the fundamental problems of the protocol itself and also provide backwards compatibility… Congrats, you’ve just reinvented Wayland and XWayland.
Dealing with X11’s problems while still being X11, when X11 is the problem? Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath either.
The fundamental architectural issue with Wayland is expecting everyone to implement a compositor for a half baked, changing, protocol instead of implementing a common platform to develop on. Wayland doesn’t really exist, it’s just a few distinct developer teams playing catch-up, pretending to be compatible with each other.
Implementing the hard part once and allowing someone to write a window manager in 100 lines of C is what X did right. Plenty of other things that are bad with X, but not that.
No KMag + KDE Connect remote input, no Wayland.
I use KDE Connect remote input on Wayland all the time…
KMag is broken (simply has not been updated, not like it couldn’t work) but you can zoom the entire screen in KDE with super +/- is that not good enough?
I honestly don’t know where people are getting these Wayland issues. I’m on EndeavorOS with an RTX 3080ti and multiple monitors and it has worked flawlessly for ~2 years now.
There’s probably a lot of people on ‘stable’ distros who are still running Wayland code from a couple of years ago and hitting bugs that have been fixed already.
Maybe, x still works better for me on all three systems. Idk I don’t get it. Everything says wayland should be better but it runs horribly for me. A stuttering mess.
same
Which driver are you using?
I honestly haven’t noticed a different except Wayland feeling a bit faster.
You’ll only see when you open your
xeyes.
This is brilliant.
But I like this.
Yus. Perfect meme. Well said.
I really want to like Wayland since it seems to be the future, but I can’t when my computer keeps crashing from just using it.
I’m still new to learning the difference between Wayland and x11. What are some of the features people like between the two of them?
Wayland provides a simplified, streamlined pipeline for graphics. Lower latency, higher frame rates, less overhead. X is straight out of the late 80s and 90s. Modern X has been cobbled together to work surprisingly well. But that old architecture is what is holding it back today.
People like x11 because Nvidia hasn’t fucked up support for it, and people like Wayland because it is the newer protocol that everything is gonna move to.
What are some of the features people like between the two of them?
The main feature of wayland is that it’s not abandoned.
X.org isn’t abandoned, stop spreading FUD. It’s maintained in a feature freeze state fixing bugs and security issues. Guess who does that? The same people who made Wayland.
Wayland has an actual future. It is being actively developed. Issues are being fixed and new features are added at least somewhat frequently. X11 might survive past the heat death of the universe, but it will be a stale, fossilized codebase maintained entirely by a small group of opinionated people.
So what’s not working in wayland? Screenshots? Remote desktop? Screen recording? Display in general?
all of these have been fixed years ago.
I feel like a lot of people tried Wayland in 2020, a bunch of things didn’t work and they’ve been permanently traumatised.
I switched my laptop years ago, but my desktop only fairly recently - multi screen, mixed DPI with variable refresh rates for gaming took longer to be ready than my laptop’s single screen, normal DPI, fixed refresh rate config.
I wish Wayland would do basic shit like save my window positions for multi-screens. I hate having to set that up every time I reboot.
Wouldn’t that be a matter for your window manager?
KDE Plasma is what I’m running. Doesn’t do this with X11, does with Wayland. Same goes for virtual desktops.
It’s a known issue.
Generally, the KDE team is very aware of some Wayland issues. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
Man I thought it was about the new European twitter concurrent. The replies did make no sense for a while 😅
Only ever had minor issues with wayland after switching. I never did tinker with Xserver or wayland though.
kde, hyprland and mangowc are working without issues for me on cachyos with gtx1660
I can’t believe that these arguments never mention one of the central tenets of engineering: don’t fix what ain’t broke. And Wayland breaks a bunch of what ain’t broke.
Yeah it’s newer etc. people don’t care.
X was broken as fuck and held together by duct tape and zip ties, as long as no one looked at it wrong.
That’s great, now run birdtray.
The shit that relied on it to run, do not work correctly on wayland. Breaking existing shit is what I’m talking about.
It’s a…mail notification??
You’re complaining that Wayland sucks cause it isn’t backwards compatible with your favorite desktop widget?
OK.
X is broken in many different ways. It has a huge codebase made to support a poor design that was optimized for machines 40 years ago. No one wants to touch the code base since it is so incredibly fragile plus the original developers are much older now.
In all fairness, it did work for way longer than anyone expected. I doubt the original designers of the X protocol anticipated it lasting this long.
@possiblylinux127 @Skullgrid protocol itself is mostly OK. Yes, it have many limitations, but it covers much more desktop needs than wayland/mir/surfaceflinger/etc.
But implementation is really broken.
For example, the way how some extensions override vtable is terrible: overriding functions usually should restore base function in vtable before calling it and and restore back after. Breaking this would break call chain and override function will never be called again.
I think, this is a reason why devs switched to wayland. Nobody want to reimplement x11 from scratch, but exisiting implementation is borkedHow much do you k ow about computer graphics and X? The protocol is indeed not ok. It has tons of hacks and is incredibly janky. Doing basic graphics with X is so incredibly awful as you need to jump though tons of hoops.
That that completely ignores the security issues.
Nobody want to reimplement x11 from scratch, but exisiting implementation is borked
And now we have a working actively developed fork of Xorg because the corporation wanted to end it. Xlibre.
And we have an implementation of X11 from scratch, in Zig, being made. Pheonix
Xlibre is backed for the most part by the singular maintainer that was still willing to work on X11 who got kicked out for being too toxic and breaking existing code. For what it’s worth, it also explicitly used MAGA language in its README for a while.
Phoenix is intended to allow for support of legacy software/DEs and provide a more modern/maintainable version of X11. It isn’t trying to compete with Wayland, it’s trying to live alongside it for environments that won’t or can’t move to Wayland. It also technically won’t be a complete X11 implementation, as it’s ignoring older portions of the protocol.
Neither option addresses the elephant in the room: The X11 protocol is still fundamentally broken in a lot of aspects. Multi-monitor support, especially when monitors aren’t the same resolution, refresh rate, or physical size, is broken at a fundamental level. It will never work even as well as Windows, which is already an incredibly low bar to clear.
Wayland is slow moving, sure, but it is a much more stable base to work with than Xorg ever was. From a security, modularity, and extensibility standpoint, Wayland is a lot better. There is a reason most of the Xorg team developed a completely new protocol instead of just reimplementing X11 themselves.
