Maybe that's a stupid question (some might say there's no such thing), but why would I run Wayland?
It looks like I would have to jump through hoops whereas x11 just works. I'm not being sarcastic or ironical, just genuinely wondering.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2022
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For me, it's that everything feels just slightly smoother, applications open somewhat quicker and typing feels more 'direct' (less latency).
Certainly nothing revolutionary for now, so if you actually have to jump through many hoops, I wouldn't bother.
My distro pre-installs a Wayland session for my DE, so to switch, I just have to log out, select the other session and log back in.
Yeah easy switching back and forth makes the transition smooth. I use Wayland as my 99% of the time, but if I happen to run into problems I can just logout and start X.
Good point. I've certainly had my moments where some application behaved slightly differently and it annoyed me, so I simply went back to X11 until that was fixed or I had a workaround or didn't need to use that application anymore.
It looks like I would have to jump through hoops whereas x11 just works.
If you have to jump through hoops I probably wouldn't bother. Most distros are shipping it by default so I would just wait until that happens.
Some benefits that I can think of off the top of my head:
- Top quality high and mixed resolution support.
- Tear free rendering and capturing.
- (Small) improved performance.
- Games are much better behaved. I can reliably window, maximize and full-screen them. They also never mess with the display resolution.
- Seems to have less windows (especially hover tool tips) just hanging around. I guess the compositor can close these at the right time under Wayland.
- Proper secure screen locking. (I think GNOME + GDM can do something safe on X but most display managers + lock screens can't cooperate well enough to manage this.)
Honestly it is nothing major (except the mixed dpi stuff) but a nice step up. And if the X devs say that X is unmaintainable and this is going to lead to many improvements and be able to be maintained for the next age of displays on Linux I'm happy to make the switch now that it is the default and I am not aware of any problems for my workflow.
Thanks for those answers.
I use I3wm and don't play games on my gnu/linux computers so for now I think I'll stick with it but it seems sway would be the way to go for me if I was ready.
I'm not using wayland because I need to screenshare
Is not OBS working on Wayland yet?
Not positive about OBS, it's mostly support in software I use
What do you mean by "not positive" and what is the relation with that you support it or not?
You mean that is not your kind of software since you didn't have a positive experience with it and because of that you don't support it?
"Not positive" in this context means "unsure" (i.e., the above commenter is unsure about whether or not OBS works in Wayland, but they rely on some other software which they know is incompatible with Wayland)
Thank you for the explanation.
I am not familiar with that kind of expression.
Yeah it's going to take a while for people to move over to Wayland.
Scaling on Wayland doesn't work for me so X11 is here to stay until that gets fixed
Hmm, do you think that more than 10% of desktop Linux users are on Wayland?
I think a better question would be, 'Aren't you mad that about 90% of Linux desktop still don't run Wayland?'
Why so negative? I think about something like "Nearly 10% of Linux systems already use Wayland".
I agree, 10% is huge. I only started using Wayland a handful of years ago and I would consider myself a somewhat early adopter of technology. Just about transition will follow a roughly sigmoid adoption curve. The first tiny fraction will switch soon, then the early adopters. Now we are at the point where most major distros are all shipping it by default and LTS releases where it wasn't the default are dropping out of support. There are still a couple of big blockers such as some graphics drivers but when those drop even more people will transition by default. 10% is significantly more than just early adopters so I would expect that as more and more people fall into the "enabled by default" category the number will steadily rise to 90% over the next 3-5 years. Then it will slow down as the final blockers are eliminated and the resistors finally give in.
right? it went from fedora being the only distro putting proper effort into using and supporting it to more and more distros using it as the standard
I wish I could use Wayland but the software I use to work, which needs to take screenshots of my desktop, can't take any screenshots from it (on my case, using Sway). And the company who made it give zero fs to find a fix to it.
freelancer.com? I occasionally work on there and was thinking of using Wayland, do they not work together?
No, Upwork. I have only tested it on Sway, not sure if on GNOME that behavior changes.
I wish my machine didn't have an Nvidia GPU so I could use it.
The only reason I'm not using Wayland is because I need an uncapped framerate for osu!, which isn't possible right now on Wayland
I couldn't run signal or bitwarden when I used Wayland. (Some electron bug). And also CS:GO.
- Signal on Wayland.
- CS go runs trough xwayland, there are also other workarounds.
- Bitwarden workaround for wayland discussed over here.
I've been able to run all those on Fedora KDE Wayland recently, maybe it's fixed now