Just wanted to share for the 10 people like me who has with an Nvidia + dual screen setup on ArchLinux (btw) with KDE Plasma desktop that since the new plasma 6 update I can finally use the Wayland session option!
The wayland should work
has been around for the last 5 years and 5 years ago it was not even close, then 1 or 2 years ago it started not crashing but multi-screen was not OK (I tried all the kernel and driver parameters).
Now for me and my 5+ years-old setup (probably a lot of legacy plasma settings in my .config) it was finally seamless.
From previous tries I already knew that the desktop feels WAY smoother (true 60 fps everywhere, specially for the video players in web browser).
Feels great so far, discord screen-sharing is not there but can be done from Firefox if needed so OK for me.
I hope this post will be informative for some like me who tried several time over the years and didn’t had much hope.
PS : the cursor has a weirdly strong outline (too shiny to my taste) feels like unintended but not a big problem. I spent 30 mins in the options but couldn’t find anything about that.
You should try one huge monitor and use an addon that let you snap windows to 1/4, 1/2 of the screen, etc (30+ inches)… Been using Wayland for years with no problems
Also switched here. OBS on wayland has some new features, that I’m excited to take advantage of, but I still cannot find a way to share some windows, but not an entire monitor.
OBS has another feature: “virtual monitor”. It does what it sounds like, and creates a virtual monitor, which you can then treat like a real monitor, like extending to, or unifying outputs, etc.
It also has a feature to share the entire workspace, but it doesn’t work like I expect, and instead uses all monitors (not workspaces) as a single input source. I suspect that’s a bug tbh, because this behavior is useless considering you can just add monitors as a source side by side.
discord screen-sharing is not there but can be done from Firefox if needed
You can also install KDE’s XWayland Video Bridge, which converts Wayland screen sharing into an app for discord to share.
flatpak install --user --or-update https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/xwaylandvideobridge-nightly/org.kde.xwaylandvideobridge.flatpakref
You might also want to add the repo for updates,
but I think it’s been down for a little while for me.Edit: There’s a new repo:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists xwaylandvideobridge-nightly https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/xwaylandvideobridge-nightly/xwaylandvideobridge-nightly.flatpakrepo
I tried Plasma 6 + Wayland on Arch btw earlier today, ran into the first issues in like 3 minutes after installation and switched back to Xorg for good. Wayland never worked for me. Yes it’s much more smooth and has nice features but it just never works that well on my machines. Btw for all the Wayland bodyguards, it was on Intel integrated graphics, not on NVidia or anything like that
What were the issues?
The whole system completely froze when I tried to resize the application launcher (aka Start menu). I switched to tty and saw Plasma getting stopped. I could launch the second GUI session but ehh I just rebooted. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a Wayland issue but anyways I always have something not working well on it. I also had bad performance which was on Plasma 5 + Wayland too (on Xorg it was fine of course). On another machine I even got artifacts when using it lol. And btw Plasma 6 is really unstable, even on Xorg. Don’t use it in production
Damned, this is so frustrating when you cannot switch yet. Not like Wayland is perfect anyway but I felt the same with pipewire where the new system as some needed improvement but the switch is harsh.
Never had issues with Pipewire smh. I didn’t even notice the transition
Same, this is also the first time that I am able to use wayland on my nvidia card. There are still issues, but there are being worked out. 6.0.2 solved the issue with plasmashell just quitting whenever I turned one of my monitors off.
My experience with this setup is generally:
- login to a black screen
- try to switch windows or desktops, then something appears with glitchy green animations
- get annoyed
- go back to x
I’m sure I missed something stupid like installing drivers properly, but I’ve been too busy / lazy to fix it.
You need to enable DRM KMS on Nvidia.
Neat, naive question, what’s the impact on Steam/Proton?
Wine is fine so I guess proton would be.