I’ve been on Wayland for the past two years exclusively (Nvidia).
I thought it was okay for the most part but then I had to switch to an X session recently. The experience felt about the same. Out of curiosity, I played a couple of games and realized they worked much better. Steam doesn’t go nuts either.
Made me think maybe people aren’t actually adopting it that aggressively despite the constant coverage in the community. And that maybe I should just go back.
Removed by mod
I never switched. Just doesn’t seem worth the hassle.
Loads of broken features and extra work shoved onto the individual compositor / WM developers. I don’t care about security on my own computer, I just want screen sharing and clipboards to work reliably.
That said, I use just one (ultrawide) monitor, so even the benefits aren’t really there at all.
Couple of years since I switched and I rarely run into any issues with my all-AMD build
I’ll adopt it when it’s ready.
The first and the best answer
I have been running wayland with sway for around 6-10 months (I forget when I switched). I have a 4-monitor setup and hated the default workspace management but swaysome convinced me to switch. I heard a lot of stuff about how manual tiling is bad but I actually don’t mind it and kind of prefer it to automatic tiling from AwesomeWM which I used before sway, .
I know I have used it since Fedora made it default in 2016. I think I actually used it a while before that, but I don’t have any thing to help me pin down the exact time.
Since I only use Intel built-in GPU, everything have worked pretty well. The few times I needed to share my screen, I had to logout and login to an X session. However, that was solved a couple of years ago. Now, I just wait for Java to get proper Wayland support, so I fully can ditch X for my daily use and get to take advantage of multi DPI capabilities of Wayland.
I use xmonad/xfce which is not available on wayland, and I have no real desire to research alternatives and config them/learn their keyboard shortcuts/etc. Its unclear to me what the benefit is from switching, from a UI perspective. Probably nothing.
But I’ll probably give it a try anyway in a few months maybe, I hear they merged something to make nvidia less glitchy, so maybe wait for that to be in my distro.
When it is ready and passes black screen or can use hardware acceleration without crashing compositor, I’ll use wayland
I tried it a few times on different hardware. There were weird lags, freezes, crashes, latency, artifacts, flickering (once I had to reinstall the system to fix it), no cursor in games etc etc so no thanks. It doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s possible to fix if I spend a week in the terminal but ehh idk. It’s just not ready for me I guess. And I didn’t even have enough time to find compatibility issues. I’m a little bit afraid that by the time Wayland is ready, a new system will already be required lol. It’s getting better though so probably it will be ready for business/production in a few years idk. The only thing I can definitely tell is that it must not be the default on regular desktop distros now. Wayland may be good but it’s not mature. Switching to it on the login screen is a 3 seconds task and it fixes so many issues, especially on older hardware
Yes. I’ve used X11 for far too long to have any rose tinted glasses for the piece of fucking broken shit it always was. a LOT of people don’t realize how many hacks, workarounds and sheer tears and duct tape goes into making the piece of shit render the smallest line on the screen.
That’s also why Phoronix comment section neckbeards are so infuriating for me. They talk like X.Org works like at all.
I’ve been on Wayland (Hyprland) for 8 months, unfortunately on Nvidia.
For my home workstation running Debian/Bookworm I started running Wayland-Plasma when Xorg mysteriously refused to work after replacing my video card. Wayland just worked and really had no issues for me so while I’m sure I could have solved the X11 problem I didn’t have a real need to.
I also changed my laptop to Wayland-Plasma more recently. A problem I had was in setting up the right modes for external monitors on laptops but that seems to work OK now. Generally things just work.
Have been using GNOME with Wayland on a dual GPU NVIDIA laptop for 2 years. DE runs on the integrated Intel card; Steam, games, anything that needs dGPU runs on NVIDIA. It’s been a smooth experience.
Yes, I have Wayland on both my gaming machine and my laptop. I switched for security reasons (i.e. client input isolation). I think Wayland compositors tend to be buggier than X WMs/DEs, just because they are newer/more immature, and there is less native support for it. But some native Wayland-only programs are really good, like Foot is pretty much the perfect terminal emulator for me, being lightweight and fast but with sixel support too. It pretty much has every feature I want to use (except ligature support but that’s not super important to me) without any of the features I wouldn’t use (looking at you Kitty).
However the downside is the occasional program that just doesn’t work on Wayland, like JetBrains IDEs, which are one of the few pieces of proprietary software I voluntarily use. JetBrains IDEs use a bunch of X hacks so they have some buggy behaviour on Xwayland. I really hope JetBrains hurries up with their native Wayland support, especially since so many DEs and distros are moving to Wayland by default now.
I also wish there were more tiling compositors out there. It seems to just be Sway, Hyprland, River, DWL, and QTile (which has a Wayland option, which is very cool). Of which I have daily driven Hyprland and River and been happy with them. I know there’s others but they seem pretty obscure or abandoned and not something I’d be looking to daily drive. On X there are so many WMs for every possible use case. And of course the popular X WMs are pretty mature software; I don’t remember many breaking bugs when I was on i3, but Hyprland and River are in very active development which means a new update can mean bugs of varying levels of annoying/need a workaround/need to downgrade.
I started daily driving sway during the transition from wlc to wlroots back in early 2019 (sway 1.0), so it’s been 5 years.
Note that’s since I got an HiDPI laptop in 2015, I have been looking at Wayland progress from the GNOME side for a long time, but not completly daily driving it because of some annoyances.