Let’s talk about #Linux on the desktop, #Gnome and the state of #Wayland in 2024.
Unfortunately I still have some breaking bugs with wayland on my laptop.
Most notably big blue button (an open source video conference tool) refuses to connect when using firefox with wayland.
Firefox does not allow copying of urls in wayland if a certain setting is enabled in kde plasmas settings.
I cannot move views around or redock windows in eclipse.
Xilinx vivadi randomly crashes on wayland but not on X11.
Notably, aside from the url copying problem, most of those things will not be an issue for the typical user
Plasma is even better with Wayland, but yeah, it’s fine in Gnome too. 2016 it wasn’t ready but from 2021 or so it’s been fine.
If you avoid Nvidia, it have been ready for many years. And to be honset, not sure X11 was really stable with Nvidia either. My main issue with Wayland, is that X doesn’t have multi dpi support… and for that I really cannot blame Wayland. Also, Skype doesn’t have screensharing, well, they actually had for a while, but then removed it… still, hard to blame on Wayland.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
Ha, your first sentence is just plain wrong. It was quite broken under “normal” usecases with per-DE bugs.
For example, on KDE, about 1.5 years ago the bug finally got fixed where your Wayland session would completely crash if your monitor lost any signal whatsoever (monitor sleep or shutting off the monitor). If you ask me, that is an very standard usecase without which there is no world where said action crashing the entire session would be considered ready for general use.
I think we are there now, just some visual glitches nowadays, also some recent glitches with monitor sleep, but Wayland very rarely crashes anymore.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
See, this attitude is exactly why Linux will never become mainstream. On Windows you don’t need to research if your machine will be able to run your operating system of choice, it just works.
If you’re a user, and you can install Linux without seeing a single warning that your hardware is going to cause issues, your distro is at fault. The moment you boot the installer, it knows damn well that your using Nvidia hardware and what the implications are. Distros either ignore the predictable instability, or they believe there is no problem, and either way the end user isn’t to blame for taking that at face value.
The truth is, Linux on Nvidia works fine, except for some very specific laptops with stupid mux chips, and even that is something Linux should fix, not the end user. Luckily, Linux installers don’t even boot on those machines, so the end user can just ignore Linux and continue using Windows.
You just can’t use Wayland if you want your Linux system to be stable, but X11 works fine and it will continue to do so for many years. Part of the Wayland issues still come from intermediate code refusing to work around Nvidia’s bullshit, ignoring known bugs and technically-spec-compliant-but-different stuff because it’s easier to blame Nvidia for everything. Wayland also makes some weird assumptions that I disagree with (“if the Wayland socket dies, your application must crash, there is no recovery”) which make minor stability problems a lot worse in practice.
Nvidia may be to blame for their shitty drivers when it comes to the core problem of the bad experiences Nvidia owners will have, not the end users buying the wrong hardware. You can’t seriously expect people who try it out for the first time to read up on the drama and controversy Linus Torvalds has caused over the years.
And even with all that, many serious Linux users who know full well the pain they’re about to subject themselves to still need Nvidia. ROCm is great but it’s nowhere near to as efficient and well-supported as CUDA. Whatever Intel has doesn’t come close and whatever macOS offers doesn’t work because even Nvidia has perfect Linux support compared to Apple.
Machine learning pays my bills, and I never had a choice on my graphics card brand. To be sure, I wanted an AMD for the open source drivers, but CUDA remains essential to me. RocM support from AMD is a joke, and isn’t anywhere close to an alternative. Reseachers release code that only runs on CUDA for a good reason. To say that I don’t get to complain is going too far
Exactly. You’d think with the two things they’re really competitive on being raw flops and memory, they’d be a viable option for ML and scientific compute, but they’re just such a pain to work with that they’re pretty much irrelevant.
That’s true, but it also wasn’t fair to be a Wayland detractor then.
Nvidia needed to do stuff to make that combination viable, and their delay in doing so wasn’t anyone’s fault but Nvidia’s
You get to complain to Nvidia, not Linux developers and maintainers.
I got my Nvidia GPU before I even considered moving to Linux. I am honestly getting pretty tired of reading these gatekeeping comments telling me “I’m not allowed to complain about anything” or how I’m a trash person for buying an Nvidia card in the first place. Nvidia is the largest GPU manufacter, people are going to own Nvidia cards, you need to live with it. Be constructive and nice to other people.
X11 is rock solid with Nvidia, never had a single problem.
I had a lot of issues with Wayland on KDE, lots of flickering issues all the time. I moved to Hyprland and things are mostly fine. IntelliJ has ocasional problems but they are working on a Wayland version anyways.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
Yes, but Linux users aren’t always the most wealthy computer users, and people get given tech, inherit tech, bin dive for tech or get a good deal on tech in a primary or secondary market. Consumer choice is very often a privilege, and consumer awareness isn’t always total. So complain away Nvidia users!
And maybe if enough people complain NVIDIA will start behaving less like a bag of dicks?
Wishful thinking, I know, but one can hope.
I use NVIDIA (got macbookpro5,3 for free) and complain about NVIDIA 😂👌🏻 good like this?
thats exactly how I ended up with nvidia. its what i could get my hands on at the time, you just have to see their market share to explain how they are much easier to come by.
As a DWM user I won’t be moving for a long time. Yes I know about DWL, but it dosnt have half the patches I use yet.
I do like the lower amount of screen tearing on Wayland, but I’ve minimised it in Xorg.
I think this thread shows it’s very hardware/driver dependent?
I’m posting from Wayland running on Plasma 5, on 100% recent gen intel hardware, and as far as I’ve been able to tell I have zero deficiencies that matter in functionality. (aside from whatever little bugs surely exist that I’m not noticing - and big things no one really has yet like HDR)
I don’t have much sympathy for the haters who think we shouldn’t be moving to Wayland ever, but every recent thread seems to confirm that Nvidia and possibly other HW configs are still likely to be problematic.
Plasma may not ever implement window shading for Wayland, but I’m hopeful. That’s probably my last blocker.
This should not be surprising at this point that a lot of users prefer the wayland session, gamingonlinux survey shows that wayland adoption is consistently increasing (while X11 usage declines).
How is the state of tilig WMs? Last time I ried Wayland, mixing and matching WMs and status bars was really flakey, with font scaling and rendering issues. There are certain things I will no longer compromise on in a WM, and if I wanted to be forced to use a specific desktop to get a working graphical environment (functioning scaling, for instance), I’d use a Mac.
Herbstluftwm hasn’t been ported - is there a similar configuration file-less tiling WM? On X, I could also settle for bspwm; both WMs are completely configurable on the command line. How about bars? I’m using polybar right now, but there are a dozen to choose from under X, any of which I can use with whichever WM (and have it function properly).
Again, mere months ago, trying to get font scaling to work properly with the same scaling in all applications was messed up. Under X, if I set a font and size in any program (that supports font selection), I get the same apparent font size - because programs get fonts from X and the same code does all font rendering which makes everything consistent. How is that on Wayland, now, because that was a major deal-breaker last a couple of months ago.
Using wayfire (disabling the fancy resources eating plugins) + waybar + plus a bunch wlr utilities (some from sway).
I’m using integrated intel gpus. There’s a laptop with both the integrated intel gpu and a nvidia discrete one, but I had to configure the bios to only use the inegrated one, both the binary nvidia drivers, and the open source nvidia drivers fail to set
fbdev=1(the external hdmi monitor is the one associated to the nvidia gpu, and it gets a blank screen), which is required for enabling KMS, which is required for wayland, so no luck. Nouveau actually works, but it’s not stable enough, after some time of use the monitor turn off and there’s no way to turn it back on, and it feels slow or lagging compared to the intel gpu, although it should be the opposite. So I gave up on nvidia on that laptop, and any other box only has the integrated intel gpu anyways. I’ve read of successful stories with nvidia, both with the binary and the open drivers, but I think it’s not a generic thing that all nvidia gpus will work well on wayland with nvidia drivers. The noveau drivers are the only ones working for some gpus, but not stable enough. So I stick with the recommendation to stay away from nvidia if using wayland…I guess although WM still applies, on the wayland jargon they’re called compositors, and the wayland compositors are not as light as the Xorg WMs, since there’s no Xorg server, and part of the responsibility of the server goes to the compositors on wayland…
There’s labwc, which is the compositor I would have chosen, but the developer decided to stick with xml configuration equivalent to the the openbox one, and also with the openbox themes/styles, which I never liked. On Xorg I used fluxbox + tint2 + …, and I tried openbox, but totally disliked it compared to fluxbox… But other than config and theming, I like its idea of being a light compositor.
Actually by disabling the plugins I am on wayfire, it’s pretty much labwc but with new decent config (I really like its config BTW), and using the gui toolkit theming, so no specific wayfire theming at all, which is nice, as opposed to the labwc own theming… Still, labwc is also an option for some.
Wayfire and labwc are not tiling compositors as most of all others, :)
I used sway for a long time(months to a year?) and it was very stable. I’m currently messing with plasmas tiling option ATM and it works okay… Not as fluid but well enough that I haven’t switched back.
My issue is my dependency on touchegg…
In my experience, any HDMI’s or Display Ports plugged into my GPU have terrible performance on Wayland while working perfectly on X11, so it seems there are still problems. Though tbf X11 doesn’t work at all with HDMI’s plugged into my motherboard so it could be a hardware issue? I have a 11 year old motherboard so idk.
Let me guess, Nvidia
I’m on amd
Oh, well its probably Nvidias fault
If you’re mixing a dedicated GPU and onboard graphics you need to set the dedicated GPU as primary somewhere, otherwise all screens get rendered on the onboard and “reverse PRIME’d” to the dedi GPU outputs.
I’ll see if I can find the snippet that fixed this for me.
I’ve just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn’t get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I’ll wait a little bit more.
Did you file a bug report with the Sunshine devs?
Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.
What hardware do you have? I have all AMD, and it works just fine on Nobara on Wayland.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA. I was buying a new PC half a year ago, and only started even considering to make the switch to Linux few months after that, so I am at a pretty unlucky point where I just had recently spent a lot of money for new-gen PC, but without knowing that I should really go for AMD.
I will make the switch to AMD as soon as it’s justifiable, but I’m too lazy to deal with second-hand resale and it’s hard to justify a new GPU when I still have the current gen, but from wrong manufacturer.
I had numerous problems with Wayland when I had an NVIDIA video card. Since I switched to an AMD video card, it has been a blissful experience. Wayland now works perfectly.
I totally empathize. I did the same thing at the end of 2020 and just switched to an AMD GPU last month.
Gnome has been pretty great on Wayland for a while.
Personally I’ve been using it since 2017, and besides a stint with a 1080 Ti that was constantly causing issues, it’s been pretty good besides screen sharing in some programs. Speaking of…
I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app or people would abandon that shitty app. Unfortunately neither looks likely.
Use vesktop. Works great on Wayland and supports streaming with audio.
From my experience, it seems like the video quality really sucks the moment you try to stream anything more complex, like a 3D game - no indication on my side, but a friend complained and I got the same result checking the stream on a second device. Frame rate drops to 2fps or worse, with bad quality on each frame.
I remember reading an issue on vesktop about it, but sounds like it might just come down to missing HW acceleration in electron for the relevant APIs? Though if you have any suggestions and/or better results, I’d love to hear about it.
Right, actually you can use Discord natively on Wayland just passing the flags mentioned in the post. The only issue I have found with the official Discord client is that it doesn’t support streaming audio alongside to streaming your screen, but vesktop does the trick for that.
Nobara (wayland/gnome) + NVIDIA 2080ti, screen and projector dual setup = never add any issues. I’m a noob, came to linux 6 months ago. I’m really curious about why so many people are having problems with Wayland and NVIDIA but my system basically worked out of the box. I guess I was lucky?
