I’m a seasoned Linux user, but mostly for servers and services, not really for desktop use.

I’ve dabbled in some desktop distros on my personal rig a few times in the past, but ultimately due to specific games, I’ve gone back to Windows.

I recently installed Arch and KDE. Upon initial boot I noticed it was defaulted to Wayland. Every time I would try to log in it would just go to a black screen then cycle back to the login screen. Picking X11 would bring me to the desktop.

Basic Specs:

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3D
  • nVidia RTX 4090

I have been doing some reading into this and it looks like the issue is due to the proprietary nVidia drivers, but there are solutions to work around this.

I know nothing of Wayland other than its supposed to be more secure. My question is, is it worth the time/effort to get Wayland working? I primarily use my system for gaming. X11 seems to be working just fine for me right now.

Forgive me if I’m using some of the terminology wrong, still learning.

EDIT - Selling my gpu is not an option. I knew ahead of time that AMD has superior Linux support, but the 4090’s performance can’t be matched by anything AMD has. Maybe next upgrade I’ll go back to AMD if they have the top performer.

  • @Karmatrine
    2•1 year ago

    Wayland got pretty much working as a protocol. There is still a room for improvements. But usually gnome is pretty much stable now on wayland for both Nvidia and AMD. With Nvidia it’s kinda “f around and find out” on other DE/WM with Wayland session. I could make it work on green cards but, there were issues. Flickering, memory leaks, etc. Not the most perfect experience. However with AMD everything seems in most cases to be better than x11. About difference, Wayland is basically refactored session from the core pointing in security approaches, and fixing X11 flaky behavior from it’s core.

    My personal opinion. There is no reason not to use Wayland on any GPU. Unless you need something hacky that works just because of core x11 issues.