Hey Community,

Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.

  • What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
  • I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
  • what would be the best way to migrate?
  • why have/haven’t you made the switch?

Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor

laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps

  • Coelacanthus
    23•1 year ago

    You should, I think. You don’t have Nvidia GPU, so you can avoid almost bugs and get better performance.

    Advantages:

    1. Better performance. e.g. for Firefox, @lilydjwg got double performance in wayland.
    2. Better multi-screen with multi-DPI support.
    3. Better maintaince. Many DE has put more and more to wayland. And many new features will only be implemented in wayland. (That’s because implementing many new features will be difficult or even impossible in X11 old software architecture, as KWin developers said.)

    Disadvantages:

    1. Some missing feature, such as remote desktop.
    2. Many bugs when you use Nvidia GPU.
    3. None of the compositors except KWin and Hyprland can use input methods with electron.

    I don’t know which DE/WM you use. If you use Plasma/GNOME, migration is simple, just switch in SDDM/GDM. If you use i3, you can try sway, it’s compatible with i3 config. If you use others, you can try hyprland or wayfire. Wayfire has fantastic animations.

    I switch to wayland because I buy a new screen with different DPI… But when I switched, I found I got better performance and video hardware acceleration in Firefox (this feature was introduced to Firefox Wayland first).

      • Coelacanthus
        1•1 year ago

        It’s reference implementation, but isn’t suitable for daily use. Because it lacks some convenient features. It’s used as a behavior reference when some one develop a new compositor.

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          lacks some convenient features

          found out the hard way. haha.

          should have read your answer first.

          thanks anyway. Ive took time to try out sway in the meantime. firefox still doesnt want to run in wayland mode. but In general sway fells good (coming from i3 daily driver)

          • Coelacanthus
            1•1 year ago

            Firefox only uses wayland by default in nightly. You can enable it in stable version by setting environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1.

            • @[email protected]
              1•1 year ago

              yeah it is set.

              even after reboot xeyes still recognizes it and about section clarifies the window protocol as xwayland.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      double performance in wayland

      Ya that is complete nonsense.

      Firefox accelerated decoding works in X11 as does mixed DPI

      • Coelacanthus
        1•1 year ago

        There is a benchmark use https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

        https://blog.lilydjwg.me/2021/11/12/display-tearing.215968.html

        • X11 + Intel card, 1080p 60fps, GPU fully utilized, one third of frames dropped! 4k 60fps is about the same. It turns out that the focus is not on the resolution (the GPU isn’t used to its full capacity anyway), it’s on the frame rate of the video.
        • Wayland + Intel cards, 4k 60fps, not even dropping frames, let alone anything else, and the GPU is used for about half of the graphics calculations.

        For hardware decode, when I switched to wayland, it was only implemented in Wayland. After they implememted EGL on X11, they implemented hardware decode on X11 as well.

        For mixed DPI, applications can implement it use screen information, but not all applictions will do this. But wayland ask them to implement this feature.