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

  • JC1@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    On my surface go 3, I used pop os at first and the screen tearing was so bad that I stopped using it. I then changed for arch with gnome on wayland and everything works much better.

    Though, for my main computer, I recently switched my main OS from Windows and went for Hyprland on Arch. I love it. Most applications run fine. Though I have a 3080. This means that most electron apps are very slow, almost unusable. Also, some applications just refuse to open, notably Plex. For jellyfin, half the time the screen is black and I need to restart the app. I also have a KVM switch that I use for my work computer. When I switched to it and came back, I got a red screen of death for which I had to exit Hyprland and get back to SDDM to log back in. I was able to start and play games though. Global shortcuts didn’t work easily (feature, not a bug), so I want to use a support app for Path of Exile. Impossible on Wayland. And finally, I tend to use a screenshoting tool. Flameshot isn’t available on wayland so I used snappy, but it doesn’t freeze the frame, rendering it useless.

    Now I switched over qtile in X11. Everything works fine, electron apps are much more snappy. Most importantly, the WM doesn’t crash when I use my KVM, so my sound device works perfectly. The only issue I’m facing is the audio, there seem to have a very small delay (I’m using pipewire).

    The only thing that I miss now is a way for me to assign an audio output to an application so that if I close the application it even restart my computer, that assignment is still remembered. Currently I have a tool that does that that I autostart with my WM, but it doesn’t redirect the audio, it just adds the other assignment without removing the default audio output.

    There you go, wayland is not recommended if you have a nvidia GPU, even though it still works.