About time. Wayland has worked great for several years on Intel and AMD systems. Nvidia is finally caring to catch up.
Its perpetually fixed the next common Xorg complaint, including disabling vsync, redirection outside of the DE for fullscreen apps, multi monitor scaling, fractional scaling, global keyboard shortcuts, a tiling wm implementation, HDR support, session restore, and soon remote access
The software that doesn’t support it and doesn’t want to support it will never adapt and have alternatives.
Its been ready, reliable, and a much better experience for so long. Ubuntu coming around is a testament to that.
@cm0002 To bad, guess I’ll have to switch distros.
@cm0002 Ubuntu isn’t ditching X altogether as advertised, some of the spins, including Mate which I use, will continue to support X.
Sometimes, I feel like the average Linux user is just on very old or at the very least pretty old hardware.
I know I am probably wrong, but it just seems odd that in X11 my 8 year old ultrawide 144hz 1080p monitor is literally a stuttery and jittery mess when moving windows, when animations play, and even moving the cursor around. I believe I tried playing a game, and it also being a stuttery mess, but I can’t remember as that was around 6-7 months ago.
Using Wayland, on the other hand, as soon as I logged in for the first time it was definitely noticeably NOT like it was in X11. Frame rate was 144hz, everything mentioned above just worked as I would expect. It even feels smoother than Windows which I still have to use every now and then. Gaming on it is a blast 99% of the time, and I game A LOT! (completed ~10 games on openSUSE Tumbleweed just this year!)
So, sometimes I just feel like I said, and as I also said, I’m probably wrong. I have never logged back into X11 except when I upgraded my graphics card a month or so ago because of the stuttery feeling of X11. Some things did work better under X11, I guess, but that is probably because of the stagnant adoption of Wayland?
Besides me using Linux since the beginning of this year until now, I am still a Linux noob, so my opinions are just that. I have no real knowledge of Linux that would qualify me to be any good source of info. I just don’t get the slow adoption is all!
I love wayland, but you can’t deny that it still lacks support and stability.
But maybe this is one of those chicken or the egg, maybe we need the transition to push the quality
I can deny it
Linux idiot here. What is wayland? And what is XOrg?
They are display server communication protocols. Essentially, the computer clients give the display server information, and then the display server processes that information and sends it to the screen. For example, a game might say, “The player is controlling a red guy with a hat and mustache” and the display server draws a Mario on the screen.
X Server is 40 years old. It’s tried and tested, but is not built on modern coding standards. For example, it has not kept up with modern security, allowing a bad actor to tell X to draw a bit of malicious code that tricks the display server into giving it control of other programs. For this reason, the developers of X are sunsetting it and have designed Wayland to replace it.
Wayland is a rewrite of X from the ground up, and is much more secure. It keeps each program in its own bubble, so if a rogue app tries to gain control of programs outside its bubble, it can’t. However, such a large change requires other programs to buy in, creating s vicious cycle where developers don’t want to switch to Wayland until it’s mature, and Wayland is unable to mature without developers buying in. That’s why this “new” protocol has been in progress for the past 16 years, and yet linux users still disagree on whether it is mature enough for wide adoption.
GNOME desktop environment has been at the forefront of Wayland adoption, and has announced plans to stop using X in a future release. Ubuntu, which uses GNOME by default, has announced they are dropping X so they can see how it works in their short-term release before pushing it to their 2026 long-term release. Essentially, they are doing it when the timing works best for them rather than wait until GNOME forces them to drop it.
Been using Ubuntu since 2008… looks like this will be the last year for me.
I’d be surprise if you notice the difference.
It’d helpful if the got Wayland to work first.
It doesn’t?
My experience has been less that stellar, but it’s always improving.
I’ve accepted it’s inevitable, but at the moment nobody’s forcing me to switch and I have zero motivation to. I haven’t had any issues with X in years.
Thankfully, I’m not in Ubuntu, so I don’t have anyone shoving their decisions down my throat (software-wise).
It’s funny people’s X and Wayland experiences are so varied. I could never stop screen tearing with X, on multiple machines, with Wayland I never had any tearing. It brought along different small issues, but never had tearing, which in my opinion was a better option than no issues and tearing. These issues got fixed with time, and now I’d hate to go back to X.
When’s the last time you used Wayland? I tried a few years back and there were quite a few paper cuts.
I’ve been using sway for about six months and there is one obnoxious paper cut, and one thing that just doesn’t work.
The paper cut for me is a java app that won’t render menus correctly. Most menus work, but there are a few that don’t draw properly.
The one thing that still doesn’t work is deskflow.
Screen sharing with zoom and Google meet and jitsi work fine. Keyboard input changes work fine, and most things are just hunky dory.
Oh, about 4 or 6 months ago? I had problems with font scaling and multiple monitors with different resolutions, and correct DPI handling. I hear that’s all been fixed, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I have no reason to try it. X works just fine for me. I have herbstluftwm set up the way I like it, and there’s only one Wayland window manager that looks at all similar in functionality to herbstluftwm (niri?). picom gives me all of the functionlity I find useful or attractive: dimming non-focused windows and light tranparency on terminals. Switching would be a lot of work, finding a bar to work like polybar, getting the WM set up, finding a good terminal to replace rio. And why? For what? X works well and reliably, and I don’t have any edge cases like I did in Wayland, so should I make the time and effort to switch? There’s no compelling reason, at the moment. There’s nothing I want, or need, from Wayland.
I’ll probably log in to Niri to play with it one of these days when I have nothing better to do. I’m curious if it does anything herbstluftwm doesn’t.
Eventually, I may be forced to switch, but at the moment I just see a bunch of unnecessary effort on my part to just get back to what I have under X now. Seriously, what’s the compelling reason for me to use Wayland?
Well, Niri is a dynamic and scrolling tiling compositor. So it offers that.
Well, and Niri supports Wayland.
Niri is interesting. It has a configuration file, and the config file is in yet another fairly complex config language: not toml, not yaml, not ini, not json. That’s something I’m avoiding.
It’s a novel and interesting approach.
I can’t log in or shutdown on Wayland. Switch to X and it works fine.
I’m sure it’s fixable, but why should I have to?
This is a wild question to ask about Linux lol
