Please excuse the noobie question, but I am a noob.
What is the reason for using Wayland? Would I notice a difference as a low level user? Is there a difference in watching videos or gaming, for example?
Thanks very much
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Generally speaking, Wayland is modern, X is legacy.
I have been using Ubuntu (with Unity and Gnome desktops) and later KDE (with Plasma) for many years on X for everyday academic work, and switched to Wayland when Plasma 6 was released earlier this year. Wayland is now the new default.
It works very well for me, I’ll never look back to X.
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What did you notice was different when you switched?
Nothing really 
The good thing is, you can just try it and switch back and forth as you like. Pragmatically, if one does not notice a difference, just stick with whatever is the default or reflects your personal taste 
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It’s smoother, more secure, better handles multi monitor setups and resolution scaling. But because it’s relatively new it still lacks some hardware compatibility. For nvidia you should use latest 555 drivers and desktop env that supports explicit sync to avoid flickering
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can you explain more about problems with “hardware compatibility?” Does that mean it doesn’t work with all video cards or it just doesn’t give all the features, like ray tracing or dlss?
can you explain more about problems with “hardware compatibility?”
The main thing is that historically, NVIDIA has not supported Wayland very well in their proprietary Linux driver. That has slowly been changing with recent driver versions, meaning any NVIDIA GPU that is still supported will work fairly well on Wayland with the latest drivers,
But if you have a very old GPU that is not supported by the latest drivers (e. g. a Kepler / GTX 600/700 or older GPU) you’re kind of out of luck and need to either use X11, or Wayland but with the open source drivers that generally have worse performance and less features.
GPUs from Intel / AMD / other vendors that aren’t NVIDIA generally work quite well on Wayland.
or it just doesn’t give all the features, like ray tracing or dlss?
That has nothing to do with it.
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OK, thanks everyone
For me the main issues with Wayland are missing software features that existed in X11 and require some non trivial development to work in Wayland and had yet to be implemented. My shortlist is currently:
- raise application with a hot key or command.
- allow application to request “always on top” and “on all desktops”
- disable touchpad on mouse connected
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@guss77 your list is close to mine also. I would add (and I know they are depreciated.) But I’ve always use latte-dock or plank Which for the moment still work with x11 but not one wayland.
With the new layer wlr layer shell (that KWin supports) there’s no reason that a custom dock cannot be ported to Wayland, its just that the work had not been done yet.
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Hardware can be problematic. I’ve got a very old NVIDIA GeForce GT 730/PCIe/SSE2 video card.
It worked fine under Waylaind up to Plasma 6.0. After that I’ve never been able to get Plasma to load properly under Wayland. I had to switch to X11
I just installed Plasma 6.1 and tried it under Wayland. Still doesn’t work. Black desktop rather than wallpaper and icons. The system gets loaded down. The mouse pointer doesn’t move until a few seconds after I move the mouse.
After all the work I did trying to get running under 6.0, I don’t have the energy to try again to get it running under 6.1
NVIDIA do not offer new drivers - with features that new Kwin versions require - for old GPU architectures. You might have better experience switching to the open source Nouveau driver.
I was on X11 for the longest time, because it worked for me. I still use it on my desktop which has an Nvidia graphics card. I haven’t tried Wayland on it yet, but I didn’t hear good things about Wayland compatibility with Nvidia. I think if you’re happy with it, just stick to X11 or Wayland or whatever you’re using right now.
On my laptop though (intel based GPU), X11 was not cutting it. I have a hidpi screen. This is fine, I run at a high resolution and 150% scaling. However, as soon as I want to plug in an external screen that is not hidpi, it’s a giant mess. X11 cannot seem to handle per-monitor scaling very well, at least not with the GUI options that Plasma provides. It might be possible to do with xrandr but I am not going to spend 5-10 minutes to figure out what command line options I would need to make it scale properly everytime I plug my laptop into a TV or a secondary monitor. Plus, from what I hear, the way X11 does it is that it renders at twice the resolution then scales down. This is very inefficient.
I switched to Wayland on my laptop. I can do per-monitor scaling on wayland very easily in Plasma. It actually works so well, I even consider it working better than in Windows, amazingly… because of how seamless the scaling changes per-window when you move it between monitors. This is my main reason to use Wayland. I haven’t had other issues on my laptop, apart from needing to configure a few apps to use Wayland (electron, firefox, etc.).
I still stick to X11 due to software compatibility. The smaller thing is that Wayland seems less smart about placing new windows, somehow - that’s just a feel I get, not sure how to describe it better.
The bigger issue is a program I use, QuiteRSS. It has a special kind of window that acts as a notification. In X11, this window
- Appears on the bottom right
- Appears on top of everything
- Does not steal focus unless clicked on
- Is not treated as a main window and simply disappears, without desktop effects
- Does not get an entry on the window list
In Wayland, none of the above points is true. Clearly the program gives some instructions to the window manager, and Wayland doesn’t listen. This gets very annoying very fast, especially the part where it appears in the middle of the screen and steals focus.
It’s worst with QuiteRSS but I’ve seen similar issues in other software as well, so for now it’s X11 for me.
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with multiple monitors, it does not remember the position of the window when minimized to the tray. It is noticeably heavier. eats up more RAM. Smoother… I still don’t like it, but it works even worse in the latest versions of KDE X11
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Wayland’s still not there yet for users with HiDPI displays using fractional scaling, even under Plasma 6.1.
Don’t get me wrong, things are far better than they were under 5.x. But if you allow apps to apply their own scaling (necessary, or xwayland apps look downright terrible), the mouse pointer turns minuscule every time it passes over a window related to an application applying it’s own scaling.
I want to use Wayland, really I do - But it’s dealbreaker issues like this, issues surrounding basic desktop functionality, that highlight that Wayland’s simply not there yet.
The mindset “If we break things developers will be forced to adopt native Wayland as opposed to xwayland” will likely result in a number of developers dropping Linux support altogether.
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See KDE Wayland Known/Significant Issues (an earlier version of the page was called Wayland Show Stoppers).
Give it a read and see if anything applies to your use-cases or hardware.
At the moment I’ve stuck with X11 because:
- From one update to the next, X11 has been more stable with Nvidia (the proprietary Nvidia driver was/is in the process of undergoing major changes for Wayland).
- Session restore for native Wayland windows isn’t being delivered any time soon.
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BTW, I was using xrandr commands to fix issues I had with Kwin multi monitor support, then I switched to used kscreen-doctor commands that also work on Wayland.
That is bizarre because it’s Kwin in both cases, and - as far as I know - it’s the same code in both cases.
This problem is the missing Wayland features I complained about above: requesting to be on top and skipping the pager, etc. If QuietRSs will do a real Wayland port (instead of what they’re doing now, which is just to build on Qt windowing system and think that’s enough everywhere) then they could target the wlr layer shell protocol - that is meant for exactly that sort of feature, but will only work in Plasma and a few minor DEs. Also the wlr layer shell implementation in Kwin is not working well enough yet and it needs implementations to test it.
This is a bug in the specific application that doesn’t impotent the Wayland cursor protocol properly and should be reported. As far as I know all KDE apps are good in that regard.
It happens with Firefox. Personally I think it’s the result of a protocol that’s too stripped out, leaving everything up to the DE and the application itself, resulting in a fragmented desktop experience.
It’s a problem that needs to be resolved if Wayland is going to gain mass adoption - As the reality is that people do run HiDPI monitors, many of which do require effective fractional scaling that isn’t a compromise between a blurry mess and minuscule UI elements.
The way things are going, I’ll be hanging onto X11 until the bitter end because fractional scaling is mostly perfect under X11.
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