Hey guys, what are the pros and cons to wayland if I intend to use my PC for gaming + others?
Comparisons to X?
General impressions?
Your advice on if I should use it or stick with X?
My PC parts are arriving soon, and while Ive been a linux user since 2016 its the first time I intend to fully main drive linux, so I guess im just looking for as much information as I can get on it.
Feel free to post links to articles or anything that will answer if you prefer, we’re on a link aggregator after all ;) and I dont mind reading.
Thanks in advance :)
A few gaming related downsides for me:
There’s no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you’ll have some extra input lag. It shouldn’t matter if you play fullscreen games though.
Missing Xorg tools like xinput or xrandr. Maybe I’m too finicky, but sometimes I can’t find the exact mouse speed I want through the settings GUI (for example, in KDE Plasma there are 11 steps from slowest to fastest), and through xinput commands I can just type any speed I want, which is very useful if one step feels too slow but the next one feels too fast.
I also want to increase the screen’s gamma level sometimes and I haven’t found any way to do that at all on Wayland.
There’s no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you’ll have some extra input lag.
The reason compositors historically increase input lag so much is due to design flaws in Xorg. With VRR Wayland has comparable input lag to Xorg with no compositor, and it’s only slightly worse than Xorg without VRR. In the best case scenario Wayland can have better input lag than uncomposited Xorg: there’s a reason the Steam Deck uses Wayland in game mode.
I think as of recently Wayland with compositing might actually have better input lag than Xorg without compositing, but I haven’t seen any thorough benchmarks in the past few months.
Yeah; I’ve a trackball mouse with an unhelpful button layout. XInput gives me the power to change the button assignment (and indeed, speed if I wanted) for input devices on a manufacturer / model-number basis. The amount of flexibility it provides seems ridiculously over-done, until you actually have a use for it.
Wayland developers seem to have thrown out all the ‘cruft’ when they’ve started over, but not realised that a lot of cruft (even basics like on-screen keyboards, screen readers) is superfluous to many but completely essential for a few.
All very good points, thanks! I’ll need to look into the windowed games thing as I have 2 monitors, often one is the game and the other is any info for the game (e.g. 3PTools for Elite Dangerous) so the input lag will need some testing. I mean worst case scenario I simply go back to X while I can right?
