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 :)
Honestly, depends on you GPU and the game. Nvidia has been quite reluctant with their Wayland support for a while, while AMD is often pretty even. Here are some benchmarks from early 2023. However, recently there were some improvements for XWayland which may improve performance significantly (there was a post on Lemmy just today or yesterday).
If you use a distro/DE that install both by default (like Ubuntu) I’d recommend to just test it and then decide for your case.
distro: just look at my instance xD
Its a full AMD build, so I shouldnt have any issues with the green goblin
Try Manjaro Sway. Wayland can’t get any better than with Sway. Of you prefer to not read the docs and confog by yourself, then go with KDE. Literally zero reasons to use xorg anymore. I’ve used Sway 2-3 months after dwm and regret a lot I didn’t switch earlier to Wayland.
Wayland has a ton of issues on Plasma including but not limited to (Not including NVIDIA Issues) (Note that many of these will be fixed in Plasma 6):
- Applications don’t prompt to save unsaved work, causing data loss
- No session restore for native Wayland windows
- When the compositor crashes or restarts, non-Qt apps are killed — work is ongoing to fix this
- Not all Sticky Keys options work
- No color management or support for changing Gamma
- KFontView is unable to open or install a font
- Session-restored windows go on the wrong screens and virtual desktops
- When dragging files, to trigger a specific result, you have to hold down a modifier key before you start dragging, not after
- Installed Chrome apps are grouped together with Chrome windows in Icon-Only Task Manager
- Global Menu is broken for non-Qt apps
- When using a Chromium-based browser in native Wayland mode, dragging an image to the desktop creates a sticky note out of it
I personally love Wayland for my system. I use Sway for mine and with support for VRR with my monitor, a lot of the vsync problems people talk about goes away (at least for me). I will say, some things that rely on Xorg screen sharing (Like Discord) will only share Xwayland windows. This is fixed in most applications, but not all. Also screen recording in general is a bit lacking. My main pro for Wayland is I use multiple monitors, and unlike Xorg which caps the refresh rate for the full desktop to the lowest (which for me is 75hz), Wayland allows different refresh rates per monitor, which means if I drag a vsync game over to a different monitor, the fps cap changes.
Wayland is also vastly improved by moving over to PipeWire instead of Pulseaudio. I’ve never had a singular problem with PipeWire and it’s drop-in pretty much. I recommend that as well. PipeWire is compatible with applications that use PulseAudio so you shouldn’t even notice a difference at worst, and will notice an improvement in sound latency most likely.
I think the main drawback about Waypand right now is people have VASTLY different experiences. Which is why I say just try it out. Most big DEs like KDE and GNOME have Wayland sessions that you can choose if you just install the wayland parts. Worst case scenario you go “This sucks” and go back. Wayland is only getting better, though, and I find that a lot of the problems I had even just 6 months ago are pretty much gone. Check in often and just keep your Xorg stuff laying around. That’s the beauty of Linux.
This is probably what Ill do - have both and give wayland an honest chance, while not severely limiting my experience by being trapped in it. Thanks!
One pro of Wayland is better multi-monitor. X11 can’t really handle mixed refresh rates, nor multi-monitor VRR, and per-monitor DPI scaling isn’t easily done. Of course, Nvidia doesn’t support Wayland VRR yet, nor does GNOME, but Plasma or wlroots on AMD should work. Wlroots btw is the Wayland compositor library e.g. Sway and Hyprland is based on.
Forced vsync has been a problem for gaming on Wayland, though that’s in the process of changing due to the tearing protocol, at least on Plasma and wlroots, doesn’t seem like GNOME has picked it up yet.
This (multi-monitor support) is exactly why I switched to sway from i3wm, and haven’t looked back.
Not a gamer, so I can’t speak to that aspect, but for everything I do there’s not much difference.
I do use a Dvorak_ES layout and it works perfectly fine in both Sway and Hyprland. I assume Colemark would too.
except unfortunately sway doesn’t actually support VRR the way it’s suppose to be used. Currently VRR is active until you make a window full screen, once a window is full screen VRR doesn’t work anymore. So pretty much exactly backwards from how it’s suppose to work.
Hyprland does VRR right but it has several other issues that make sway the better choice for now, just with VRR disabled.
Do you uave any experience with bspwm and WL? Thats what I plan on going with
I do not. But bspwm looks like an X window manager, so doesn’t support Wayland.
Really, what it should come down to as an individual is that all of the x11 devs left to work on Wayland because x11 is unmaintainable.
Use Wayland if it works for you, if you find something that doesn’t work, go back to x11 and find the issue tracker and switch back if you care for the benefits later.
The benefits:
- A better security model
- More efficient rendering
- Better animations
- Better support for multi displays (mixed refresh rate/dpi)
- HDR (soon)
- Better color management (soon)
The only problems I have currently is sway doesn’t support single window capture and the XWayland clipboard isn’t great.
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?
