Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
Most distros use Wayland now and you probably won’t notice a difference.
I wish that was my experience, but Nvidia drivers on KDE Wayland have had a lot of oddities and issues that have caused me to go back to Xorg every time I’ve tried (12 times and counting). Wayland is a good move in the right direction, and I look forward to it, but it’s still being implemented.
That’s less about Wayland than it is about shortfalls in nVidia driver development. Exactly like Nate’s example in the blog post.
Oh absolutely, this isn’t to say “Wayland bad”, it’s just to say that a large number of people may not have a smooth transition, so it’s hard to say “just do it”
Just don’t buy nvidia (or stuff from any other company openly hostile towards their users)
It was a birthday gift from my wife, and lets not alienate people who don’t know computer hardware very well and pick up something from Best Buy. I agree that Nvidia sucks, and many of the issues are indeed their fault, but we also can’t neglect the fact that they own the vast majority of the market.
I’ve been a Linux user since the 90s, and nvidia has been a problem as long as I can remember. The wayland issues are just a new chapter in a long saga. ATI used to be the same, but they came around after having been bought by AMD.
If you’re already planning to use Linux on something a quick search will directly tell you that nvidia is a problem. If you got the hardware before nvidia that sucks - but again, it’s nvidias fault.
I think we absolutely should neglect nvidias market share, and just fully drop support for nvidia cards - either they’ll get pressured by angry users to no longer behave like dicks, or they keep doing it, and people will only make the mistake of buying nvidia once (or not use Linux) - either way, we’ll have gotten rid of a massive headache.
Hopefully your card is new enough that NVK will work with it.
I’m sure hoping so, I haven’t followed development super closely, but I’m kinda imagining that the 3080 ti should be new enough :)
It is. RTX 20 series and up use GSP which nouveau/NVK needs for reclocking on modern cards
yeah but the point is why bother? :) especially if I wouldn’t notice differences…
To provide features that Xorg can’t.
If you don’t need features like fractional scaling, VRR, touchscreen gestures, etc. you won’t notice a difference.
People who do use those, will. Because for them, those features would be missing or not complete on Xorg.
mmmh, I bet I will not notice any difference also if I don’t do shit and keep whatever is working until the day I’ll have to switch because my distro drops the packages 🤷🏼
Because it fixes all the issues I had with X. Everything runs a bit faster and is smoother plus inputs behave like they should.
sorry, my rhetorical question was obviously intended as why I should bother. I don’t see any value in stopping you doing whatever you think is better for you, in fact it is exactly what annoys me the most :)
Bother to do what? As you said, when your distro switches you go with it and notice no difference. You don’t have to bother to do anything.
yes!
Well Xorg is pretty much unmaintained and is on its death bed. Modern hardware and software are slowly favoring Wayland due to it being much simpler by design.
well, everything which I use runs well on xorg, and I’d need to change relevant parts of my daily stack in order to use wayland sooo … :)
Why bother what?
yes!