Hey Community,
Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.
- What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
- I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
- what would be the best way to migrate?
- why have/haven’t you made the switch?
Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor
laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps
I switched recently and it’s still just a tiny bit rough around the edges. People have been saying to switch for years and that can’t have actually been a good idea until like half a year ago. KDE fills in some of the missing functionality with e.g. its screen sharing portal and global hotkeys emulator, so if you use something with less Wayland support/shims it might be rougher. The upside to me is FreeSync/VRR and security improvements.
Staying on X.org is fine for now if you don’t need any Wayland features - Wayland is very close to being completely polished so if you really can’t deal with one of its rough edges I’d check back in like a year and it will probably be seamless.
Performance is the same. Nothing has broken for me for gaming yet, and I’ve thrown some obscure games at it. Xwayland seems sufficient to fix any Wayland quirks that programs aren’t expecting.
Last time I tried it, obs studio was unable to capture video on Wayland, which is a dealbreaker. Functionally they’re are the same point for a regular user, so I’ve been shown using xorg without issue but it is a point for to consider
OBS Studio has been working fine for at least a year. It was an issue on OBS’ side.
Oh yeah definitely OBS’s fault for not upgrading but that still left me with no option but to use xorg.
I can do video on OBS on Wayland (as a Flatpak). KDE pops up a screen sharing picker so it works that way, or you can probably use this plugin. Like I said this seems to be a bandaid that KDE put in to fix this shortcoming, so if you use a different DE then it probably doesn’t work as nice.
I last tried 8 months ago so maybe they added that in between but at the time it straight up didn’t work. Good to hear its been fixed, given how Wayland works in don’t think this being removed is happening anytime soon.