1 yr. ago • 98%

Great experience with Wayland on Nvidia with GNOME 44

I mostly use AMD and have been using Wayland since GNOME 40 without any problems, loving the consistently perfect frames and fantastic scaling (with Wayland programs, but nowadays I use nearly no X11-only programs).

I tried Nvidia with Wayland a few times and it always was a clusterfuck. I remember when Nvidia just released GBM support on their drivers I actually compiled my own Mutter to try Wayland because there was a bug with the hardware cursor that overflowed the GPU memory. I even tried eglstreams a few times with the Nvidia-developed GNOME backend. No matter what, I always had problems with invisible programs, programs leaving trails like the cards falling in Windows 98 Solitaire when moving the window, slow programs, blurry programs, unresponsive programs, etc.

Today I tried again Nvidia with GNOME 43/Wayland on Debian 12 and also experienced lots of the same issues as I always had. I then moved to Sid with GNOME 44 and was pleasantly surprised to see nearly all my issues just go away. Have not seen any invisible programs, nor any trails behind windows when moved. I have seen abnormally slow programs though, the GNOME terminal seems to struggle when scrolling fullscreen, whereas my laptop with and AMD APU works perfectly.

Currently happily using GNOME 44 with Wayland on Nvidia, never thought I would get to say this. I'm hyped for GNOME 45 to drop in Sid!

21 comments

Let me suggest you to switch to Fedora, Arch or Opensuse. Debian Sid may have problems, and stable is simply too slow for how fast Nvidia is moving. My suggestion is to use Fedora or Arch, or Opensuse, with newer packages. Everything was super smooth on Fedora.

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- I love Fedora! but sadly I have been burned twice by Red Hat already. I refuse to be burned a third time so I'm moving my servers over to Debian. I like to use the same ecosystem on all my computers, so I also moved my desktop and laptop over to Debian.
  
  I tried OpenSUSE a few times, but I disliked YaST, disliked the unclear future of Leap and disliked the unclear future of ALP. I thought I would love Aeon (I used Silverblue when I used Fedora) but I didn't like being unable to compare my system against a "base" one. So for the time, at least until the situation over SUSE clears up, I'm going to stick with Debian.
  
  Anyways, once GNOME 45 hits Debian Testing I think I'm going to move over to that, I would prefer to use Stable (which I use on my laptop and job) but I really want a recent GNOME for my Nvidia GPU. I have a bunch of BTRFS snapshots ready to go back to stable at any moment if anything happens, so I'm not too worried.
  
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- Permanently Deleted
  
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  Debian is a great distro itself. I just happen to love Fedora and appreciate their stability (meaning, the software usually works very well)
  
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What's your workflow that involves almost no X11 programs?

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- First, I have a multi monitor setup, with different resolutions, refresh rates and scalings, so X11 is basically unusable (tears like crazy and wrong sizes everywhere). On Wayland, Wayland programs work perfectly, always looking crisp and the correct size.
  
  Anyways, nearly everything I do is in a browser or a terminal, both work perfectly on Wayland. The other program I use lots is VSCode, which in the past was its own source of problems for Wayland/Nvidia, but now it surprisingly works fine (as long as I launch it with --ozone-platform-hint=auto so its not blurry).
  
  I do use lots of these fancy electron apps, things Slack, Discord and Teams, but I sandboxed all of them into my browser. Teams barely works, but it barely works anywhere anyways so I'm not missing out on much.
  
  I also use lots of native GTK apps, they all support Wayland perfectly, I really like the Celluloid video player for example.
  
  The only programs I commonly use that are X11 only are Spotify, which I don't really care if its blurry (I tried sandboxing it too into the browser, but I like to keep all my music downloaded) and Datagrip, which I'm anxiously awaiting for Wayland support.
  
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  Teams barely works, but it barely works anywhere anyways so I'm not missing out on much.
  
  Great summary of half the broken Linux apps. After thinking Unity (game engine)'s Linux support was garbage, I tried it on MacOS, only to realize it's not Linux support but Unity itself that's garbage
  
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- Not Op, but:
  
  Firefox works perfectly fine natively
  
  chrome/chromium work perfectly fine natively when started with --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
  
  emacs since version 29 has the pgtk backend, which works without issues. I've been running emacs from git for about a year before the 29 release for pgtk already
  
  anything Qt does wayland natively, unless they're doing some weird stuff
  
  same for GTK, only one I can remember right now with problems would me GIMP, but I'm typically using Krita nowadays
  
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I think gnome terminal has been replaced with gnome console in gnome 44.5. I don't have any scrolling issue using Console on Wayland with an Nvidia GPU.

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- I tried a bunch of terminals on my laptop and ended up deciding that I don't care and just like the GNOME terminal.
  
  I'm going to try Console on my desktop then!
  
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That is just amazing. Glad it works for you.

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No FreeSync/GSync if you're using Nvidia drivers on Wayland

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Honestly I’m jealous of you, I have a Nvidia GPU and both Xorg and Wayland run poorly on Plasma. Wayland corrected many things but brought others problems, and Plasma’s experience at Xorg is degranding.

I am jealous because I am already used to my workflow in Plasma, and besides, I love Plasma, but otherwise it would be a Gnome fan.

And it’s curious because I also have the problem of windows or mouse leaving a ghost shadow in certain windows. In programs like Yuzu or RPCS3 that makes playing simply impossible, I thought that was a problem at the level of Nvidia drivers, not DE, maybe try Gnome, thanks OP.

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- I have a Nvidia GPU and find the Plasma / Xorg experience to be fine. Plasma / Wayland is shocking though.
  
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  It is completely usable but this "lag" or "dragging sensation" feels disgusting at least on my PC.
  
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Unfortunately, Wayland works terribly on my Nvidia MX150 GPU. It's an Optimus based GPU, so both the iGPU and the Nvidia GPU are running all the time. I've had my Nvidia GPU disabled for better battery life for a while now.

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- I went for an AMD APU on my laptop explicitly because I wanted to avoid hybrid graphics. While I would like a faster igp, for battery life and ease of use, APUs are fantastic.
  
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- No problems on my laptop. Mi Notebook Pro with that exact same GPU. On Wayland in Fedora since 36 everything's gone super smooth.
  
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