1y ago

I'm joining the Wayland club on Nvidia

I run proprietary Nvidia drivers as well and Wayland runs so much better than Xorg now that I'm permanently coming over to Wayland. I'm extremely happy rn with Wayland

111 comments

Not gonna lie, I specifically bought an AMD GPU laptop so I could run a Wayland WM. After trying and failing with my old nvidia optane razor laptop I gave up on Nvidia. I still use it on my desktop tho. It's so much smoother than X-11.
- same here. few years ago ditched the nvidia card for amd and made my life rasier. wayland on fedora all the way, no issues. but i guess i'm completely different type of user.
- It should be noted that for some reason, people in Linux communities seem to never watch hardware accelerated video content, because AMD 6000 and 7000 have HUGE issues regarding video decoding on Linux, Im talking full system crash or full system freezes after 30 minutes of watching videos on youtube (and thats without mentionning the video freezing for a few seconds with the audio still going, and then catching up, and refreezing a few seconds later). It caused me to install Chrome which does not have hardware acceleration yet to watch youtube if I wanted to have an uptime of more than 1.5 days.
  These issues have only been reported on AMD's iGPUs though, so I think dedicated graphics cards should be fine. But anyways, for this reason alone, I would just recommend Intel chips for most users, especially now with the new Intel Gen 1 Ultra or whatever its called, the GPU is basically on-par with AMD and the CPU is very close as well.
  
  Hm weird. Running 6000 series igpu with hw decoding on, no issues.
  On desktop 7000 series dGpu, also no issues.
  There were some Frame drops in the past, but current kernel + Mesa has no issues for me.
  
  I was seeing those issues on my 7840u, but they were completely resolved with the testing firmware for phoenix here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/8044
  
  Chromium recently got support for hardware acceleration. Link
- Honestly for laptops I just stick with Intel integrated graphics. If you need more horsepower you can always remote into a home server. (This can be cost effective if you buy used components)
  
  Both Intel and AMD iGPUs are starting to get insane, especially AMD. Weren't not there yet on the laptop front, but the 8600G is perfectly serviceable for 1080p/60fps gaming on the iGPU. Doubley so for any classic esport title.

Bought a new AMD GPU to run Wayland. Here's to NVIDIA getting their shit together or, more likely, going bankrupt.
- That's hilarious. 😄 Linux users dropping Nvidia en-masse would be like a half a percent blip on their desktop market share. Probably couldn't even tell if it's a rounding error.
  This is a company that's speculated to drop the desktop consumer market altogether at some point. They make so much money from other industries it's obscene. I suspect they only keep the gaming and desktop crowd around for the drama and the publicity. They don't really give a shit anymore.
  Which would be sad in a way because Linux gaming was built on Nvidia. For the longest time it was the one manufacturer you could count on to be there and deliver decent, accelerated Linux drivers consistently.
  
  Well to be fair, most AI workloads are on Linux and that's a huge fraction of their sales. But desktop Linux, yeah, not going to notice at all.
- Consider all the gamers with more money than sense buying 4090s for the price of cars and, more importantly, many companies buying datacenter cards for their next generative AI project (not that I think many of them will last).
  I don't see Nvidia running out of money any time soon.

I had nothing but issues running Wayland with Nvidia. How strange.
- That's because the drivers are bullshit but not the problem in general. They work well for some very specific cards, not at all for other and in general it's just random hit or miss.
  And then, to make it more fun, not all wayland compositors are born equal either.
  
  Any recommendations? Or knowledge of which cards work best with it? I'm thinking on trying it out again, never tried it on my 3070
  
  I thought they'd use the same code as windows to interface the card and the issue was with exposing that in a linux-compatible way?

I keep trying Wayland and an in the middle of an attempt. I use fedora maniacally updated, Nvidia, and plasma shell. I'm about to abort again:
-even configured to directly use Wayland, I see chrome based browsers glitch out on occasion, and when it starts glitching it just keeps on glitching
-plasma panel stops updating multiple times a day, staying frozen including the clock
-sometimes kwin starts, but plasmashell has to run manually, and per above has to be restarted on occasion
-occasionally it just forgets what the monitor resolution is supposed to be and reverts to 1024x768
-the blur translucency effect glitches around mouse cursor
-immersedvr doesn't support Wayland
On the flip side, xorg problems are: -occasionally kwin can't grab keyboard for some effects until restarted. This is a well documented bug butt other than it being xorg specific, doesn't seem to be figured out.
-some things tear in ugly ways, but not nearly as bad as the chrome glitch under Wayland.
Maybe kwin isn't a great Wayland compositor, maybe Nvidia drivers are still not up to snuff. Ultimately, it's not viable for me. Further kwin is a huge factor for "why Linux desktop" for me, gnome shell is more limited even than Windows for my workflows.
- I had those same issues on my 3080. I switched to AMD and Kwin works great on Wayland.
  I wonder. Does KWin still use the old workaround for Nvidia?
  I remember gnome refusing to bend to Nvidia over eglstreams.
  If Kwin is still using that workaround, even now after Nvidia conceded, maybe that is the problem.
- Definitely think NVidia has got some ways to go on improving Wayland drivers. AMD has its share of issues but they're a lot less obtrusive than what you're describing

my ONLY gripe with wayland rn is the lack of global hotkey support, which currently breaks Discord/other's "push to talk" feature unless you install a webserver to control your mic via your compositor's hotkey system and HTML requests 😭
I suppose push to talk can and should be owned by the desktop and not any particular app, but Id like an interim protocol until then
- global discord hotkeys work for me on sway and hyprland for the most part
  
  They must implement their own workaround/protocol for this. On KDE 5 it's still missing. Hopefully they have something cookin for KDE 6 but since it wouldnt be standards-compliant there's no guarantee

Hyprland nvidia here, running without and issues so far for about a month

Yeah Wayland rules- problem for me is I'm hopelessly addicted to Synergy for mouse and keyboard sharing, and it doesn't work on Wayland yet>< I'm 100% team red and my fancy new display won't do 4k@144hz on X11 so that's frustrating. 144 and no Synergy or 1440p 144hz and Synergy
- Try rkvm. It even works outside of X/Wayland. The only downside is the lack of copy/paste which I'm still trying to find a solution to.
  
  Quite interesting- found it on github, so switching appears to be keybound with rkvm, huh?
- Input Leap is a Synergy fork with mostly working compatibility for Gnome Wayland, and Waynergy works well as a client on sway (and possibly kde?)

Have fun with your 10% FPS drop, undocumented glitches, and zero support for 45 degree tilted monitors lol
- 45 degree tilted monitors lol
  WTH? That's a "thing" who or why would you even do that?
  
  Because why not lmao
  https://sprocketfox.io/xssfox/2021/12/02/xrandr/

I've been using NVIDIA under Wayland for a few months now and it's been... alright? No major issues on v535 (however v545 is buggy as hell for me, Minecraft would show a black screen whenever too many pixels were updated -- needless to say, I downgraded).
However, I'd still love to swap to an AMD GPU because of better Linux support, maybe keep my current GPU for passthrough.
- 545 had a regression with VRR causing black screens apparently. 550 beta supposedly fixes it
  
  Glad to hear that. I downgraded for the same reason so it will be nice not to have to pin old driver versions in future if it works.
  
  Tried 550, didn't fix anything. The game window still blinks black.

I use i3 and kde on void with an amd gpu, i tried kde wayland and sway (and i check on them every few weeks), but I've found them to be buggy and sway in particular to be very difficult. I honestly have no idea why it's been like this for me, i look forward to the day wayland is truly as good as x11
- KDE/Wayland has become stable for me with AMDGPU only in the last 6 months or so. They seemed to have had a lot of trouble on that.
  Sway always worked for me, though.
- KDE and Wayland works perfectly, at least if you are on 5.27 or even Plasma 6 beta.
- For me the switch was simple the only issue I do encounter from time to time is lockscreen related. What's not working for you?
  
  Prolly the biggest thing is sometimes when i launch sway dmenu completely fails to work, and then on kde there's little bugs that show up, one that comes to mind is the bar at the top of windows that has the max min and close buttons rendered completely transparent

How are the games, and especially Electron apps? Gotta know this.
- If you can enable wayland / ozone electron apps do fine otherwise still flickery
  
  Can use —disable-gpu instead for the rest if gpu acceleration isn’t important for the apps.
  
  So there is a way-around, didn't know about this. Is this the package chromium-wayland-vaapi ?
- I get 1080p 120fps consistently with my RTX 3050 Mobile and high refresh rates
  
  Seems nice. Have you tried different types, like native, proton, older proton versions, lutris etc?

I'm just salty that I have bugs and other folk don't. I'll regret my username choice in the future for sure but for now, I'm just going to stubbornly stick by it until NVIDIA makes better drivers
- I dunno. I'm kinda salty that I don't have the bugs and thus haven't been able to really hate on it. Maybe that will change when I get my new machine.

I used to use Xpra a lot, to run services in remote containers/VMs. I've recently replaced all of that with waypipe. It's not quite the same as waypipe does not offer offline buffering like Xpra, but damn is it smooth and seamless!
- I was in shock at how smooth everything was like these madlads made something amazing that's less bloated than Xorg. Props to the devs!

I‘m running kde on debian stable. I‘ll let you know when my branch is ready. Until then its X11 all the way. Wayland wont even let me log in.
- Might be waiting a while if you're on Debian. But should be pretty nice once it's working.
  
  No biggie. Thanks for pointing it out. :)
- What version does Debian ship? 5.27 LTS works great on Fedora
  
  Not at my pc atm. I‘ll try to remember to look it up when I‘m home.
  
  5.27.5

I waited for so long to buy an external trackpad for my desktop, Wayland on Nvidia is basically what was preventing me from getting it. After about a month or two of stability testing, it's really great now, so since yesterday I can finally enjoy all the GNOME gestures that I enjoyed for so long on my laptop on my desktop as well!!

using terminal can be productive.

I was super happy under Wayland but switched back to x11 when my maximize and minimize buttons in Firefox (yes only Firefox) disappeared randomly after an update. It's such a small issue I lived with it for a few weeks until I changed to x11 troubleshooting some other minor issue and saw they were back (and the problem I switched for was completely unrelated, lol). The different experiences for me were basically invisible so I never bothered switching back.
Mostly I don't have strong feelings one way or the other currently, my install defaulted to x11 originally, I switched to check Wayland out and really didn't notice any major differences. I was told I'd have so many issues in Wayland that just didn't seem to exist...

Wayland is not ready yet. I'll wait till its done before jumping over.
- I'll switch when xfce fully supports it, by that time it should be ready.
  (this is not meant as a slight against xfce in any way, I appreciate their focus on rock-solid stability)
- True but I felt like it's better to jump now so that I don't feel bad leaving my wm. If your work/necessary apps do not work properly on Wayland it's understandable. For me it's fine. And hyprland is the best wm I've used till now.

Is there anything like Xmonad for Wayland?

If I could run Wayland with Nvidia I would actually go to the trouble of configuring Nix.

Does anyone know a good screenshot tool for wayland?
- I use Spectacle by KDE. Comes installed on Plasma and it's always done a good job me.
- I just been using gnomes built in screenshot tool
- Flameshot should work.

I use i3 on a thinkpad p50 with hybrid graphics (Intel + nvidia). Works sort of stable if I force the use of the dedicated card, but I'm getting like 1,5h of battery.
Video acceleration seems to work most of the times, but for a few weeks I have problems with picom freezing my screen, capping fps in games and video. Any ideas? It took me hours to have it running sort of smooth, so I'm hesitant to try out sway and ruin my daily setup
- Why are you forcing i3 to use the dedicated GPU?
  AFAIK sway doesn't work with proprietary Nvidia drivers
  
  I'd love to run hybrid graphics with free drivers, don't get me wrong.
  I also love running steam games and video acceleration and with my previous setup it was mostly unstable. My current setup just works, with minor effects like reduced battery times and picom bugs.

I try Wayland from time to time, but my 4k60Hz TV (HDMI) keeps having problems.
Under Wayland I only get 30Hz and sometimes it makes the system very laggy.

Same situation, but my machine just suddenly rebooted for no apparent reason 10 minutes ago. I hope Plasma 6 irons out these instabilities.
- Same I wanna try KDE Plasma 6 and Pop!_OS's cosmic desktop when they release. These projects look really cool
  
  Same. If cosmic nails the basics, it could be the "new ubuntu but better" for new linix users.

I need nightlight mode so x11 until then
- The new version of plasma coming out on the 28th has this fixed on wayland. We're currently on rc2, but fill release will be soon. It may be a bit before your distro has it available however so you'll have to use a PPA on debian/ubuntu/etc., install manually once it's available, or compile from source if you'de like it now

I too am at nvidia wayland. have fun

Are you using the new 550 drivers? They are supposed to include lots of wayland related fixes. I might try it myself once they update it on the arch repo. Last time I tried, my 2060 and 525 drivers just did not go with wayland, at all.
- 545 right now and the only issues I have is kde panels crashing and horrible screen tearing in games because of my gsync only monitor. I xorg has a toggle for gsync but can't work around that damn monitor on Wayland for some reason.

On a microsoft surface, just switched back to X11 from Wayland. Multiple applications segfaulting that run fine under X11. Mode switching in kde is miserable under Wayland with it being completely random as to how the resizing is applied if it doesn't just crash the DE.. Works perfectly under X11. Weird power state switching under Wayland causing background tasks to fail. Again works fine under X11.

Games are not happy on XWayland when there's a gsync only monitor at play.

I can recommend a hybrid setup. That works well with Wayland as long as you set that one kernel parameter. Otherwise the two GPUs won't be in sync and you get glitches when using the dedicated one.

Wasn't that the guy from Stone Temple Pilots?

111 comments