[imiric]

I'm surprised whenever I hear Wayland works flawlessly for someone, since I've tried using it on the NixOS unstable channel for a few releases now, and there are a few major bugs that make it unusable for me.

A show stopping one is that the bottom panel is stuck in the middle of the screen, with no way to move it down that I could find, and clicks register in completely different parts of the screen. It's difficult to explain. I noticed this starts happening after I start an Xorg session for the first time, which for some reason always switches back to the default after an upgrade.

If someone knows what bug this is and how to fix it, I'd appreciate it.

Then there are other minor issues like the cursor being tiny when hovering over a Firefox window, which I guess uses Xwayland(?).

The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland, and I need to switch to an entirely different app ecosystem, is insane to me. I'm willing to make the jump if it offered a truly better experience than X, but I've yet to see that.

[MarcusE1W]

Firefox is a Wayland ready app. You need to set the env variable MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 tough.

Regarding the panel I have no idea. Mine is at the left and I have no problems to move it wherever I want. No idea for that.

[miloignis]

I recommend swapping your nix package to firefox-wayland -I've been using it for quite a while and it's been great. For me, it's been a huge improvement over X - thr lack of screen tearing when srolling and playing videos is huge.

If an app uses one of the normal GUI toolkits, they don't normally have to do anything crazy to support wayland, so I'd be suprised if you need to swap to a whole new ecosystem (and there's always XWayland for those that do).

[imiric]

Thanks, I'll try that, but the thing is that I haven't experienced screen tearing on X for many years now, on Intel, AMD or Nvidia cards, and even on high refresh rate displays (90/120hz). Sometimes when plugging in a second monitor I need to force full-screen composition with Nvidia cards to get rid of tearing, but I can always set this permanently in a config file, I just haven't gotten around to it.

I really haven't had major gripes with X for many years. It mostly just works, and is rock solid. Long gone are the days when you had to manually craft the perfect config file depending on your setup. It also works great with multiple monitors, though I think there are still some color management issues, which don't particularly bother me, and lack of HDR, obviously. Plus the client/server architecture is super useful, to this day. IME Wayland feels like a usability regression, forcing me to change many of the programs I use, and it has critical issues, which seemingly only affect me...

[kaba0]

You don’t notice screen tearing on normal usage with most desktop environments on X due to them using compositors. Try disabling it, or alternatively, to just play a high-resolution video on a high-res screen. The latter will often have artifacts.

[tux3]

Firefox supports wayland, IIRC it wants an env var and some about:config flags

Some of the other bug might be nix-specific? On debian sid with KDE I haven't seen those, at least

[Alupis]

Using an unstable channel and being surprised at bugs is kind of your own making...

I also use Wayland + KDE full time and have not experienced any of the issues you described.

[imiric]

NixOS unstable is more of a rolling release than an equivalent unstable version on other distros.

I've also reproduced these issues on Void Linux, and on 3 separate machines. So it's not a hardware or distro specific issue, nor particularly rare.

[Cu3PO42]

I run KDE on NixOS unstable as well and have also not experienced any of the issues the grandparent is describing.

[kaba0]

> The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland

That’s not really the case, basically every framework supports both X and Wayland, out of the box. It is just sometimes marked as experimental/non-default by some software, e.g. firefox (which is not your average GTK/Qt app).

[anotherhue]

Try running wdisplays to make sure the screen geometry is correct.