I have an RTX 4060 Ti with latest drivers installed, KDE on Debian. On the login screen, I can select X11 or Wayland. Selecting X11 lets me log in fine, selecting Wayland and logging in results in a black screen and the only thing I can do to get any video out at all is switching to another TTY.
I have an RTX 4060 with latest drivers, KDE, and Arch. Wayland works perfectly for me. Maybe Debian has some outdated packages that haven't caught up yet?
Wasn't suggesting at all that you use my distro or that you can't use X11 as your solution. Debian is great and I use it for all of my servers. I'm just responding to the assertion that Wayland doesn't work with NVIDIA today, which is really only true if you are using older packages for a more stable distro. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not accurate to represent the current state of Wayland based on a distro known for using older packages.
Listen, I run Debian too. But I'm not going to get online and complain out X Y Z not working when I'm running a package from 3 years ago. Please, be for real.
You don't have to preach Debian to the choir man - I run Debian.
We're talking about very new developments here. You're running years old packages. Okay? That's not going to work.
When you're running Debian, it's expected you're going to be 3-5 years behind the Linux userspace status quo. So it's absolutely fine you're on X11. I have a desktop on Bookworm running X11 on Nvidia - works great, I love it. I also have a very, very new laptop running Tumbleweed on Wayland and kernel 6.15. X really struggles with new hardware in a way Wayland does not. For me on that computer, Wayland is better in a plethora of ways. I am a bit forced to run a very new kernel and Mesa and all that due to running bleeding edge hardware.
I've been totally breaking Linux installs trying to get Nvidia to work for 15 years now, and that's on X11. On the other hand I recently did the first OS upgrade that I've ever done successfully without breaking Nvidia and that was running Wayland.
Nvidia is just really really bad on Linux in general, so it's always a coin toss if you'll be able to boot your system after messing with their drivers, regardless of display server.
Nvidia under Linux has had a long and hard history.
For most purposes, including gaming, it is best to avoid Nvidia hardware. Using Intel for laptops and AMD for dedicated GPUs is kinda the best general approach if you are planning on using Linux.
Of course if you have a need for CUDA then Nvidia is the only game in town, but that is a different issue then Wayland support.
For a while Nvidia was fighting the Xorg/Wayland devs over GBM vs EGLStreams which has delayed Wayland support. This has to do with the API extensions that allowed Wayland to manage application output buffers.
Gnome was the only Wayland environment to try to support EGLStreams for Nvidia, but it really didn't do them any good.
A while ago Nvidia eventually switched over to GBM and EGLStreams is dead, which helped out a lot of people running non-Gnome Wayland desktops. But there are lots of problems with Nvidia drivers besides that right now.
The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
So right now if you are running Linux on your personal workstations/desktops/laptops you are essentially beta testers for whenever Enterprise Linux distros make the switch to Wayland.
> The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
What does this actually mean in terms of technology? What is Nvidia providing that works for RHEL but doesn't work for Fedora, or whatever?