[bityard]

When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years.

Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine.

Good job, KDE team.

[fhars]

On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.

[Kaliboy]

I upgraded to the latest PopOS with Cosmic running on Wayland.

Honestly everything just worked, but using it made me so nauseous. There was some latency somewhere, never figured it out. Running Cinnamon on X11 now. I did read some suggestions to improve latency but I have PTSD so it's going to take a while before I try Wayland again.

[Filligree]

That’s interesting. I have the opposite effect—X11 always had jank and latency, to the point that it drove me to windows for a couple of years.

This is with multiple monitors on Nvidia’s, all of which support vsync. Disabling that did help, but why would I want to?

Wayland, currently, is butter smooth.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

It's faux smoothness caused by the mandatory vsync. There's several frames of delay in Wayland which apparently you're not sensitive to

[Filligree]

I’m sensitive enough that I bought 180Hz monitors.

[monooso]

I've found Cosmic to be rather flaky, sadly (I'm rooting for it to succeed), so the latency issues may not have been Wayland-related.

Both KDE and GNOME seem to run very smoothly on Wayland.

[Joe_Cool]

You might have an older GPU that doesn't work with wayland like me. My Radeon HD5870 also won't do Vulkan and anything wayland has never worked properly for me.

[gf000]

I'm not questioning what you are saying, but Wayland's only requirement is DRM, which is a Linux kernel capability that is supported for basically everything that you can push some sort of display cable into. It's for buffer management, and X was also ported to use this API.

Unless you have proprietary X server blobs, you have mostly the same low level route in either case to display stuff, so it's on the exact compositor you have tried, not on the wayland protocol.

[Joe_Cool]

I agree, it should work. It just doesn't. I haven't had the time yet to figure out why it doesn't because everything is fine on X11.

[duskdozer]

I have the same issue using either an older AMD card and an RTX 3 series card. Both are fine with X11.

[Zardoz84]

Then something os wrong is in your machine. I'm just using KDE on Wayland on Debian 13 and just works fine.

[craftkiller]

What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?

[chlorion]

Probably didn't even bother to diagnose the issue. It's hard to tell if it was even wayland related without logs and some digging. But lets just blindly blame wayland cause new thing bad!

[duskdozer]

Log in using wayland -> no desktop. Log in using x11 -> desktop. Clearly it's "wayland related" even if whatever root cause it is is something you wouldn't consider directly attributable to it. Logging into a graphical session is something that has just worked out of the box each other install on whatever random hardware I've used for many years. How is that classified as some nitpicky "new thing bad" complaint?

[gf000]

Well, it's like new car doesn't start but you have forgotten to put fuel into it, and now blame the car.

This is Linux desktop, like if you have never had a black screen before then I'm not sure what you expect. One culprit could actually be the home .config/.cache folders that have all kind of sh*t accumulated (like why do we still do it this way? It's horrible), so I usually rename them and try again to see if this is the problem behind the scenes.

[duskdozer]

Well, if I never had to put fuel into my old car then this would be a step back, no? I'm not a stranger to troubleshooting, and do a lot of it already, which occupies my energy and time for troubleshooting. I use Debian stable for a reason. It's mostly that if I didn't go looking for a new thing, it doesn't provide anything new that I want, it removes old things that I want, and it doesn't work without troubleshooting, why do I want this thing?

This specifically isn't the biggest issue for me right now because I use this machine mainly over ssh, but if I eventually can't do x-forwarding, RDP, or log in manually without finding some fix, that's a lot of extra work and lost functionality.

[account42]

Blame on Wayland is absolutely justified here. If you force changes onto others its up to you to make sure you're not breaking things.

[ahartmetz]

I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.

[l72]

When switching to Wayland I lost a lot of custom interactions. I’ve learned to live without them but I still miss them.

For example I was a big user of devilspie for placing windows in certain locations, on certain desktops, marking windows as sticky, or marking them as different types of windows.

I am still a heavy user of pidgin (I know I know but I’ve even written my own protocols for it). I really liked being able to place it in a certain position as a certain size, mark it as sticky, put it below anll windows, and mark the buddy list as a utility window. This places in the background, removed borders, and doesn’t include it in alt-tab or window list when you do the expose type of thing. Then I had a global key binding to bring it to the front of all windows or drop it back of all windows.

As far as I know, none of these paradigms even exist in Wayland and I’ve had to deal with less useful options or completely change my interactions which is unfortunate.

[rw_grim]

What's wrong with Pidgin? Also what protocols have you written?

[httpsterio]

my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps.

in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.

[d3Xt3r]

If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS.

[1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec

[2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/

[httpsterio]

The 940mx on this laptop doesn't support hardware video encoding, so I'm basically forced to run everything on CPU. I do also stream so it's definitely a nice to have.

I could run the game on the GPU and leave more CPU for the desktop and encoder, maybe I'd be able to record and play on Wayland that way, but there's some additional drawing latency if I run the game on the GPU, the frame buffer gets sent back to the CPU before it's drawn on the display anyways.

As it's rhythm games I mainly play (ITGmania, Stepmania fork), the additional latency for getting the picture out on the display it's not really working out great for me.

[account42]

With X11 you don't have to care about what wm/compositor you're using to choose a screen recorder.

[c-hendricks]

Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?

[httpsterio]

yep and I've also tried disabling the compositior in KDE, which marginally helps but not enough.

[pmontra]

For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.

[ahartmetz]

KWin can do dimming in hardware or by messing with the colors - not sure how.

[pmontra]

Messing with colors looks like gamma correction and dimming in hardware is the backlight control that does not work anymore on my laptop.

I don't remember why gamma correction didn't work for me Wayland but I'll give it another try next year, maybe it got fixed by then. X11 is working perfectly well and it always did for me.

[hgoel]

I recently installed Kubuntu 26.XX on my desktop, was worried about having to use workarounds and giving up on fractional scaling to use it with my NVIDIA gpus (previously had to do this), but was also pretty surprised that it has been smooth sailing.