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by ahartmetz 9 days ago
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.
2 comments

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.

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

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/

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.

With X11 you don't have to care about what wm/compositor you're using to choose a screen recorder.
Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?
yep and I've also tried disabling the compositior in KDE, which marginally helps but not enough.