this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
This won't be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I'll never buy one again, but I've still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.
I'd suggest you check out NVK.
By the time you're ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They've already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don't know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.
Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.
I'm not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I've been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it's definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.
Oh yeah, I'm also keeping a eye on that. Every time I see nvidia pop up in my updates, I try logging into Wayland and doing my usual tasks. If it starts working, that'll just let me extend the life of this card. I'll probably still strongly consider switching flavors with my next card.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it's not a great experience with legacy apps. You can't completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Which apps? I've discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.
Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
But isn't that still on par with xorg where you can't have any fractional scaling?
To be fair I haven't tried. But I believe even at 2x scaling it looked like shit.
Integer scaling works perfectly, even with legacy apps. Fractional scaling works great with native apps.
*every application using xWayland looks like crap.
Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.
As someone who dabbles in Linux but is ultimately a regular people, what’s the advantage of this?
A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.
That’s pretty awesome. I imagine this would be a huge advantage with the growth of Linux gaming too
I suppose the Steam Deck experience would be a bit worse if it wasn't running on Wayland 👍
The games on Steam Deck are already running in Wayland using gamescope IIRC
Yeah, it could be and it will be
Wait, what? I'm on PopOS, with Nvidia GPU, and my "g-sync" VRR works fine.
PopOS uses GNOME which hopefully uses Wayland
I can confirm that PopOS 22.04 is definitely running on X. wayland is officially coming when Cosmic releases.
That said, I see that Wayland is "available" if I want to manually switch to it - but it is definitely disabled as a default (and current) setting.
This is what wayland said every year lol.
KDE 6 will have Wayland by default, on track to release Feb 2024.
nobody would say that one year ago far as my memory goes, and it’s reasonable thing to say now. Personally I expected some break-throughs that have happened in 2023 to take much longer.
Source?
We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.
In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.
By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.
I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.