this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Hey Community,

Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I'm questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I'm asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.

  • What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
  • I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I'm back into gaming (on the desktop). How's performance there? Anything that might break?
  • what would be the best way to migrate?
  • why have/haven't you made the switch?

Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor

laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I've switched to wayland full time, on amd GPU so I didn't get any nvidia problems.

Used sway and hyprland as my compositors, and a large pro was incredibly smooth desktop experience, especially when browsing when compared to Xorg. No screen tearing, just smooth as butter scrolling. Also when gaming, I found the fullscreen/borderless experience to be way less of a hassle than on xorg.

That's where the pros off the top of my head end. The cons are that it's new, so it's lacking in some software like autoclickers (can use scripts as workaround), and the security feature of applications not being able to read each others inputs, which does help against potential keyloggers but disrupts any push to use/talk applications. If you want to create an autoclicker script or use discord's push to talk, you'll likely have to bind it through a compositor with varying results, or be pretty much limited to using them in xwayland windows. And recently, it seems that my loading times of games on steam went up, though not sure how much of that is wayland's fault.

Apart from that, yeah. It's a shiny new thing that is perfectly usable, and if you want to - go for it. For your use case specifically, the cons probably won't matter unless you don't want to use a window manager, because then I'd probably stay away if I were you. The only desktop environment that supports wayland is KDE and last I've heard the experience is still rather experimental. But overall, is it worth switching for practical reasons when compared to xorg? In my opinion, no.