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
The only system I have where X11 is still better is a Raspberry Pi. The whole Broadcom software stack there is horrible and should diaf anyway.
Your laptop is old enough that it’s probably not worth teaching the old dog new tricks. I have an 8th gen L480 that Lenovo already doesn’t want to sell a new battery for.
The desktop would definitely benefit from a windowing system that understands “multi-headed” beyond being one weirdly large framebuffer. Wayland is architectured to deal with multiple screens with multiple DPIs and different refresh times.
For gaming, Wine/Proton currently targets X (with magical Xwayland protocols to bypass the worst of it), but it’s going to be Wayland-native before you know it. Valve has a lot riding on making Linux/Wayland gaming better, and they’re going to keep on plowing development into that. Intel and AMD are 100% on the train, and even Nvidia is being less bad about it.
https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/