Has this place officially become a true Linux community? Did we just have the first X vs Wayland thread?!

That said, I use Wayland on all my machines, but I don’t have Nvidia hardware. I suggest just using X11 until Nvidia manages to do the needful. Personally I enjoy using wayland, things run so smoothly, I have zero issues with games and the only application I used that broke was Barrier, but I just used it for my Steam Deck and that problem is solved with SSH.

I love Wayland but I’m not using Nvidia. I really hope th3y figure that Nvdia stuff out soon because it’s such a roadblock to many people when it comes to Wayland

X11 is deprecated, it’s been removed from RHEL, and hasn’t had dedicated maintainers for years. You might as well switch to Wayland (and xwayland if needed) now, it’s not really the case that you have an option.

Just a head up to be careful with 7900 XTX if you do plan on getting an AMD GPU like other people on here are suggesting.

When I purchased 7900 XTX, AMD doesn’t offer me any way to control the fan speed on 7900 XTX and it always get stuck on 5% speed. I literally tried everything from using hwmon mode setting to manual (it stuck on auto and refuse to switch to manual), literally modifying the AMD GPU driver in kernel to forcibly set the manual mode for fan speed, it doesn’t work and instead it locks up the Kernel, and tried literally every application that exists for setting fan speed on 7900 XTX.

I tried to contact the manufacturer to refund me, they refused to pay me back in full and want me to reduce what I get back, I paid $1000 for it, they want me to pay $100 shipping and to only be qualified to receive $400 from them. I ended up keeping the 7900 XTX and basically went nuclear on fixing the GPU. This was literally within 1 week of receiving the GPU mind you. AMD is ranked far below Nvidia after my absurdly negative experience with them and I would rather go with Intel than AMD at this point and that is saying a lot, because it’s not only my GPU that is a problem, but it also with their software and driver like ROCm that NEVER worked, ever.

I created a plastic strap via 3D printing on top of the GPU and create a negative pressure fan to cool it down, it can stay under 50 degree Fahrenheit at 100% utilization.

For me, I use Xfce so the decision is already made for me, Xfce does not support Wayland yet. I figure by the time Xfce does support Wayland it’ll probably be ready enough for me to use in general.

I’ve found compatibility lacks on programs like AnyDesk (does not support Wayland for remote connections). IMO, if you don’t really need Wayland, stand with X11

NVIDIA has been shit on wayland for a while now, wayland is coming along nicely though and there’s already quite a bit happening in terms of expensions; but unless you need wayland for something there’s no real need for it (and you can get wayland apps working on X11 just fine). The big thing right now is that we’re in a transition period where we need to go from one ecosystem with tons of well used extensions (like xinput) to one where these extensions are still being developed.

What I’d say is that if you just stick to Gnome or KDE you won’t have to worry about which one you’re using yet, and if you have problems with wayland just stick to X11 until those get resolved. I’m in a similar ballpark where I’m still on X as I am waiting for several parts of the wayland ecosystem to mature (mainly nvidia support specifically for certain laptop configurations and tiling WMs (yes there’s options, but I have multiple problems with most of them))

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In your situation, I would say to stick with X11. I’m still using X11 for gaming, but Wayland for most other things. Maybe try Wayland again in a few years. And when it’s time to buy new hardware, maybe avoid Nvidia.

If you want to have another go at getting it working, check out what the Arch wiki says for KDE:

If you are an NVIDIA user with the proprietary nvidia driver, also enable the DRM kernel mode setting. If that does not work, too, check the instructions on the KDE wiki.

As for the question of security, I want to emphasize that X11 is not increasing your risk of getting hacked. If one of your applications is compromised, then X11 acts as one method by which an attacker could further their attack or extract information, but other methods would usually be easier for an attacker. You could use flatpaks or firejail to mitigate those other methods, but only after you’ve done that would Wayland provide a meaningful security benefit.

I had many issues running Arch+Wayland+nvidia because, as a long-time i3 user, I figured that migrating to Sway would be the best choice based on so many people in the community talking about it. I tried moving over several times, every few months to see if the experience had improved but each time I got frustrated with how terrible and buggy the environment was.

Trying out Hyprland was a complete game-changer. I’ve been running it full-time for about 2 months and it’s completely stable, supports everything I need to run, and is more efficient: the battery on my laptop lasts about 30% longer compared to my i3/picom/X11 setup.

So yeah, I highly recommend Hyprland if you’ve tried sway in the past and didn’t get anywhere with it.

Void Linux user here. nVidia’s Wayland support was shit a couple of months ago but it has been pretty good for a few months now. And they’re really focusing on Wayland with each update. Sway is weird with nVidia, which they state openly. I have RTX 3060Ti and I’m using Wayfire. Steam is working pretty smoothly and I haven’t had any problems gaming, so far (no AAA games, mind you, just CSGO, Hollow Knight, Subnautica etc.).

Just throwing in this https://arewewaylandyet.com/

I currently see no advantage in fighting the nvidia driver to get wayland to run - especially if you use your rig for gaming. If the argument is stability then a flaky wayland is no better than the ancient X11.

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I am on Fedora KDE and run Wayland with Nvidia without any major problems daily. But if you have problems, i would rather just wait, especially if X11 is working for you. Nvidia should start fixing the wayland issues soon.

I would double check if you have options nvidia_drm modeset=1 in your modprobe.d. This is necessary for Wayland. I can login to KDE Wayland just fine with my 3090, but I still stick with X11 for now because of VRR and overall better input latency. The input latency issue isn’t an Nvidia specific thing, although Nvidia does perform worse with Wayland than AMD in some cases.

And while you’re at it add options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 so that your GPU saves video memory when your system suspends.