I've been using Wayland since the end of last year, I haven't done any real benchmarking but games run about the same for me on either.
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Since I mostly run Debian with KDE, I've been using it a lot since KWin is on its stable repo.
First time I really use it is on Gentoo, which exclusively runs Plasma. Since it's rolling-release, it didn't take too long to be available.
I've been moving this build from one computer to another, they all work fine. Currently it's on a Thinkpad W530. Got some problems with multi-monitor that never happen under X11. Thankfully after I replace the firmware with coreboot, and opted for dGPU only, I never encountered any issue.
Currently, what keeps me from fully ditching X11 on KDE is the buggy SDDM support.
On the other hand, I've been using Linux Mint on my work PC. As you may have known, neither Cinnamon and XFCE has it at the moment.
I've been using it since about spring 2022 and it's been way more reliable than X for me. The only times I've had trouble was one computer where I was missing one of the pipewire packages I needed for screen sharing and another time I tried to run it on a 20 year old Radeon X1600, but both of those were my fault and not something a normal user is likely to encounter. For context I've used Sway, Hyprland, GNOME, and Plasma although the usability has been the same between all of them.
When VMWare Horizon Client (which I need for work) supports it
When I can inject keystrokes to windows not on focus with scripts.
Yes, though "since when" depends on the machine. My last machine to switch over was one with an NVIDIA GPU a couple of months ago.
About a year ago I moved to Hyprland & Wayfire for my NVIDIA & Intel boxes. Moved NVIDIA to Radeon a few months back and had mixed results.
Recently tried Plasma 6 for experimental HDR and am impressed.
I'll probably make the jump when Plasma 6.1 releases with their "real, fake session restore" functionality, was hoping that would make it in to Plasma 6, and I am daily driving Wayland on my laptop now, but I kinda need my programs (or at least file managers and terminal windows) to re-open the way they were between reboots.
Thanks to kscreen-doctor, I've been able to port most of my desktop scripts that I use for managing my multiple monitors to work on Wayland, and krdc/krfb have been a decent enough replacement for x11vnc or x2go for accessing the desktop on my home server/NAS remotely (I know, desktops on servers are considered sacrilege, but for me it's been useful too many times to get rid of at this point).
Where Wayland currently shines for me is VR, Steam VR works better, and more consistently on Plasma Wayland than X11 at this point, which is probably more of a Valve thing than a Wayland thing. When I first got my Index, X11 worked fine, but there have been times when Steam VR on Linux being "broken" has made the news on Phoronix/Gaming on Linux, but still worked fine on Plasma Wayland (which seems to be where Valve is doing most of their SteamVR Linux testing as of late).
As an end user, I do wish that the Wayland specification was organized better, because as an outsider, it seems a lot of the bickering that goes on has more to do with everyone having different end goals. I think if they would split out the different styles of window management to have their own sub-specs or extensions and then figure out what of that could be moved into the core after everyone has built what they need would be better than their current approach of compromising their way through every little decision that doesn't always make sense for every use case. Work together when it makes sense, but understand that there are times when that doesn't make sense, and sometimes you can't please every stick in the mud, and are going to have to do your own thing without them. I do get the appeal of doing things right the first time too though, even if it takes more time. But it seems like usability is always the thing that gets sacrificed when compromises are made.
I tried Wayland many times in the past ~6 years, usually with Sway (but I tried most other compositors, other than KDE's), but I always came back to X11 (using cwm).
Around two months ago I started using river, and I think I'll stick with it. There are enough Wayland protocols which now exist (and are supported by river) that using a minimal compositor feels pretty similar to just using a window manager on X.
I use it with gnome on nixos without any problems AFAICT. Had the explicit sync issue with Nvidia initially but I ended up buying an rx6800 to use as the host GPU when I set up win11 with KVM. Been completely fine since.
I’ve been using it ever since Ubuntu switched over. No major issues, though I have to launch Calibre (the ebook manager) via the command line with a special environment variable because the developer is anti-Wayland. I’m looking for alternatives.
I tried for a bit and it was great, no complaints. However, I was having issues getting NixOS set up as quickly as I would like, so I went back to Pop!_OS. I'm looking forward to the next release of Pop, which will have full Wayland by default.
I've been running wayland on popOS for a year now. Works great. It's already installed, you just have to into a file and either delete a line or change false to true. Takes about 2 minutes.
I've thought about making the leap, but this is a work machine so I want to make sure it's rock solid.
I've been using it since Plasma 6 came out so about 3-4 weeks.
Overall, it's been a very negative experience for me. The main problems have been:
- Random scaling issues in apps: some apps show a slightly smaller cursor, other show a poorly upscaled one, others have random rendering issues like lines remaining on the screen after an option is no longer highlighted (gimp, libreoffice, many others), some apps have random flickering of parts of the UI, some apps no longer scale at all or are scaled twice. Plasmashell itself has blurry icons on the desktop but all other KDE apps don't. I know fractional scaling has always been problematic, but it has gotten worse to the point of being almost unusable
- Random crashes of GTK apps when using the wayland backend. Some GTK apps don't even start and segfault immediately with a wayland error in the terminal
- Some apps like okular and libreoffice lag like crazy or outright freeze when scrolling
- Some games not capturing the cursor properly (Proton)
- Inconsistent font rendering, some fonts look fine in some apps and atrocious in others
- Issues when resizing or moving windows, some times they "jerk" off the screen or resize to a very tiny window and I'm forced to use key combinations to resize them again
- Random issues with window decoration not appearing in some apps but randomy appearing for things like context menus
This is on a full AMD system with Arch Linux, the latest kernel and mesa-git. I hope for KDE's sake that there's something broken in my installation because I can't believe the KDE team released Plasma 6 in this sorry state.
I haven't run KDE 6 but on Kubuntu with the last LTS 5.27 release, I don't have any of those issues also on a fully AMD system
You know, some personal anecdote here but Arch is a really shitty distro when it comes to subtle, hard to detect, system config breakage so maybe there's something wrong somewhere in the system?
Give it a try with another distro like Debian or something and see if the issues happen there
And if they do, for the love of fuck FILE BUG REPORTS! The only reason we're here today is because people who got annoyed at shit filed bug reports for it
I know, I know :)
I reported the bugs I've encountered but I don't have time to install another distro right now. I've seen some of those bugs (scaling) on the KDE neon live iso though.
Plasma 6 fixed a lot of issues I had with Wayland, mostly multi monitor, but I've been using it since steam on X11 would cause your entire desktop environment to freeze up consistently every time. I read it was because steam was constantly pinging your display ports to see if there was another monitor connected, but I don't know how true that is. Moving to Wayland fixed that probably because of xwayland
I've been on Sway for a while now. Also have a computer on Plasma (Wayland).
(Intel iGPU, AMD APU, and AMD graphics card)
I was using it on a new work machine, it was fine.
The main issue is all the good tiling wms are X11 based and I don't really want to use a wayland version of i3. I want some dynamic tiling goodies.
You're looking for Hyprland!
I have been for the past month now. All of my games are now working.
Previously no and the reason was bc of Nvidia issues, but they all seem resolved now for the most part
I'm on AMD, so I've been on Wayland since around 2021. Haven't really experienced any issues.