I was running Debian stable with xfce4 (4.12.5) for the last few years. A few months ago, chromium and other applications started to give me major rendering problems, becoming completely transparent when switching virtual desktop "workspaces".
I decided it was time to get with the times and try out GNOME on wayland. While I would have preferred to stick with xfce, Debian stable does not make it convenient to upgrade to their latest version, 4.16.
I'm using a T480 Thinkpad and I'm sure my GNOME version is similarly out of date, but wayland has been performing well enough so far.
However, at this point I'm looking to migrate to Fedora when I get the time. I'm tired of fighting against the bizarre nerd carnival that is the Linux Desktop.
the last negative point is something I noticed. Wayland somehow seems to handle the cursor on the same thread as anything else, meaning when your system is under heavy load the cursor actually starts to lag, and even under normal circumstances mouse movement feels weirdly laggy. It is an absolutely atrocious experience, like someone has put sand on your toothbrush or something, it actually makes Wayland unusable for me.
Yep, when I last had a memory leak (kayo in case anyone here works on it) it would refuse to process input. Couldn't close the offending tab with the mouse, couldn't switch to a terminal. All I could do was reach for the hard reset button.
that's a problem with the specific compositor (DE/WM) you're using. If it's GNOME you're referring to, then that should be fixed in the next release. If it's something else, you'll have to check with them.
Sway has other problems, like null pointer crashes, crashing based on weird layout bugs. I'm still suffering from a bug which makes the clipboard on Firefox just hang, perpetually. This is Firefox with the wayland backend enabled, which I had to switch to because the Xwayland backend would crash the entirety of sway in some weird resizing edge case.
Sway is still unstable. Even if the bugs have gotten less frequent, having it crash is not an uncommon experience. And because they tied its feature set to i3, the scripting experience is really not great. I say all of this as someone who has:
The bugs are so irritating and wayland is so irritating that it's driven me to have already started making both my own browser due to firefox's issues, and my own alternative compositor. I'd rather make something outside of both wayland and X that only runs programs that I personally wrote and have QEMU as an escape hatch than use either of them full time. And one day I'll port it to Raspberry Pi on a unikernel or just off of the bare ISA.
E: Oh yeah and screen capture, IME, and various other things are still basically experimental.
I agree on the crashes part, I did solve most of my crashes by (ironically) going from stable releases to compiling from master, but I trust that it might just been a hardware configuration thing. In fact, in the last 4 months or so I've only had one compositor crash, which also wrecked the framebuffer until I restarted so I assume it was an amdgpu bug.
I do not use Firefox so I cannot comment on that, I'm using Brave (which is based on Chromium 88) and the ozone backend is working fine after a rocky start. The only application that gives me trouble is Zoom where it likes to crash on start and I need to fake being in GNOME through envs in order to enable desktop sharing (and even then, I have to do it through the webcam interface).
Just go back to Xorg with peace in mind like me. Wait until you hear from others that Wayland is finally stable then switch, or if that is never going to happen, stay on Xorg until the next community replacement attempt.
Well he’s using a three year old version of Ubuntu and lots has happened in three years. Some of those points still stick but gnome on wayland has gotten a heck of a lot smoother because of performance improvements.
Not bad. I first used wayland about 4 years ago and immediately switched back to X. It just wasn't ready.
About a year and a half back, I got a new laptop and installed arch/gnome/wayland on it again, and was very pleasantly surprised.
At this point, my only remaining issue is that screen sharing is hit or miss. Pipewire has landed and most electron apps support screen sharing now (including slack, which didn't as recently as 2 months ago). But it's still not perfect. For example - I can share a full desktop screen in zoom or hangouts, but only an application window in slack.
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Outside of screen sharing? I'll never go back to X. My touchpad feels as good as the touchpad on my work macbook. I'm typing this while using two displays - one at 1080p and one at 4k, and scaling mostly "just works" between them. Applications that depend on x-wayland won't auto adjust when moved between screens, but native wayland apps do - and I'm using native wayland apps everywhere I can at this point (including a chromium-ozone build in AUR: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...)
I absolutely love that I can't remember the last time I saw a screen tear. I also haven't touched a HID or Display config file on this machine ever. No more xorg config file headaches.
Overall - if you're setting up a new machine with the intent to use a graphical desktop - I'd suggest starting with Wayland.
Nice thanks. I'm open to it but X never really bothered me. My setup on Ubuntu Mate just works how I like it. I don't really screen share. Never edited xorg.conf either, although I did fight with xfree86.conf many times decades ago.
I think I tried stock fedora a year or two back to try Wayland but didn't like gnome 3, so didn't stick with it. Is there a distro with W and gnome2/mate support?
I still get random crashes (1 out of 10 times, not rare) when I connect or disconnect my external display, including on suspend & resume. Since I'm used to a very long-running login session, that makes it unusable for me personally. (This is on GNOME, in case it matters.)
I decided it was time to get with the times and try out GNOME on wayland. While I would have preferred to stick with xfce, Debian stable does not make it convenient to upgrade to their latest version, 4.16.
I'm using a T480 Thinkpad and I'm sure my GNOME version is similarly out of date, but wayland has been performing well enough so far.
However, at this point I'm looking to migrate to Fedora when I get the time. I'm tired of fighting against the bizarre nerd carnival that is the Linux Desktop.
These are my installation notes: https://github.com/anschwa/debian-thinkpad-install