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
I’ve fully switched to Wayland some time ago (it could be already a year) after I learned about how insecure X really is and I honestly do not experience any issues that I sometimes see on the internet. I’ve been using Gnome for few months, but now I switched to KDE. I think a lot of apps are working natively on Wayland, but for other cases you have XWayland that also works flawlessy in my opinion.
One of things that was issue for me was that I couldn’t use Auto-Type feature in KeePassXC, because Wayland doesn’t let apps pretend to be a keyboard or capture windows as easily as X does. Funnily enough, I’ve managed to get it working by running
keepassxc --platform xcb, but it stopped working some time ago and I’m not entirely sure why. Other thing that is a problem for me is screen sharing. Wayland doesn’t allow apps to capture screen as I mentioned earlier so it heavily relies on PipeWire for this and PipeWire has its own sets of problems. It seems working correctly for the most part, but I couldn’t really figure out how to share screen with sound. Not a dealbreaker for me, and a workaround would be to route audio as a microphone input for example, but it is an issue nonetheless. This is only a problem on Discord, in OBS you can easily select video and audio sources.If you’re using KDE already, you could just select
Plasma (Wayland)in your display manager and play with it a bit to see if you like it and experience any issues.I don’t think Discord screen sharing has sound on X11 either, does it?
It doesn’t. You’re better off running Discord on the web to get those features.
Especially because you don’t have to deal with updates. I hate that pop-up every time I open the app.
Or vesktop
I’m using Wayland with Gnome and have no problem with screen capture.
Screen capture issues have been fixed for years now.
Screen capture is taking a screenshot, Screen sharing is when you present shit at a zoom meeting. Did you mean screen sharing?
You are right, i misread your text. I haven’t tried sharing.
On that note, screen sharing worked just fine for me on Wayland Fedora 38 with Zoom Flatpak.
Also no issues with to capture sound as well? For example, on Discord?
Discord doesn’t have sound sharing on Linux whether X11 or Wayland. They just haven’t built the functionality.
Oh okay, that’s good to know! I thought it was something with my setup.
If you’re interested in a hacky workaround: if you’re running Pipewire, you can send an application’s audio stream into the Discord microphone input (together with your voice or completely without it) through tools like qjackctl or any other tool that’ll work with Pipewire routing. Instead of using Discord’s native video streaming audio source, your system audio will be sent as if you’re talking on the video call.
It’s a bit messy (tends to get reset when applications close/relaunch and when audio devices get attached/detached) but it works. As a added bonus, you can get a wide range of filters and audio processing for your microphone input as well.
You just said you don’t experience any of the issues I sometimes see on the internet then proceed to describe how an app you use didn’t work out of the box, you were able to work around the issue, and then it broke for a reason you don’t understand. You follow this up with the number one frustration: Screen sharing being broken.
You forgot mixed DPI being broken on everything but very recent KDE used by around 15% of Linux users. It’s not like buying a monitor at worst buy and plugging it into your laptop which has a different DPI is an incredibly uncommon thing at this point.
Well, not really. KeePassXC works properly apart from the Auto-Type feature, which is not that big of a problem because you can use browser integration or just copy and paste it. As for the screen sharing thing - it works, i’ve had problem with capturing sound with it but apparently it is just Discord for Linux thing and not really Wayland. I never had any issue with DPI, neither on Gnome or KDE. I don’t remember what is was on Gnome, but UI scalling on KDE works fine.
On everything but plasma 5.26+ Applications running via xwayland are scaled in a fashion that makes them blurry when the desktop uses scaling eg high dpi, furthermore if you have monitors A and B which use different scaling the X app can’t be scaled differently on each monitor like X apps can be under X nor like Wayland apps are under wayland. If you use a single 1080p monitor you wouldn’t have noticed any of this but its ridiculously common if for no other reason that there are shit tons of high dpi laptops and low DPI external monitors