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.

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.

Little late to the party, but I’ll chime in. I have a 3080, and for the most part, Wayland works, but there are a few problems that keep me from using it as a daily driver. G-Sync doesn’t work at all, and when I put my PC to sleep, upon wake I end up needing to do a full reboot because of severe graphical issues. When it is running though, it’s pretty smooth, with only a few graphical issues here and there. I still daily drive X11 though until the major bugs are fixed.

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.

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.

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.

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 recently blogged about my transition with a similar setup as yours. I made some mistakes and took my a while to figure out, but now I got everything working:

https://danielpecos.com/2023/06/08/from-xorg-to-wayland/

Hope it helps

I haven’t used Nvidia since I switched to Linux 8 years ago. That’s what my computer at the time had, and it definitely influenced the hardware I chose going forward (I switched to using AMD GPU’s).

The X11 developers have moved onto working on Wayland, and I find my computers are more performant under Wayland. However, my use-cases don’t require CUDA or anything else that Nvidia provides.

In the end, use the tool(s) that get the job done. I’m not going to say “switch to AMD & use Wayland,” it’s not my place to do that. X11 is fine until the Wayland experience on Nvidia improves.

Specifically with KDE and Arch, if you installed the meta package including the sddm display manager, make sure you’re using sddm-git and not the stable release (19.x I think) because the stable version of sddm doesn’t support Wayland. That could be why you’re seeing a black screen, the drivers shouldn’t be that bad. KDE is in the process of transitioning to being Wayland by default, some things are still WIP and you may have to account for that on bleeding edge distros like Arch. That’s the fun thing about Arch, not only does it not stop you from shooting yourself in the foot, it cheerfully loads the gun for you.

I run Wayland on my laptop (a Framework) and it works beautifully. But I still use X11 on my desktop where I’m a heavy Zoom user. The lack of a proper support for screensharing in Zoom is the primary blocker for me.

Wayland is great other than compatibility issues like that.

I would just wait if you’re on a nvidia card, all of the problems with nvidia on wayland are nvidias fault, and they’re supposedly releasing patches to fix this, but it’s taking forever and nvidia sucks.

If possible, sell it and get an amdgpu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkfFvEeVC4w

It’s honestly a good idea to just sell.

Wayland is fundamentally better designed from the ground up, but isn’t extremely mature. Waiting is perfectly fine if you’re comfy on x11, but once wayland is the default everywhere, the linux desktop will be a significantly better experience in more ways than just security.

Enjoy your NVIDIA card in Linux, should bring you many surprises. Being much older now, i dont like surprises so I went with the AMD only solution. No more surprises!

This is a sore point. I understand that Wayland is the future, just as people adopt laptops instead of desktop machines.

Many years ago, I used Opera browser - I learned to close tabs using MOUSE gestures… so instead of clicking on a little 'x to close a tab, I could press the RMB and draw an L shape.

With X11 (initially with the software Easy Gesture and later on with KDE’s own Custom Shortcuts) I was able to do the same thing - but for ALL desktop apps.

So now, drawing an L does Ctrl+W - and I have dozens more gestures to do not only keyboard shortcuts, but also commands and scripts…

So just putting it out there that X11 isn’t only for NVidia users or gamers…

Wayland is the future. But I live in the present so I use X11 :)

Just kidding I use Wayland on my work laptop (and maybe I should revert it to X11?! I have an issue with switching to an external monitor). I have both installed but overall I think I’ve had fewer issues with X11 than with Wayland.

I’m hoping one day soon it’ll be amazing but until then I see everyone’s pushing for it and in my experience so far it’s not ready yet.