It's Looking Unlikely KDE Will See Per-Screen Scaling On X11 This Year

[Alexmitter]

Radeon VII here on Ubuntu 20.04.

Wayland dealbreakers:
* no screen share using Google Hangouts
* Postman (htpp requests application) flat out refuses to work on Wayland unless you start editing config files to bypass it and that didn't work.
* Odd problems on my 3-screen system where dock takes ages to appear on reboot, and all applications page never shows up. Xorg zero issues.
* RingCentral flat out no video calls at all on Wayland.
* infrequent but not never: small areas of "noise" on screen reminiscent of frame buffer corruption. Seems related to mouse pointer.

And that's just me in the past 2 months. Really wanted to "see the future" but gave up. I got work to do.

Let me clear some things up as another fellow Radeon VII user.

Xorg applications shared the screen by reading the buffer directly, every application could just do that, always. Thats a big no no in Wayland or any modern display system so there is a replacement for it and it is already implemented in core apps like OBS. As most video chat applications today are just web apps pretending to be real applications running in chrome, it would probably be enough for 90% of usecases if chromium supports that.

Postman is (and I am not aware of any other application like it) a application that for some reason support Wayland and explicitly favors it over Xorg but not actually supports it at all. Guess you have to start it with DISABLE_WAYLAND=1.

I would check your extensions, no issues on my 4 screen setup.

That area if frame buffer noise that sticked around is fixed since 3.36.

[Alexmitter]

So few problems? I had much more, including broken Firefox on wayland and blurry scaling on xwayland apps.

Firefox's wayland support is still not at perfect conditions, but 77 is pretty close now. You can always use Firefox with Xwayland, its just less smooth and misses all those nice new features like accelerated WebGL, hardware decoding etc.

X apps, no matter if on a Xorg desktop or on Xwayland can not fractional scale at all, not possible. All you get is a blurry upscale. Only wayland applications can do real fractional scaling.

[royce]

I switched to sway/wlroots about a year ago and even though I miss a number of things (a functional panel the sort gnome, kde or unity have, and glitch-free java apps like Jetbrains' IDEs), once I adjusted to the tiling workflow I'm happier than ever. Excellent wayland support, performance and stability.

Screensharing is still an issue, however I can work around it by capturing a display using wf-recorder into a ffplay window, which runs in X and is available to conferencing apps. This is in lieu of working xdg-desktop-portal, pipewire and support on the browsers.

[zyxxel]

what is the problem with Wayland to take more than a decade still in beta or maybe alpha stage?

I did run Linux in similar state for a number of years before Linus finally dared to step from version zero.xx.y. Different projects have different policies for what they call alpha or beta. Some define based on maturity and ability to pass tests. Others decide based on an originally planned release date and happily delivers stinking software tagged as premium quality.

[JackLilhammers]

About the numbers: we can see the Steam survey, if it's useful for you:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=linux

Thank you.
Those figures represent just the gamers in the Linux world, but still the vast majority of the systems have an Nvidia gpu.
Probably if we look at all the desktop user base the difference is less strinking, because I expect a higher share of Intel integrated solutions, but for dedicated graphics Nvidia still dominates the market.

[MrCooper]

I really look forward to use wayland....with 5.19 it is in pretty good shape already, although it leaving xwayland-games running locked on 60hz is a dealbreaker for me. :/

That sounds like an issue with older Xwayland, fixed with current Xwayland.

[mykolak]

I am using the KDE wayland session and it works well,

Seriously? I'm trying Wayland with each new Plasma version and every time I see an unusable system and turn back to X. Menu as button in header (the only I find reasonable, classic menu only takes space and almost never used) from version to version works better or worse again (with 5.19 menus has window headers and disappears, again). Right click on header and you got a context menu which doesn't wan't to go away easily. I easily got stuck with several context menus. Desktop settings window flicking as hell on resize on Wayland (which supposed to have "perfect frame") while it's fine on X. KWin + Wayland scales cursor, so it looks awful (why not to find closest by size in theme?). Not working secondary buffer reported to be working now, haven't checked that yet. Sometimes settings windows looks very pixelated. Fractional scaling leads to different visually unpleasant bugs. With X I could use scaling=1 but DPI set to 144dpi (well physical is 142, but 144 is better for some apps, like Firefox) — everything is readable and no visual glitches.

I was really hyped with Wayland some time ago. It promised a lot of features I wanted, e.g. support for screens with different DPI, less resource usage, perfect frame. But right now I very disappointed in it — every wayland compositor is completely different engine, almost no code share (except, maybe, libinput), garbage state. And yeah, I have secondary NVidia GPU, so no XWayland when I want to play games — it's an NVidia problem, but still, I'm not gonna change laptop in nearest future.

Other compositors aren't an option. Gnome has CSD, while I hate CSD design, and I just don't feel Gnome as 'right'. Especially when I use tons of KDE apps and none of Gnome. Sway — I'm not looking into tiling wm. And that's it.

[Nth_man]

I'm trying Wayland [...] unusable system [...]

A lot of people are not having the same experience. Maybe because they use another distribution? For example, in this site:

• https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...20#post1183920
• https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...98#post1175398
• https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...15#post1175215
• https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...85#post1173285

[andre30correia]

I am using the KDE wayland session and it works well,

a lot ppl say that I try wayland with multiple hardware and experience is always bad, intel, amd, nvidia(don't work), gnome, kde. Ubuntu, manjaro, arch, fedora

[Nth_man]

Thank you.
Those figures represent just the gamers in the Linux world, but still the vast majority of the systems have an Nvidia gpu.
Probably if we look at all the desktop user base the difference is less strinking, because I expect a higher share of Intel integrated solutions, but for dedicated graphics Nvidia still dominates the market.

We can see the Ubuntu survey, if it's useful for you:

https://ubuntu.com/desktop/statistics