Ubuntu 21.10 Radeon Gaming With KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell + Wayland vs. X.Org

[Guest]

I am astonished to see Wayland loosing against Xorg. Shouln't by Wayland more lean, simple and in result, faster, than bloated/olded Xorg?

This has been the case since Wayland has came out; games perform better on Xorg, and have been playing "catch up" to Wayland, most of the time just being comparable. Xorg is only really criticized for security (notably when running it as root, but I don't think any mainstream distro has done this for a while), but everything generally works with it, whereas Wayland has been known to lack certain features. Never heard of Xorg being "bloated".

For gaming today in-general, Xorg still provides the best experience in my use with a RX 580 and GNOME 40 and 41. Wayland is ok, but mouse acceleration is still largely different between Xorg and Wayland (feels more connected/synced on Xorg). And my keyboard/mouse lights lose the ability to automatically shut-off on Wayland (ckb-next).

I've been under the impression GNOME still has the best Wayland implementation, and these tests show that.

I am seriously impressed with Ubuntu 21.10 (GNOME 40, Xorg + Wayland by default (XWayland), Mesa 21.2 stable, GCC 11.2, etc). This is it, chief. It's faster in every way and so far all of my main extensions have worked flawlessly. I've literally given up or sacrificed nothing for what I had in 20.04. Everything in 21.10 is equal, better, and/or faster.

I was using Ubuntu 21.10 yesterday for about 20 minutes. It worked, but their FileZilla package was a bit older than upstream (3.52 on Ubuntu vs 3.55 upstream and on Fedora 34). That's largely the main reason I stopped using Ubuntu primarily in the past, and it still seems partially true today; some packages aren't as up-to-date on it. In FileZilla's case, the version doesn't matter and I'm not aware of me benefiting at all from versions newer than 3.52.

I don't have any particular reason to distro-hop from Fedora, so I guess I'll just stick with it

[BangoMopar]

...if KDE will be the first thing Windows users encounter on Linux, they will reevaluate if Windows is really that bad thinking that compared to this experience, it may not be so bad after all.

Never let facts get in the way of an opinion...

[fhek789]

unfortunately these test were done with Plasma 5.22.5... Plasma 5.23 just release last week with much more wayland improvements

[perpetually high]

This has been the case since Wayland has came out; games perform better on Xorg, and have been playing "catch up" to Wayland, most of the time just being comparable. Xorg is only really criticized for security (notably when running it as root, but I don't think any mainstream distro has done this for a while), but everything generally works with it, whereas Wayland has been known to lack certain features. Never heard of Xorg being "bloated".

For gaming today in-general, Xorg still provides the best experience in my use with a RX 580 and GNOME 40 and 41. Wayland is ok, but mouse acceleration is still largely different between Xorg and Wayland (feels more connected/synced on Xorg). And my keyboard/mouse lights lose the ability to automatically shut-off on Wayland (ckb-next).

I've been under the impression GNOME still has the best Wayland implementation, and these tests show that.

I was using Ubuntu 21.10 yesterday for about 20 minutes. It worked, but their FileZilla package was a bit older than upstream (3.52 on Ubuntu vs 3.55 upstream and on Fedora 34). That's largely the main reason I stopped using Ubuntu primarily in the past, and it still seems partially true today; some packages aren't as up-to-date on it. In FileZilla's case, the version doesn't matter and I'm not aware of me benefiting at all from versions newer than 3.52.

I don't have any particular reason to distro-hop from Fedora, so I guess I'll just stick with it

I would *really* love to know the reason for that. Are they not freezing the versions at the same moment in time? I get the release of 21.10 has to go through the release cycle, but I think a better job needs to be done to include bleeding edge.

No real *shitty* software is being written these days imo, I think it's mostly safe to include the latest version (albeit making sure no glaring security/memory leaks sneak in) but I think we need to live more dangerously personally. Linux is at a pretty stable place now. This isn't 2010.

Also, I also agree with your whole post. If Wayland can match Xorg within like 1-2% that's a huge win in my opinion. If there are serious issues like jitter/stutter or mouse issues, then it would be a dealbreaker. But 144hz FreeSync is a thing of beauty, I haven't seen jitters in a long time. (though I haven't gamed on XWayland yet).

I think if you're using anything from Ubuntu 18.04 + a new Mesa PPA + a new Kernel, you're in pretty good shape. But I'm here to tell you: everything has gotten better. And I'm on a Haswell and a RX480. Not new hardware, but my computer has never, ever been this fast and smooth. And I'm not even running my custom kernel or done any major tweaking. Just mitigations=off and intel_pstate=disable. That's it. Smooth as heck. Doesn't mean the tweaked kernel won't give me even more relevant gains. It's all to the good, my friends.

[rewik]

This has been the case since Wayland has came out; games perform better on Xorg, and have been playing "catch up" to Wayland, most of the time just being comparable. Xorg is only really criticized for security (notably when running it as root, but I don't think any mainstream distro has done this for a while), but everything generally works with it, whereas Wayland has been known to lack certain features. Never heard of Xorg being "bloated".

Umm.... really? Here's a video from a linux conference where a Xorg developer complains about Xorg being bloated ... among other things (to be fair, they did remove Xprint in 2008 or so) https://youtu.be/GWQh_DmDLKQ .

[Charlie68]

unfortunately these test were done with Plasma 5.22.5... Plasma 5.23 just release last week with much more wayland improvements

In fact, it is known that KDE is lagging behind in Wayland support compared to Gnome, but the latest version 5.23 already has good support on a normal hardware configuration, unfortunately Kubuntu has a de facto unsupported version.

[tildearrow]

Wait, is this Ubuntu KDE or Kubuntu? o-o

[oiaohm]

Xorg is only really criticized for security (notably when running it as root, but I don't think any mainstream distro has done this for a while),

Even not running as root there are quite a few things wrong with X11 server general security. Big ones is the fact you cannot do a proper lock screen or proper protection of password entry under X11 and X11 with minor configuration alterations allow remote control of system that is the case when running as root or not. Yes X11 server looking at the process table there is no difference between X11 server running local only and X11 server running network enabled with no permissions.

x.org X11 server could be altered to make network enabled a bit more in face.

There is also a stack of legacy stuff with X11 server needing to maintain 3 different input systems for keyboard and mouse that they have to keep synced they were able to remove 1. Yes the odd X11 server input stutter that can appear kind of random-ally on user comes when particular programs are loaded all at the same time come from applications using different X11 input systems so causing a locking problem. Yes this is not a small stutter either its a stutter that lasts up to 2 seconds.

[bearoso]

It would be interesting to see kwinft compete, since that’s what Valve’s funding for the Steam Deck.

[tildearrow]

considering come crashes and lower performance on kde, i hope valve change their decision for the desktop environment of their incoming game console

I actually hope not. KDE is the only desktop environment that resembles something most people are familiar with, unlike GNOME.
(Other desktop environments are out of the picture for being too complicated or not being intuitive)