Sway generally doesn't support NVIDIA, or it's rather NVIDIA that doesn't support common kernel modes that Wayland needs.
Details here: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
Details here: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
> About a year ago Nvidia announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before.
That’s pretty damning for Nvidia. I can see why the developer is so upset. Must be tough working on OSS in that type of hardware environment.
Looks like AMD is the way to go for desktop Linux boxes going forward. Although it looks like both Dell XPS [1] and System76 [2] is still using NVIDIA. Purism Librem uses the Intel i7’s embedded GPU [3]. I’m curious what the ideal Linux laptop is these days…
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-ca/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-15-9570...
Sadly my work uses all Macbrook Pros, which are amazing machines), but I'm scared to install Archlinux on them. The Archlinux Macbook wiki pages are 4yrs+ old.
IMO the ideal GPU for a UHD screen would be either an Iris or a Vega 10. But it's difficult to find the former outside MacBooks and the latter with more than an FHD screen.
Gaming on Linux was vaguely toleable while it lasted but I'm back to Windows.
Just to back this up, I've recently bought a non-touchbar 13" MBP from 2016, and been amazed at the amount of games I've been able to play no issues on the Intel graphics in it.
It did take a full year for all the bugs to be sorted out (random kernel panics & freezing), these same bugs were problematic in Windows 10 tho. Neither OS had good platform support for quite some time...
Problem is: desktop Linux has an irrelevant market share, and the trivial workaround (use intel IGP or go buy and AMD graphics card) do not work when you don't just manage your one PC but actually maintain a system that is produced in series...
And honestly being upset at nVidia leads nowhere. The architecture of Wayland is complete bullshit to begin with and I'm not sure any other graphic stack of competing systems went that way, EVEN for systems that have a single window manager (well, that's most of other systems... -- so the situation is strangely kind of reversed). So hopefully wlroots will eventually improve the situation or something like that, but is it even convenient to build something that does not link the graphics session to the low level graphics stack with that? I hope it is, because if not, that is hopeless... :/
And I've not even talked about extra deps like Cuda, or the general lead nVidia still have in perf/W and/or perf/price (IMO AMD is close, but no cigar)
The X proto was maybe shit, but at least the general approach did not lead to the kind of insanity we are currently seeing. And people discussing the Death of X when Wayland ecosystem is maybe still 5 years away from decent quality and some reasonable feature completeness... (remoting, anybody? anything good enough for Wine?)
Oh well, we will see...
But I personally don’t care as long as Intel and AMD are available, it’s fine. I see Linux like MacOS, it’s an operating system targeted at a limited set of hardware. As long as you buy within this group 90%+ of the problems with Desktop Linux will go away.