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Comment by hpfr | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, some of Valve’s more interesting Steam features don’t really work on Wayland. For example, you can control your desktop with a connected controller on X11, while controllers only work in-game and in Big Picture Mode on Wayland. Xbox One controllers also didn’t work on Wayland last time I checked. I wouldn’t be surprised if features like Remote Play didn’t work yet either because of Wayland protocols’ security model. Controller hotplugging is also a mess. Hopefully Valve gets to these issues in the future, but since Xwayland doesn’t even work with Nvidia GPU’s (more Nvidia’s fault than Wayland’s as I understand it), it could be a while. In any case, I’m quite thankful to Valve for making Linux viable for gaming, and the occasional game I buy now is always purchased through Steam to support their work.

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Just stay with X. Wayland won't be production ready in a long time. Seriously it just came up here a few days ago, and just yesterday a friend of mine tried Linux on his desktop for the first time. He chose fedora for whatever reason, so ended up with gnome on Wayland. Since Steam was important to him and he's running an NVIDIA card, after an hour of struggling I just guided him to disable Wayland. Not only did it fix all Steam issues, but it also fixed a problem he apparently had where applications occasionally lost mouse clicks. Needles to say, his first impression of Linux wasn't too great, but once games worked properly he was happy. Let's see how long he can do without Windows. :)

>Wayland won't be production ready in a long time.

With NVIDIA it will never be production ready because NVIDIA doesn't support the Linux standards for Wayland and they don't allow developers to write/use good open drivers and all functionality. Even with X11 and their closed drivers it's a bad experience with glitches in the desktop, but at least the games run.

NVIDIA closed source drivers are supported by at least KWin, and IIRC GNOME, on Wayland. Furthermore they are working with the wlroots/sway maintainer to develop a new way for compositors and graphics card drivers to communicate effectively.

TL;DR never say never

I was talking about XWayland and the other problems Wayland devs have mentioned like Pipewire, poor performance, current and future issues FLOSS developers can't fix on their own without being able to patch and only NVIDIA can fix them. A big waste of time for that extra path (even if initially sent by them) that I wish they didn't had to maintain and triage bugs.

The experience with glitches and problems that the user above just describe to you and I see every day on social media. And the blame went to Wayland. I don't claim to know how it works deep down I can only comment about the smell and it's not pleasant.

They promised many things years ago and we are still in the same situation. I will be the first to congratulate NVIDIA if they fix this issue and change their practices. I'm sure they have legit grievances with Linux developers but their behavior is awful if you're a user or want the desktop to succeed.

Nobody is voluntering to make X releases. That has been the case for almost two years I think. It used to be Red Hat guys doing it, but it's not their priority anymore.

There is a pile of new features that only exist in master with no clear path to users' computers. Notably some big VR enablement thingies commissioned by Valve and written by former X lead Keith Packard. I think freesync too.

I rely on Synergy/Barrier to use my mouse/keyboard between computers. They only support X and I am not aware of any Wayland alternatives.

As a desktop user I am currently stuck in a bad place because Wayland is not ready but the powers that be have moved on from X and don't care anymore.

Maybe Valve could pick up X release duty for a while? That'd be quite more good karma on their part, additionally to all what they've already done.

> I think freesync too.

Freesync works with released X.org, at least for amdgpu.

As a gamer, I prefer investments into things that actually give me something, such as containers, Proton. Wayland compact at best is going to give me what I already can get with X, so frankly I'm not terribly interested. The fact that NVidia seems utterly uninterested in Wayland doesn't help either, because that remains the best way to get your games to run on Linux.

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