Tell HN: One month in, GNOME on Wayland is still amazing | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: One month in, GNOME on Wayland is still amazing

14 pointsoxplot6 comments

I submitted [1] a month ago and some noted that I was still in the honeymoon. Well it’s a month later and I love this whole thing even more. Everything I wanted to do works and more. Performance continues to be great and pipewire is amazing. My Bluetooth has somehow improved as well (snappier connect and reconnects).

All in all, I ain’t going back.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30750710

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Pipewire is the real star of the show. Wayland itself has had a remarkably rocky road to where it is today, and even still it only really works on 2 or 3 desktop environments (and still doesn't have feature parity with x11). It's good if you can get it to work, but it still hasn't dethroned xorg for me (particularly since I use a couple different WMs on a couple different systems).

Pipewire though, I will agree is unequivocally great. It came out of nowhere and got developed in a matter of months(!!!) and managed to respect the full history of Linux audio while pushing the important features like Bluetooth and class-compliant audio into the next generation. Switching to it was easy, and now it easily has the best wireless audio experience out of any device I own, and probably any device I've ever used. Kudos to the Pipewire devs, if Wayland's development was this smooth I would probably be using it right now.

Is it a PulseAudio replacement? A streaming framework like GStreamer? Or a hardware abstraction layer? The homepage is kind of fuzzy on the details which is expected since the project is so new. Would be interesting to know what its usp is though.

I think "PulseAudio replacement" is a pretty good description of it, but it's functionality goes much further. It can also route Jack, ALSA (and PulseAudio) through it to create a unified audio layer that can "do anything" so to speak. It's also a sort of hardware abstraction layer in that sense, but in reality it's so much more.

Has anyone gotten Wayland working consistently with Nvidia GPUs? I tried it a while back and I faced a lot of issues getting it working.

I'm guessing things are better now but would love some signals before I try this again.

Does Wayland allows the use of a mixture of displays, one at 4k with a billion colours and others at different resolutions with just 16 million colours?

The improved support for external monitors alone is enough to make one not want to go back to X11. No more fiddling with xrandr to fix scaling issues. Or being forced to settle for lower refresh rates if any one of the monitors or cables can't support higher rates. Moving to wayland has definitely resulted in a much better experience.

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