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Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

This is how most of us casual linux users learned about Wayland.

To be fair, for such a huge change to how we use Linux on the desktop, worst things could have happened.

Yeah while Wayland still has some warts it seems like people say "I don't have proper color management on Wayland" with the same enthusiasm "This GNOME Wayland session crashes on boot" from a nearly a decade ago.

This Plasma Wayland session crashes (in my GPU driver):

- 3 years ago

- 1 year ago

- 6 months ago

The biggest issue I have with Wayland is that it requires a lot more out of a GPU than a framebuffer, and my experience with video drivers on Linux is that they are very buggy and not maintained for very long.

I have an older computer that I can run Xorg with compositing disabled and firefox with GPU rendering disabled. As far as I can tell I will never be able to run Wayland on it without changing the GPU.

Similar issues with some ARM based SBCs; they have varying levels of stability in their graphics acceleration capabilities, and often only on a very old kernel, but I can get a reliable framebuffer on mainline.

Wayland in itself has no special requirements on the GPU; it needs standard kernel support (KMS, dmabuf). EGL is optional, for both compositors and apps. Mutter and Sway can both happily run in QEMU framebuffer.

Is it possible to force wayland to not use EGL on a card that ostensibly supports it? That would fix so many of my issues.

Have you tried LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE?

I have not; thanks that works, I'm writing this reply from Wayland right now!

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