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Comment by cevn | Hacker News Reader

Wayland sucks. At least for Nvidia users.

RN dealing with -

1- when it comes back from suspend, the whole screen is filled with Rainbows. Pretty, but useless. 2- display scaling setting is either ignored or completely broken, no in between. Display settings in general seem wonky.

If I pretend these two things don't exist, the smoothness during gaming is far superior though..

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I am not bullish on Wayland but it's not Wayland's fault that nVidia is abnormally uncooperative with the open source community.

I lurk on several Linux enthusiast forums and subreddits and whenever a new person wanders in asking why they get a blank screen on boot, or their laptop can't resume properly, or their desktop crashes randomly, I have observed that there is a roughly 0.95 chance they have an nVidia card in their system. (With or without the proprietary drivers.)

Why does it work perfectly on X11, then?

Nothing works perfectly on X11.

WTF is this revisionism. There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative.

Because X11 is really terrible at doing many things.

Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work.

Finally Wayland does things that X11 simply cannot do, and unlike Wayland where some of the things it “cannot” (more often chooses not to by design) do can be offloaded to other parts of the system, the same is not true of X11.

> There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative.

Maybe because the developers themselves have deprecated it? That would be freedesktop.org.

I think an X11 alternative would be a Good Thing. In the future, that might well be Wayland, I suppose. But I don't trust freedesktop.org; I have learned to expect them to play compatibility games in order to achieve hegemony. The main reason I use Linux is to avoid hegemonic overlords.

>Nothing works perfectly on X11

Agreed. "Perfect" is a stretch. What I'm saying, though, is that on an NVidia card, I can actually run a graphical system with X11. It has screen tearing and freaks out when my monitors aren't framerate matched, but it runs.

Wayland crashes on startup. Every time. I've tried every setting, every environment variable, every kernel parameter, and it doesn't work at all. And when I roll up my sleeves and dig deep on forums/github issues, the answer I get is basically "Yeah, this is broken. Blame NVidia."

X11 isn't under active development. That's not a good situation. However, I don't think the alternative is very compelling when their response to a super common system configuration being totally broken is "not my problem. shoulda bought AMD."

>Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work.

It's over a decade old. The remaining blindspots as far as X11 backwards compatibility should be super niche things. Not "using NVidia."

That reasoning is flawed. I could easily counter it with similar flawed reasoning: My AMD cards works (without proprietary kernel modules) flawlessly wit Wayland. I can play Cyberpunk out of the box.

Because Nvidia, until recently, refused to use the driver model (GBM) that everyone else adopted because they wanted to force everyone to use EGLStreams, which was their choice of API.

At the time EGLStream was an open standard where GBM was a proprietary API tightly coupled to Mesa. Extra work had to be done in Mesa in order to let Nvidia write a backend for it. Nvidia released such a backend over 2 years ago.

Because nVidia supports X11 and other old APIs but not newer ones.

Wayland does not define AFAICT new APIs that a driver needs to support, but it does use the newer ones that nVidia never bothered to support.

> If I pretend these two things don't exist, the smoothness during gaming is far superior though..

Really? I find Wayland way worse for gaming. Like there's a few extra frames of delay or something. It _really_ messes with me and I can't stand it. It's why I'm still on X11 for now.

That's really weird... I play Rocket League on 144 frames and X is far more janky.. while Wayland keeps a very smooth 144 99% of the time, and input delay feels non existent but on X it feels like 2-3 frames behind.

Did you mean seconds? 2-3 frames on 144 FPS would be roughly 17 ms which I think is too short for a human to notice.

Also, did you enable VSync on both the tests? And the same form of VSync? That can have an impact on input lag.

I can notice audio and video being 50ms out of sync. Surely when interacting one could do better.

edit: I recall reading about timing experiments. IIRC good participants could get down to 10ms accuracy when trying to time moving their finger to a signal.

Ah, I think I was confusing the human notice time (is that a thing?) with the human reaction time. Thanks for correcting.

Yes reaction time is around 100-150ms. The experiment I read about was specifically about testing the accuracy of planned motion, which as mentioned was way better.

hmm... It was fairly un scientific.. I will try VSync and report back. I would prefer to use X tbh, because of these bugs. It's certainly not seconds behind, but yea, maybe more like 50-100ms instead of 17.

On NixOS/KDE/Wayland with my 3070 ti, my gaming experience is admittedly excellent. Disabling V-Sync ingame, I get the same latency I did on x11, same performance, with much better frame pacing and VRR support. Strictly comparing across protocols, Wayland is what I prefer to game on. YMMV.

Nvidia's drivers are flaky and deserve their own condemnation, but that's a problem no matter what you use. You won't escape Nvidia's enormous firmware files and driver jank even if you run your machine headless.

It has really low latency on Steam Deck OLED, so it seems not to be fault of protocol, but either your HW or compositor.

Steam deck is AMD, not Nvidia. I was surprised that the parent had good performance in games with Nvidia+Wayland.

Edit: I did a quick Google search, and your comment is dishonest. Many people are complaining about input lag on the steam deck. They've even measured it [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11yuulz/input_la...

I specifically said OLED, yes the LED model is not so great. The improvement across board is described eg. here https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-steam-deck-ole...

Yeah, look at the input lag in your link. If you enable the frame limit it goes to shit. It's unclear to me if this is Wayland's fault or Valves fault or a mixture of both. The new version doesn't fix the issue, it just reduces latency somewhere else so all the latencies go down.

More like "Nvidia sucks. That includes Wayland users."

I can't deny that, but the fact is, X still works fine.. and a lot of people use NVIDIA cards and don't want to throw them away. I guess they are the real culprit though, to be sure.

But if were a random new user who booted into Wayland-only new fedora only to find my installation is already borked... what are we supposed to tell them? Oh yea, Linux is only for AMD users.. sorry!

Even worse for me, I have a hybrid laptop with integrated amd-gpu and a dedicated nvidia, and there is no way to specify primary gpu on Wayland. Everything goes through integrated and nvidia card just sits at 0%.

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