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Comment by Fell | Hacker News Reader

Wayland is perfectly ready to be used for normal desktop applications, but the devil is in the details.

Lately, I struggled with: (1) a flickering bug in the NVIDIA driver only affecting Xwayland (2) streaming to my TV via SteamLink (3) reduced performance (compared to X11) on very old (2013) hardware

I fully support the idea of Wayland, but it needs to be adapted better for games.

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Perfectly ready* to be used.

* Recently tried to run an Electron application, in particular Element. It failed completely to show UI even with the extra options to do it. Even with Xwayland

* Interesting handling of drag was spotted in GNOME on Wayland with touchscreens, as in events are discontiguous breaking apps. The one we spotted it in is Blender.

* Multiple important use cases have no replacement or equivalent, especially remote desktop access is weak, and software KVM like Barrier doesn't seem to exist.

* Issue with 3D also messes up timings on video playback at high frame rates.

Issue (1) has been a long-standing issue and a prolonged back and forth [0,1] between NVIDIA and Xorg/Wayland devs about implicit and explicit synchronisation protocols. It looks like the explicit sync protocol is in the process of getting merged upstream and the 555 series driver [1] will take advantage of this so hopefully things are looking better. Problem with wayland is that all of the driver, xwayland and every compositor must support the new protocol but it looks like mutter, kwin and wlr will eventually support it. That being said there are constantly new paper-cuts appearing with the NVIDIA driver and Wayland support so who knows what will break with the new driver. Definitely not a pleasant experience. I'm not saying that AMD is smooth sailing but at least you don't have to fight the driver at every new release.

I'm afraid (2) will probably never work properly :-(

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[2] https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/pull/104#issuecomment-...

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