Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

KingMachiavelli

Good, it's been long enough for GPU manufacturers to ensure proper Wayland support and with the exception of EOL Nvidia cards (Kepler and older I think), everything mostly works on Wayland. wlroots + Nvidia still has some issues like flickering but AFAIK that's mostly been solved.

The issue with popular distro's like Ubuntu defaulting to X11 for certain hardware is it allows companies like Nvidia to de-prioritize Wayland support. Even in the best case, Nvidia's Linux docs are still written assuming Ubuntu + Xorg which is very unhelpful.

I bet we'll finally see proper Wayland-focused documentation and more Wayland compatibility updates from Nvidia within a year or two just because Ubuntu changes the default.

To be honest, I don't think it's going to be the Ubuntu community (or even the whole Linux desktop community) that's going to pressure nvidia to support wayland.

We are all but a drop in the nvidia ocean.

RHEL deprecated xorg, and in the same year we had the biggest wayland fixed in nvidia drivers

It's not the Ubuntu community that will convince Nvidia it's their large enterprise customers that want docs like "How to develop CUDA application on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)". Nvidia can only use an ancient Ubuntu version as the baseline for so long before they get complains from large customers. Nvidia doesn't want to loose it's position as easy to develop for (compared to AMD's mess).

I'm inclined to agree with you about it being time to make life difficult for nvidia, but that's mainly because I totally disagree with much of what else you said. Running nvidia with Wayland is a bloody nightmare, I've been gritting my teeth for the last year or more and I'm about ready to go back. I just have an application that relies on it and some particularly terrible tearing problems on X11 for some reason. But on Wayland, with nvidia, so many little and big things are still totally broken, and oftentimes the failure is not graceful, but stateful and problematic, and I'm someone who knows what I'm doing.

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