I have read a fair bit about Wayland recently, and I am growing increasingly curious about it, but still a tad confused about if it’s meant for a user like myself. I executed echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE in terminal, and it says x11, so obviously that’s not Wayland. I use an Intel NUC 12 device, and I am wondering if any of you would encourage me to switch to it? If so, why and how? If not, also why? My understanding is it’s the future and that xorg will be phased out?
I don’t notice any display issues in my desktop experience. This device uses an Intel ARC GPU and it’s been great. No screen tearing or any of that eyesore that I experienced with a previous device that had an Nvidia RTX 3090.
It depends which DE you are using. For gnome it makes sense to give WAYLAND a try. For any other DE, like KDE, XFCE, etc. I would recommend to stick to X11.
One more reason to not change anything. Be happy that it is working flawless for you. You are not missing anything with X11.
I don’t know if I can encourage you but what I can say is that I use Wayland (Gnome, Sway and Hyprland) for 2 years now and it’s impossible for me to go back.
When I try a desktop that doesn’t support wayland and runs on X11 (for exemple Cinnamon and Budgie that are great DE) I just have the feeling of a past travel. I can’t really explain why.
I think that performances are better. And something in the visual feeling that is coooool.
This is just the point of view of a final (and experienced) user.
Maybe you can just try on a livesession for exemple or install a DE that support it to test it with a testing user on your system.
The only person who can have a first hand experience if Wayland works for their specific use case, is you, yourself.
There are as varied of use cases as the number of users out there. Each with their own opinions, likes, dislikes and experiences.
You could easily enable the Wayland session for your DE (kde plasma ?) referring to the relevant ArchWiki article.
Going back and forth between sessions is as easy as loging out, choosing one session or another and loging back in.
At any rates, with the arrival of plasma 6, Wayland is the recommended default by its developers. You will have to make a decision then to go with the default or stay on the legacy Xorg.
Wayland will eventually be used by the big majority of people once it introduces the functionality and fixes people need.
Some people have use cases that cannot be done on Wayland yet, so x11 can’t be replaced and won’t be anytime soon, but Wayland really needs to improve, it brings a lot of capabilities to desktops, from variable refresh rate, to multiple monitors with different refresh rates, to HDR and, eventually, proper color management and configuration, to better performance and latency in general and lower power consumption.
It’s a matter of time until I switch to Wayland. I just need the ability to configure my screen’s RGB balance for my laptop on Wayland, as well as the guarantee that fullscreen games will have screen tearing if vsync is disabled. I’m also waiting for ffmpeg to add pipewire capture support for recording.
Nvidia 545 seems to push things further into the right direction. My impression is, that wayland runs much smoother with this driver update.
@Kundalini you can run both alongside each other and switch the session.
If your’re running plasma the package “plasma-wayland-session” will do the trick.
If running gnome, there can be further steps to take especially with nvidia gpu. The EOS wiki covers this topic if i remember correctly. The Arch wiki does cover this alongside the new drm configuration for driver 545:
This certainly did the trick, but it’s very unfortunate that ‘plank dock’ doesn’t load on Wayland. That’s a big issue for me. Why would that be the case?
I enter this command in the Wayland session and here’s what it says
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 plank
[WARN 22:28:53.138906] [Wnck] libwnck is designed to work in X11 only, no valid display found
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
The command it’s telling me to enter to fix the incompatibility produces the same error.
This workaround mentioned in ArchWiki refers to what had been posted on a bug report from 2019-01-12 (here).
Things may very well have changed since then.
libwnck is a dependency of plank. I cannot tell if something has changed specifically in this package since then or it wasn’t a dependency back in 2019 when the workaround presumably worked.
The closest report I found on “no valid display found” on the libwnck’s issue tracker is this:
With further reference to:
You may be able to wrap your head around it all and find a working solution/workaround or file a report.
Otherwise, if using plank is an essential part of your workflow, then I’m afraid Wayland is not suitable for your use case for now.
To piggy back on this is it should be noted that there has not been any major development on plank in several years. With both Gnome and KDE planning on a ditch of X11 will make plank unable to work on either of those DE’s.
I don’t use KDE but I thought it had its own dock program or is that only for X11 as well?
latte-dock isn’t maintained anymore if I rember correctly (if this is what you thought of). But you can configure the default plasma panel’s behaviour to be dock-like.
it could be i honestly don’t know since I don’t use KDE and havent in over 15 years. Think 3 was the last time I messed with KDE. It’s a different monster today that it was them i’m sure. Until Arch kills X11 i’ll continue with Openbox. Simple, Elegant and it just works
