I mostly use AMD and have been using Wayland since GNOME 40 without any problems, loving the consistently perfect frames and fantastic scaling (with Wayland programs, but nowadays I use nearly no X11-only programs).
I tried Nvidia with Wayland a few times and it always was a clusterfuck. I remember when Nvidia just released GBM support on their drivers I actually compiled my own Mutter to try Wayland because there was a bug with the hardware cursor that overflowed the GPU memory. I even tried eglstreams a few times with the Nvidia-developed GNOME backend. No matter what, I always had problems with invisible programs, programs leaving trails like the cards falling in Windows 98 Solitaire when moving the window, slow programs, blurry programs, unresponsive programs, etc.
Today I tried again Nvidia with GNOME 43/Wayland on Debian 12 and also experienced lots of the same issues as I always had. I then moved to Sid with GNOME 44 and was pleasantly surprised to see nearly all my issues just go away. Have not seen any invisible programs, nor any trails behind windows when moved. I have seen abnormally slow programs though, the GNOME terminal seems to struggle when scrolling fullscreen, whereas my laptop with and AMD APU works perfectly.
Currently happily using GNOME 44 with Wayland on Nvidia, never thought I would get to say this. I’m hyped for GNOME 45 to drop in Sid!
What’s your workflow that involves almost no X11 programs?
Not Op, but:
First, I have a multi monitor setup, with different resolutions, refresh rates and scalings, so X11 is basically unusable (tears like crazy and wrong sizes everywhere). On Wayland, Wayland programs work perfectly, always looking crisp and the correct size.
Anyways, nearly everything I do is in a browser or a terminal, both work perfectly on Wayland. The other program I use lots is VSCode, which in the past was its own source of problems for Wayland/Nvidia, but now it surprisingly works fine (as long as I launch it with
--ozone-platform-hint=auto
so its not blurry).I do use lots of these fancy electron apps, things Slack, Discord and Teams, but I sandboxed all of them into my browser. Teams barely works, but it barely works anywhere anyways so I’m not missing out on much.
I also use lots of native GTK apps, they all support Wayland perfectly, I really like the Celluloid video player for example.
The only programs I commonly use that are X11 only are Spotify, which I don’t really care if its blurry (I tried sandboxing it too into the browser, but I like to keep all my music downloaded) and Datagrip, which I’m anxiously awaiting for Wayland support.
Great summary of half the broken Linux apps. After thinking Unity (game engine)'s Linux support was garbage, I tried it on MacOS, only to realize it’s not Linux support but Unity itself that’s garbage
I occasionally do some Unity work on windows and it still crashes every few hours when saving a scene…