7 ms·

It's interesting to see Wayland enabled by default. I'm curious to know what state Wayland is in nowadays, especially regarding how well it works with Nvidia c

by suby 5y ago

It's interesting to see Wayland enabled by default. I'm curious to know what state Wayland is in nowadays, especially regarding how well it works with Nvidia cards. The last time I tried it out was around 2017ish when Fedora enabled it by default. It was 100% not ready then as it wouldn't even boot into the desktop with my nvidia card. Is it actually ready now? Does it work with nvidia cards? Does GPU acceleration work with nvidia cards? Are apps launching via xwayland gpu accelerated / working as expected? It sounds like OBS and some screenshot programs work now which is nice.

momothereal 5y ago
I've learned not to hold my breath on Ubuntu + Nvidia cards ever working out of the box. I've been using Pop_OS as a daily driver (distro over Ubuntu) and it works 95% of the time.
- pacoverdi 5y ago
  Thanks for the tip. Just tried it. Looks nice but suffers from the same problem as Ubuntu 21.04: laggy with fractional scaling. But fractional scaling with Nvidia did not work at all before 21.04 so I guess there is progress.
  - julianlam 5y ago
    What level of scaling are you using? I tried turning on "large text" in Accessibility settings, which functions like 1.25
    - pacoverdi 5y ago
      I tried 125% and 150%, both modes are too slow for me
      - flurdy 5y ago
        I have it at 125% for one of my 4k screens, and I have no lag. Then again I have an AMD card.
        pacoverdi 5y ago
        Yep, the problem is specific to Nvidia cards
CraftThatBlock 5y ago
XWayland support on NVIDIA should be coming later this year: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-GL-VLK-XWayland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G... Additionally, NVIDIA seems to be putting a lot of effort into overall Wayland support (yay!): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4... Hopefully, by next year, Wayland on NVIDIA should be "fully" supported. It's slow progress, but it is moving forward.
- williamscales 5y ago
  So it sounds like folks with Nvidia cards should hold off on this version of Ubuntu?
  - favadi 5y ago
    No, I guess Ubuntu will just boot to X11 on a system that Wayland is unsupported.
  - CraftThatBlock 5y ago
    No, you can always switch back to Xorg on the login screen (at the bottom right). Wayland support is getting really good these days, I'd recommend giving it a try before going back to Xorg if needed. This release is no different than any previous one for NVIDIA users
    - slacka 5y ago
      > Wayland support is getting really good these days Depends on your needs and hardware. I have an Nvidia desktop and Intel Laptop both running Arch + GNOME 40. Intel is definitely less buggy, but I still find myself switching back to X11. For example, when I needed screen sharing for work video conferencing, it only works under X11(PipeWire support was buggy at the time). Wayland/GNOME also still have issues with mouse lag with high CPU. It's getting better every day, but still rough around the edges.
gspr 5y ago
Depends a lot on the compositor. I've been running on Sway for about half a year. It's 99% perfect — the only thing I'm missing is smooth high-DPI scaling for XWayland windows. Note, smooth high-DPI scaling is good for Wayland programs – I'm just talking about that one piece of software that I use that still needs X (Emacs). Before christmas I played around with Plasma on Wayland. It mostly works, but there were some weird quirky behavior. I didn't look much into it, since I'm so happy with Sway. I hear people say Gnome is fine on Wayland. As for Nvidia: can't help you with that, sorry.
- scaladev 5y ago
  >still needs X (Emacs) With luck, this problem will soon be solved from the opposite direction: https://lwn.net/Articles/843896/ https://lwn.net/Articles/843896/
  - znpy 5y ago
    > Looking forward > Now that there is a pure GTK3 port of Emacs, GTK4 has naturally been released. Oh FFS...
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Nice and slow.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
  Yes! I've been using Sway for years and it's amazing! Very underrated.
Tomdarkness 5y ago
From what I understand after briefly looking into this earlier this month the issue seems to be basically NVIDIA want to push their own buffer API (EGLStreams) rather than use the buffer API developers are actually using (GBM). If you use one of the "big" compositors like GNOME or KDE I believe they have sort of added EGLStreams support so you can use it on NVIDIA but it's not perfect. If you use a more niche one, e.g sway, then it won't work on the NVIDIA proprietary drivers because they don't support GBM. There is some news recently that NVIDIA may be coming around and are in the progress of implementing GBM support in their drivers, but it's not confirmed. You can also use the nouveau nvidia drivers but from what I understand the performance is trash in 3d applications using modern cards, it seems more orientated to supporting older nvidia cards.
- trissylegs 5y ago
  There's also the External memory extensions for Vulkan and OpenGL. All the vendors support the Vulkan api. https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevicescoverage.php?extension=VK_KHR_external_memory_fd&platform=linux https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevicescoverage.php?extension... But not sure about the OpenGL (I think Nvidia do). These apis let you export a FD for sharing. Pretty sure you can import (scanout compatible) objects into DRI/DRM/KMS. Which is what libgbm does for Mesa drivers. Although most compositors (including wl_roots based ones) still use libgbm as they might also need to support embedded hardware. (eg: Tizen). (In the original release of Vulkan intel has a weird "unofficial" extension that let you export a FD. and khr had a VK_cube demo that could directly use KMS with Vulkan using this "extension". This was removed as it was only there to test Vulkan before any window manager integration was implemented)
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  NVIDIA tends to be good (in an evil way) at proprietary lock-in, but they also tend to be good (in a genuine way) at making better thought-out and more advanced APIs. What's the balance of these two qualities in EGLStreams (as compared to GBM)?
  - ZeroCool2u 5y ago
    I've looked into this myself before, because I was curious and had the same thought as you. I don't feel comfortable making any detailed claims about GBM vs EGLStreams and which is better, but I will say there are absolutely some tradeoffs between the two and neither is entirely without merit. The thing that is worth noting is how this situation came to be. That is, there was at one point a conference where the community invited AMD, Intel, and NVidia to discuss the future of this API and Nvidia was a no show for some reason. Those who showed ended up producing GBM, Nvidia pulled EGLStreams out of a hat, and the rest is history. Who knows, maybe it was something as simple as scheduling and the people at Nvidia that needed to be there couldn't make it? Maybe in another timeline this mess could have been avoided entirely.
skerit 5y ago
I've been using Wayland for over a year now without any big problems. I even use fractional scaling (which causes XWayland screens to be blurry) but most of my applications run natively anyway, so it's not a big deal.
fanatic2pope 5y ago
I've been using it with an AMD RX580 driving a 32" 4K monitor for a couple of years now and it just about works perfectly for my needs, including playing a few games through Steam. The only issue I have is that for some reason I occasionally cant alt-tab to the keepassxc window under gnome after I start it up. If you use Linux on the desktop and don't otherwise require an nvidia card (cuda, etc) it is worth while to switch to an AMD card or to spec one for a new build.
- lawik 5y ago
  There will be no new builds. There is no hardware :)
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Fortunately that's not entirely true. In my neck of the woods (Central Europe, so not a place with cheap and abundant hardware like North America or Asia) you can find plenty of decently priced hardware in stock if you're an educated consumer and willing to look around. Sure, you won't find any discrete GPUs anywhere at MSRP thanks to mining and scalpers, BUT, you can find golden nuggets like the Zen2 based 6-core 4650 Pro Ryzen APUs for 220 Euros which is a cracking CPU with good integrated graphics, or you can buy a gaming laptop with the latest gen 8 core Ryzen 5800H and an RTX 3060, 16Gb RAM and 512Gb SSD for about 1200 Euros or even less which IMHO is insane value for this level of performance considering the current apocaliptic market.
philliphaydon 5y ago
I tried it on my laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme) and it was horrible. Firefox would freeze. Kubuntu themes don’t work properly. Resizing apps would cause freezing. Switching back to x11 and it all works totally fine. This was 2 weeks ago on kubuntu 21.04 beta. But I’m on manjaro now and for some reason I have less issues on my laptop than I had with ubuntu 20.04.
sbayeta 5y ago
Is the Wayland thing related to yesterday's announcement of WSL now supporting GUI aps?
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Still broken with Nvidia cards. Works fine with Nouveau drivers. If you want wayland with good performance from your cards it's best to look for AMD graphic cards/gpus . That said I use it just fine on a laptop with nvidia video that is ancient (2014 build date) and Ubuntu 21.04 works great on it. I updated from LTS to give the new pipewire and wayland stuff a shot and it's fine. Makes a good little multimedia server with VLC, unified remote on my phone, and some custom lists
paulirwin 5y ago
My biggest problem trying Wayland in Ubuntu 20.04 was not actually with graphics, that worked well for me with my Radeon card. My issue was with my Logitech T650 trackpad, since Wayland also handles pointer events and scrolling and such. I can't remember exactly what was bugging me about it, but it was annoying enough that I switched back. (Xorg still isn't great with this trackpad, but it's usable.) And my apologies to the community, but I also didn't have the energy to figure out the details enough to file a bug report, as switching back to Xorg solved my problem. I will try to revisit this and see if it's still an issue in 21.04.
astrea 5y ago
I've been out of the loop, but what is the interest in Wayland exactly? It's a display server; what is the interest in it over X11? Outdated?
brudgers 5y ago
Is it actually ready now? Considering I probably have to fool with X every six months or so, a lot will depend on what you mean by "ready." Personally, I'm not ready for Wayland. It doesn't solve any problem I have. And might create problems I don't have. If I was in the market for new problems I'd probably try Arch again ;)
aflag 5y ago
I’ve tried using waylaid on 20.04 and it completely broke Firefox on snap (though it worked if I downloaded it from mozilla’s). So, I know it can be a bit painful to change these things. But I think the bottom line is: wayland is the future. It needs to become the default at some point. There will certainly be some kinks to be ironed out for a while, but we’ll get there.

by suby 5y ago

momothereal 5y ago

I've learned not to hold my breath on Ubuntu + Nvidia cards ever working out of the box. I've been using Pop_OS as a daily driver (distro over Ubuntu) and it works 95% of the time.

pacoverdi 5y ago
Thanks for the tip. Just tried it. Looks nice but suffers from the same problem as Ubuntu 21.04: laggy with fractional scaling. But fractional scaling with Nvidia did not work at all before 21.04 so I guess there is progress.
- julianlam 5y ago
  What level of scaling are you using? I tried turning on "large text" in Accessibility settings, which functions like 1.25
  - pacoverdi 5y ago
    I tried 125% and 150%, both modes are too slow for me
    - flurdy 5y ago
      I have it at 125% for one of my 4k screens, and I have no lag. Then again I have an AMD card.
      - pacoverdi 5y ago
        Yep, the problem is specific to Nvidia cards

CraftThatBlock 5y ago

XWayland support on NVIDIA should be coming later this year: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-GL-VLK-XWayland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G... Additionally, NVIDIA seems to be putting a lot of effort into overall Wayland support (yay!): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4... Hopefully, by next year, Wayland on NVIDIA should be "fully" supported. It's slow progress, but it is moving forward.

williamscales 5y ago
So it sounds like folks with Nvidia cards should hold off on this version of Ubuntu?
- favadi 5y ago
  No, I guess Ubuntu will just boot to X11 on a system that Wayland is unsupported.
- CraftThatBlock 5y ago
  No, you can always switch back to Xorg on the login screen (at the bottom right). Wayland support is getting really good these days, I'd recommend giving it a try before going back to Xorg if needed. This release is no different than any previous one for NVIDIA users
  - slacka 5y ago
    > Wayland support is getting really good these days Depends on your needs and hardware. I have an Nvidia desktop and Intel Laptop both running Arch + GNOME 40. Intel is definitely less buggy, but I still find myself switching back to X11. For example, when I needed screen sharing for work video conferencing, it only works under X11(PipeWire support was buggy at the time). Wayland/GNOME also still have issues with mouse lag with high CPU. It's getting better every day, but still rough around the edges.

gspr 5y ago

Depends a lot on the compositor. I've been running on Sway for about half a year. It's 99% perfect — the only thing I'm missing is smooth high-DPI scaling for XWayland windows. Note, smooth high-DPI scaling is good for Wayland programs – I'm just talking about that one piece of software that I use that still needs X (Emacs). Before christmas I played around with Plasma on Wayland. It mostly works, but there were some weird quirky behavior. I didn't look much into it, since I'm so happy with Sway. I hear people say Gnome is fine on Wayland. As for Nvidia: can't help you with that, sorry.

scaladev 5y ago
>still needs X (Emacs) With luck, this problem will soon be solved from the opposite direction: https://lwn.net/Articles/843896/ https://lwn.net/Articles/843896/
- znpy 5y ago
  > Looking forward > Now that there is a pure GTK3 port of Emacs, GTK4 has naturally been released. Oh FFS...
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Nice and slow.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
Yes! I've been using Sway for years and it's amazing! Very underrated.

Tomdarkness 5y ago

From what I understand after briefly looking into this earlier this month the issue seems to be basically NVIDIA want to push their own buffer API (EGLStreams) rather than use the buffer API developers are actually using (GBM). If you use one of the "big" compositors like GNOME or KDE I believe they have sort of added EGLStreams support so you can use it on NVIDIA but it's not perfect. If you use a more niche one, e.g sway, then it won't work on the NVIDIA proprietary drivers because they don't support GBM. There is some news recently that NVIDIA may be coming around and are in the progress of implementing GBM support in their drivers, but it's not confirmed. You can also use the nouveau nvidia drivers but from what I understand the performance is trash in 3d applications using modern cards, it seems more orientated to supporting older nvidia cards.

trissylegs 5y ago
There's also the External memory extensions for Vulkan and OpenGL. All the vendors support the Vulkan api. https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevicescoverage.php?extension=VK_KHR_external_memory_fd&platform=linux https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevicescoverage.php?extension... But not sure about the OpenGL (I think Nvidia do). These apis let you export a FD for sharing. Pretty sure you can import (scanout compatible) objects into DRI/DRM/KMS. Which is what libgbm does for Mesa drivers. Although most compositors (including wl_roots based ones) still use libgbm as they might also need to support embedded hardware. (eg: Tizen). (In the original release of Vulkan intel has a weird "unofficial" extension that let you export a FD. and khr had a VK_cube demo that could directly use KMS with Vulkan using this "extension". This was removed as it was only there to test Vulkan before any window manager integration was implemented)
jjoonathan 5y ago
NVIDIA tends to be good (in an evil way) at proprietary lock-in, but they also tend to be good (in a genuine way) at making better thought-out and more advanced APIs. What's the balance of these two qualities in EGLStreams (as compared to GBM)?
- ZeroCool2u 5y ago
  I've looked into this myself before, because I was curious and had the same thought as you. I don't feel comfortable making any detailed claims about GBM vs EGLStreams and which is better, but I will say there are absolutely some tradeoffs between the two and neither is entirely without merit. The thing that is worth noting is how this situation came to be. That is, there was at one point a conference where the community invited AMD, Intel, and NVidia to discuss the future of this API and Nvidia was a no show for some reason. Those who showed ended up producing GBM, Nvidia pulled EGLStreams out of a hat, and the rest is history. Who knows, maybe it was something as simple as scheduling and the people at Nvidia that needed to be there couldn't make it? Maybe in another timeline this mess could have been avoided entirely.

skerit 5y ago

I've been using Wayland for over a year now without any big problems. I even use fractional scaling (which causes XWayland screens to be blurry) but most of my applications run natively anyway, so it's not a big deal.

fanatic2pope 5y ago

I've been using it with an AMD RX580 driving a 32" 4K monitor for a couple of years now and it just about works perfectly for my needs, including playing a few games through Steam. The only issue I have is that for some reason I occasionally cant alt-tab to the keepassxc window under gnome after I start it up. If you use Linux on the desktop and don't otherwise require an nvidia card (cuda, etc) it is worth while to switch to an AMD card or to spec one for a new build.

lawik 5y ago
There will be no new builds. There is no hardware :)
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Fortunately that's not entirely true. In my neck of the woods (Central Europe, so not a place with cheap and abundant hardware like North America or Asia) you can find plenty of decently priced hardware in stock if you're an educated consumer and willing to look around. Sure, you won't find any discrete GPUs anywhere at MSRP thanks to mining and scalpers, BUT, you can find golden nuggets like the Zen2 based 6-core 4650 Pro Ryzen APUs for 220 Euros which is a cracking CPU with good integrated graphics, or you can buy a gaming laptop with the latest gen 8 core Ryzen 5800H and an RTX 3060, 16Gb RAM and 512Gb SSD for about 1200 Euros or even less which IMHO is insane value for this level of performance considering the current apocaliptic market.

philliphaydon 5y ago

I tried it on my laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme) and it was horrible. Firefox would freeze. Kubuntu themes don’t work properly. Resizing apps would cause freezing. Switching back to x11 and it all works totally fine. This was 2 weeks ago on kubuntu 21.04 beta. But I’m on manjaro now and for some reason I have less issues on my laptop than I had with ubuntu 20.04.

sbayeta 5y ago

Is the Wayland thing related to yesterday's announcement of WSL now supporting GUI aps?

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Still broken with Nvidia cards. Works fine with Nouveau drivers. If you want wayland with good performance from your cards it's best to look for AMD graphic cards/gpus . That said I use it just fine on a laptop with nvidia video that is ancient (2014 build date) and Ubuntu 21.04 works great on it. I updated from LTS to give the new pipewire and wayland stuff a shot and it's fine. Makes a good little multimedia server with VLC, unified remote on my phone, and some custom lists

paulirwin 5y ago

My biggest problem trying Wayland in Ubuntu 20.04 was not actually with graphics, that worked well for me with my Radeon card. My issue was with my Logitech T650 trackpad, since Wayland also handles pointer events and scrolling and such. I can't remember exactly what was bugging me about it, but it was annoying enough that I switched back. (Xorg still isn't great with this trackpad, but it's usable.) And my apologies to the community, but I also didn't have the energy to figure out the details enough to file a bug report, as switching back to Xorg solved my problem. I will try to revisit this and see if it's still an issue in 21.04.

astrea 5y ago

I've been out of the loop, but what is the interest in Wayland exactly? It's a display server; what is the interest in it over X11? Outdated?

brudgers 5y ago

Is it actually ready now? Considering I probably have to fool with X every six months or so, a lot will depend on what you mean by "ready." Personally, I'm not ready for Wayland. It doesn't solve any problem I have. And might create problems I don't have. If I was in the market for new problems I'd probably try Arch again ;)

aflag 5y ago

I’ve tried using waylaid on 20.04 and it completely broke Firefox on snap (though it worked if I downloaded it from mozilla’s). So, I know it can be a bit painful to change these things. But I think the bottom line is: wayland is the future. It needs to become the default at some point. There will certainly be some kinks to be ironed out for a while, but we’ll get there.