5 ms·

I'll throw my hat in the anti-Wayland ring. I have a 5-year-old graphics card from the most popular graphics card company in the world. And yet, in 2025, I cann

by 63 1y ago

I'll throw my hat in the anti-Wayland ring. I have a 5-year-old graphics card from the most popular graphics card company in the world. And yet, in 2025, I cannot run Sway/Wayland on my Nvidia 3070 for more than 20 minutes without a crash. i3/Xorg works fine. Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.

mqus 1y ago
At least in the past, this was an nvidia issue (not respecting the kernel). But I do understand the user issue here: X works, Wayland does not.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter! Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use. It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
- throwaway63097 1y ago
  > Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
  - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    Ignorance is a beautiful shield Against rationality & understanding, little green grasshopper (8 hour old account). The world has no ability to make Nvidia's drivers good. If Nvidia can't build drivers that work, there's nothing we can do about it. Defending a situation where hackers have no ability to improve or work a situation is unhackerly, dumb. Consumers are free to remain ignorant, but this situation of where we go and what we do has consequences & meaning to the hacker, and the facts and technics ought matter.
    - petre 1y ago
      Sure mate, but I guess I'll stick to X if it works, I don't care who's fault is it, nvidia's or wayland's. Life is too short to have a crashing UI interrupt my work.
      - queenkjuul 1y ago
        End of the day people buy Nvidia because they need to (CUDA/AI/ML) not because of ideology or driver architecture. Shit just needs to work and bottom line is no matter who's to blame, Wayland doesn't work for every use case that X does.
        jauntywundrkind 1y ago
        I want to emphasize again that most people at this point don't have a problem running Sway on Nvidia. It's been working adequately for years, stably. In the past ~18 months especially, Nvidia seems to have been updating their closed source drivers much more actively as well, which is positive to see. As far as I know, the top poster having issues has taken no steps to report the issue, send coredumps, do any follow up on their issue. I can't emphasize enough how gross this mercenary position is though. X developers were fed up, en masse. The whole project had thoroughly rotted, was unsustainable, had no path forwards to use modern video techniques. It sort of works, but also, it's insecure as hell, and a terrible leaky foundation. We get to claim where politically we are in the axis: are we going to be conservative people, who resist and are afraid of change forever? Or will we have hope and excitement at progress and hope for better futures? Doing nothing and investing nothing and only having a "shit just needs to work" is a refusal to inform yourself, one that makes you quite conservative. There's reasons to be in that camp, and especially for less open-source more consumeristic people who owing to the conditions of their environment have a very strong trained helplessness where there's no sense contemplating alternatives since your hands are tied anyways. But I find it repulsive & immature to be so short, so anti-informed, so un-nuanced, and hopeless and lacking ambition. As ever, Yegge's Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus, on the political axis of technologies, https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150 https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
- lelanthran 1y ago
  Meh. I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work. The number of paragraphs used to explain why the non-working product does not work would be better spent simply pointing people to the working product.
  - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    I mean, yeah, Nvidia being fundamentally incompatible with open source ecosystems, not having drivers, and having stuff broken sucks and while I think it's pretty pathetic and low-life to not care and not think about that in any way at all, I get that folks are going to stay on X because Nvidia refuses to work with open source. That said, I do think the parent post is probably experiencing a very very rare issue. There are plenty of people using Nvidia ⨯ Sway now quite successfully.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > I think it's pretty pathetic and low-life to not care and not think about that in any way at all, Was this part really necessary? The people who care more about working software are pathetic and lowlife? Really? > I get that folks are going to stay on X because Nvidia refuses to work with open source. I dunno if you've noticed, but there are one or two other dealbreakers that keep people off of Wayland.
      - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
        Open source grants folks the right to use however they want at whatever level they want, but yeah, I think it's riding dirty to take take take & not give a lick of thought to the ecosystem or concern for it's overall well-being. When you said: > I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work. I see active dis-interest like that as damaging to open source as a whole. It's a mercenary in-it-for-me view, one that's not investing any caring.
        lelanthran 1y ago
const_cast 1y ago
I know this conversation keeps coming up again and again, but this is firmly nvidia's issue. Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever. Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent. And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows. Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever. Have they? Or have others refused to work with them, refused to make compromises, and refused to offer stable interfaces for them to target. Don't pretend like none of this "antagonism" wasn't self inflicted.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    1. The kernel never provides stable interfaces in kernel space. That's just how it is. 2. Nobody can work with them anyway because their drivers are closed sourced. They decided they should be the only ones developing them, so be it. If they upstreamed them they would get thousands of contributor's worth of help.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      1. It doesn't have to be that way. Windows provides a stable interface for drivers for example. 2. Directly contributing code is not the only way to work with someone.
      - boudin 1y ago
neurostimulant 1y ago
Wayland and Nvidia seems to work better on bleeding edge distro that ships bleeding edge DE and latest stable kernel.

by 63 1y ago

mqus 1y ago

At least in the past, this was an nvidia issue (not respecting the kernel). But I do understand the user issue here: X works, Wayland does not.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter! Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use. It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!

throwaway63097 1y ago
> Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Ignorance is a beautiful shield Against rationality & understanding, little green grasshopper (8 hour old account). The world has no ability to make Nvidia's drivers good. If Nvidia can't build drivers that work, there's nothing we can do about it. Defending a situation where hackers have no ability to improve or work a situation is unhackerly, dumb. Consumers are free to remain ignorant, but this situation of where we go and what we do has consequences & meaning to the hacker, and the facts and technics ought matter.
  - petre 1y ago
    Sure mate, but I guess I'll stick to X if it works, I don't care who's fault is it, nvidia's or wayland's. Life is too short to have a crashing UI interrupt my work.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      End of the day people buy Nvidia because they need to (CUDA/AI/ML) not because of ideology or driver architecture. Shit just needs to work and bottom line is no matter who's to blame, Wayland doesn't work for every use case that X does.
      - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
        I want to emphasize again that most people at this point don't have a problem running Sway on Nvidia. It's been working adequately for years, stably. In the past ~18 months especially, Nvidia seems to have been updating their closed source drivers much more actively as well, which is positive to see. As far as I know, the top poster having issues has taken no steps to report the issue, send coredumps, do any follow up on their issue. I can't emphasize enough how gross this mercenary position is though. X developers were fed up, en masse. The whole project had thoroughly rotted, was unsustainable, had no path forwards to use modern video techniques. It sort of works, but also, it's insecure as hell, and a terrible leaky foundation. We get to claim where politically we are in the axis: are we going to be conservative people, who resist and are afraid of change forever? Or will we have hope and excitement at progress and hope for better futures? Doing nothing and investing nothing and only having a "shit just needs to work" is a refusal to inform yourself, one that makes you quite conservative. There's reasons to be in that camp, and especially for less open-source more consumeristic people who owing to the conditions of their environment have a very strong trained helplessness where there's no sense contemplating alternatives since your hands are tied anyways. But I find it repulsive & immature to be so short, so anti-informed, so un-nuanced, and hopeless and lacking ambition. As ever, Yegge's Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus, on the political axis of technologies, https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150 https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
lelanthran 1y ago
Meh. I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work. The number of paragraphs used to explain why the non-working product does not work would be better spent simply pointing people to the working product.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  I mean, yeah, Nvidia being fundamentally incompatible with open source ecosystems, not having drivers, and having stuff broken sucks and while I think it's pretty pathetic and low-life to not care and not think about that in any way at all, I get that folks are going to stay on X because Nvidia refuses to work with open source. That said, I do think the parent post is probably experiencing a very very rare issue. There are plenty of people using Nvidia ⨯ Sway now quite successfully.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > I think it's pretty pathetic and low-life to not care and not think about that in any way at all, Was this part really necessary? The people who care more about working software are pathetic and lowlife? Really? > I get that folks are going to stay on X because Nvidia refuses to work with open source. I dunno if you've noticed, but there are one or two other dealbreakers that keep people off of Wayland.
    - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
      Open source grants folks the right to use however they want at whatever level they want, but yeah, I think it's riding dirty to take take take & not give a lick of thought to the ecosystem or concern for it's overall well-being. When you said: > I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work. I see active dis-interest like that as damaging to open source as a whole. It's a mercenary in-it-for-me view, one that's not investing any caring.
      - lelanthran 1y ago

const_cast 1y ago

I know this conversation keeps coming up again and again, but this is firmly nvidia's issue. Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever. Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent. And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows. Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.

charcircuit 1y ago
>Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever. Have they? Or have others refused to work with them, refused to make compromises, and refused to offer stable interfaces for them to target. Don't pretend like none of this "antagonism" wasn't self inflicted.
- const_cast 1y ago
  1. The kernel never provides stable interfaces in kernel space. That's just how it is. 2. Nobody can work with them anyway because their drivers are closed sourced. They decided they should be the only ones developing them, so be it. If they upstreamed them they would get thousands of contributor's worth of help.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    1. It doesn't have to be that way. Windows provides a stable interface for drivers for example. 2. Directly contributing code is not the only way to work with someone.
    - boudin 1y ago

neurostimulant 1y ago

Wayland and Nvidia seems to work better on bleeding edge distro that ships bleeding edge DE and latest stable kernel.