3 ms·

When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of

by bityard 4mo ago

When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years. Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine. Good job, KDE team.

ahartmetz 4mo ago
I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.
- httpsterio 4mo ago
  my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps. in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
  - c-hendricks 4mo ago
    Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?
    - httpsterio 4mo ago
      yep and I've also tried disabling the compositior in KDE, which marginally helps but not enough.
  - d3Xt3r 4mo ago
    If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS. [1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec [2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/
    - account42 4mo ago
      With X11 you don't have to care about what wm/compositor you're using to choose a screen recorder.
    - httpsterio 4mo ago
      The 940mx on this laptop doesn't support hardware video encoding, so I'm basically forced to run everything on CPU. I do also stream so it's definitely a nice to have. I could run the game on the GPU and leave more CPU for the desktop and encoder, maybe I'd be able to record and play on Wayland that way, but there's some additional drawing latency if I run the game on the GPU, the frame buffer gets sent back to the CPU before it's drawn on the display anyways. As it's rhythm games I mainly play (ITGmania, Stepmania fork), the additional latency for getting the picture out on the display it's not really working out great for me.
- l72 4mo ago
  When switching to Wayland I lost a lot of custom interactions. I’ve learned to live without them but I still miss them. For example I was a big user of devilspie for placing windows in certain locations, on certain desktops, marking windows as sticky, or marking them as different types of windows. I am still a heavy user of pidgin (I know I know but I’ve even written my own protocols for it). I really liked being able to place it in a certain position as a certain size, mark it as sticky, put it below anll windows, and mark the buddy list as a utility window. This places in the background, removed borders, and doesn’t include it in alt-tab or window list when you do the expose type of thing. Then I had a global key binding to bring it to the front of all windows or drop it back of all windows. As far as I know, none of these paradigms even exist in Wayland and I’ve had to deal with less useful options or completely change my interactions which is unfortunate.
  - rw_grim 4mo ago
    What's wrong with Pidgin? Also what protocols have you written?
fhars 4mo ago
On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.
- craftkiller 4mo ago
  What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
  - chlorion 4mo ago
    Probably didn't even bother to diagnose the issue. It's hard to tell if it was even wayland related without logs and some digging. But lets just blindly blame wayland cause new thing bad!
    - duskdozer 4mo ago
      Log in using wayland -> no desktop. Log in using x11 -> desktop. Clearly it's "wayland related" even if whatever root cause it is is something you wouldn't consider directly attributable to it. Logging into a graphical session is something that has just worked out of the box each other install on whatever random hardware I've used for many years. How is that classified as some nitpicky "new thing bad" complaint?
      - gf000 4mo ago
        Well, it's like new car doesn't start but you have forgotten to put fuel into it, and now blame the car. This is Linux desktop, like if you have never had a black screen before then I'm not sure what you expect. One culprit could actually be the home .config/.cache folders that have all kind of sh*t accumulated (like why do we still do it this way? It's horrible), so I usually rename them and try again to see if this is the problem behind the scenes.
        4mo ago
pmontra 4mo ago
For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  KWin can do dimming in hardware or by messing with the colors - not sure how.
  - pmontra 4mo ago
    Messing with colors looks like gamma correction and dimming in hardware is the backlight control that does not work anymore on my laptop. I don't remember why gamma correction didn't work for me Wayland but I'll give it another try next year, maybe it got fixed by then. X11 is working perfectly well and it always did for me.
hgoel 4mo ago
I recently installed Kubuntu 26.XX on my desktop, was worried about having to use workarounds and giving up on fractional scaling to use it with my NVIDIA gpus (previously had to do this), but was also pretty surprised that it has been smooth sailing.

by bityard 4mo ago

ahartmetz 4mo ago

I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.

httpsterio 4mo ago
my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps. in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
- c-hendricks 4mo ago
  Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?
  - httpsterio 4mo ago
    yep and I've also tried disabling the compositior in KDE, which marginally helps but not enough.
- d3Xt3r 4mo ago
  If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS. [1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec [2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/
  - account42 4mo ago
    With X11 you don't have to care about what wm/compositor you're using to choose a screen recorder.
  - httpsterio 4mo ago
    The 940mx on this laptop doesn't support hardware video encoding, so I'm basically forced to run everything on CPU. I do also stream so it's definitely a nice to have. I could run the game on the GPU and leave more CPU for the desktop and encoder, maybe I'd be able to record and play on Wayland that way, but there's some additional drawing latency if I run the game on the GPU, the frame buffer gets sent back to the CPU before it's drawn on the display anyways. As it's rhythm games I mainly play (ITGmania, Stepmania fork), the additional latency for getting the picture out on the display it's not really working out great for me.
l72 4mo ago
When switching to Wayland I lost a lot of custom interactions. I’ve learned to live without them but I still miss them. For example I was a big user of devilspie for placing windows in certain locations, on certain desktops, marking windows as sticky, or marking them as different types of windows. I am still a heavy user of pidgin (I know I know but I’ve even written my own protocols for it). I really liked being able to place it in a certain position as a certain size, mark it as sticky, put it below anll windows, and mark the buddy list as a utility window. This places in the background, removed borders, and doesn’t include it in alt-tab or window list when you do the expose type of thing. Then I had a global key binding to bring it to the front of all windows or drop it back of all windows. As far as I know, none of these paradigms even exist in Wayland and I’ve had to deal with less useful options or completely change my interactions which is unfortunate.
- rw_grim 4mo ago
  What's wrong with Pidgin? Also what protocols have you written?

fhars 4mo ago

On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.

craftkiller 4mo ago
What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
- chlorion 4mo ago
  Probably didn't even bother to diagnose the issue. It's hard to tell if it was even wayland related without logs and some digging. But lets just blindly blame wayland cause new thing bad!
  - duskdozer 4mo ago
    Log in using wayland -> no desktop. Log in using x11 -> desktop. Clearly it's "wayland related" even if whatever root cause it is is something you wouldn't consider directly attributable to it. Logging into a graphical session is something that has just worked out of the box each other install on whatever random hardware I've used for many years. How is that classified as some nitpicky "new thing bad" complaint?
    - gf000 4mo ago
      Well, it's like new car doesn't start but you have forgotten to put fuel into it, and now blame the car. This is Linux desktop, like if you have never had a black screen before then I'm not sure what you expect. One culprit could actually be the home .config/.cache folders that have all kind of sh*t accumulated (like why do we still do it this way? It's horrible), so I usually rename them and try again to see if this is the problem behind the scenes.
      - 4mo ago

pmontra 4mo ago

For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.

ahartmetz 4mo ago
KWin can do dimming in hardware or by messing with the colors - not sure how.
- pmontra 4mo ago
  Messing with colors looks like gamma correction and dimming in hardware is the backlight control that does not work anymore on my laptop. I don't remember why gamma correction didn't work for me Wayland but I'll give it another try next year, maybe it got fixed by then. X11 is working perfectly well and it always did for me.

hgoel 4mo ago

I recently installed Kubuntu 26.XX on my desktop, was worried about having to use workarounds and giving up on fractional scaling to use it with my NVIDIA gpus (previously had to do this), but was also pretty surprised that it has been smooth sailing.