Switching to modern Wayland, is it worth?

[g-virus]

Hey folks

I remember I had a discussion about migrating to Wayland a time ago, but things could be changed since, so I'm wondering if it's worth to switch to Wayland nowadays with the following preferences:

1. I'm going to use NVIDIA graphics card
2. I'm gonna use Sway or similar tiling window manager, no pure KDE/Gnome DE
3. I'm using no-multilib gentoo profile
4. I'd like to avoid X-only apps and keep the system minimal, but still usable as a daily computer

I have a laptop with Intel-only graphics and I use Arch on it with configured Sway/Waybar and other things, looks very usable, but there is no NVIDIA card/G-Sync.

So the question is: can I use Wayland-only environment with no-multilib gentoo profile, as well as with the NVIDIA card, and would you recommend to switch to Wayland to use a technology, that will potentially replace Xorg soon?

[Zucca]

There has been a lot of discussion about this.

I'd say try it out, if it doesn't work then revert back.
I, myself, have been using wayland (first sway then wayfire) for some years already. Your mileage may wary.

[Anon-E-moose]

So the question is: can I use Wayland-only environment with no-multilib gentoo profile, as well as with the NVIDIA card, and would you recommend to switch to Wayland to use a technology, that will potentially replace Xorg soon?

And the answer is "it depends"
no multilib is fine
same with sway and wayland
you don't need X unless you're wanting to run X apps by way of Xwayland

Nvidia, that depends on which card and drivers you have.

I've been running straight wayland for a few years now, without X (not even libs) on a non multilib system, though I'm an amdgpu user.

[g-virus]

Nvidia, that depends on which card and drivers you have.

I have rtx 3070ti, and I'd like to use proprietary drivers if it's possible. I'm just wondering of how different reviews about Wayland are, even now: some people say it isn't ok with Nvidia, others say it's ok, some people complain about broken screen capture/sharing, others tell that there is no problem with it.

I personally use sway on my laptop, and I can't notice any problem, but it doesn't have a discrete graphics card, while my desktop does and of course I'd like to utilize the hardware I actually have (I'm already suffering the lack of proper Razer support )

[Anon-E-moose]

Reviews (especially nvidia/wayland ones) the more current the better chance of it being true.
It's only been in the last year or so that nvidia has gotten serious with wayland support in their drivers.
The latest if preferable, though if I was an nvidia user I'd check the nvidia linux forum for any problems.

The only advice that I can give you is to try it, you can have both X and wayland installed at the same time.
You just start one or the other, that's how I started using wayland, then when I was comfortable that wayland worked (for me) I removed all X stuff.

[ChrisJumper]

Nvidia, that depends on which card and drivers you have.

I have rtx 3070ti, and I'd like to use proprietary drivers if it's possible.

Since this is a modern card and should work well, with the actual drivers. I just read some Archlinux Blogpost about wayland and modern Nvidia Drivers. Keep in Mind when use Gentoo Wikis to adjust your Installation an Configuration. Sometimes i snitch in the archlinux wiki to configure my Gentoo. Just for Wayfire the gentoo wiki is more verbose and in 2025, we have often to dig into github Project Pages, Discussions or the Manual of the Projects. Wich is good because if you check out some Source Code or Configuration Files and other Wiki-Pages you get a feeling for what is New or too old and changed.

On Gentoo its a problem to have an OLD Nvidia Card Geforce 9400 GS (nvidia driver 340.1080). I have one from 2008 and with the open source driver it did not work well with wayland. I had a workaround about years by having an old ebuild for the obsolet package and patched the driver to Kernel 5.1 by Hand. However id did not work 2025 any more and GDM fail now. Thats why i write from Wayfire. Ill buy a new computer next week. GDM with properitery drivers work cause i supports DRM (Direct Rendering Managment). Nouveau Support page say it may work with opensource too but i should add properitary external firmware files. - Since the Driver got no Security Fixes and run that closed Sources for parts i will reject it.

However neglected my Gentoo and open Source in the last month/years cause live was awful. I missed my open source Computers and i am sick of having compromises in my computer or smartphone setting. And Wayland and Rust is the only way to go.

As Anon-E-moose say, you can have install X and wayland at the same time and even use a minimal X-Config or not root running X-Server. It just sometimes doubles the complexity and the failure possibility .. cause you have more then one way to handle Xorg Config and Wayland config and it kind of doubles some bad updates. But on the other side you have a backup as DE when your Xor-Server is not working or as me and Nvidia: I Like to have Nouveau Drivers, cause if they do not the job right now i have to use Terminal and "Links" again to Brows the internet.

g-virus if you not want to play with your Gentoo and use Wayland and Steam, it should work very well. Just try a slight migration with booth installed, used and configured and migrate after a few steps and check out if your Greeter work well with Wayland and your Desktop Environment.

[antonone]

No other way of finding out than checking it for yourself I guess. I was using Wayland for several months on proprietary drivers and GTX 1060 until I had to finally revert to X.

A lot of things worked *better* for me under Wayland (general snappiness), some worked equally well (screen capture), but some things were simply broken: Electron apps don't work well (e.g. CURA slicer; but VSCode is an exception, it worked after some environment variable tweaking), apps like Signal for some reason was throwing I/O errors, Vivaldi browser didn't work on Wayland for me (drawing corruptions all over the place), remote desktop software TO wayland didn't work well (NoMachine), remote desktop FROM wayland to other systems didn't work well (e.g. remmina, when started in X11 compatibility mode it corrupted VNC connections while RDP worked, and when started in Wayland mode it corrupted RDP connections while VNC worked), proprietary software like BricsCAD simply crash on Wayland, they run on XWayland but crash in other random places, so the software is not usable.

But my last straw was missing the ability of programmatically moving the mouse cursor under Wayland.

But I guess if you limit yourself to non-X apps, then Wayland experience would actually be better for you.

[dmpogo]

It all depends on how you measure "worth". Wayland abilities is not a superset of X. There are tradeoffs

[ChrisJumper]

I am back with a new computer, working with wayland like a charm - and my keyboard issue was about a 3.2 USB Port and a not implemented kernel driver. Now everything worked. I just missed it! Wayland is the future.