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Can you even game on Wayland? Maybe with open-source AMD drivers? Last I heard you can't do that with NVidia proprietary drivers and Wayland.

Quoting: Spud13yCan you even game on Wayland? Maybe with open-source AMD drivers? Last I heard you can't do that with NVidia proprietary drivers and Wayland.

Especially on KDE.

Quoting: Spud13yCan you even game on Wayland? Maybe with open-source AMD drivers? Last I heard you can't do that with NVidia proprietary drivers and Wayland.

You can game with about the same performance on AMD with both Gnome and KDE. Nvidia however doesn't want to support xwayland, so you'd have to only play games that only use wayland which is rare atm.

Quoting: Spud13yCan you even game on Wayland? Maybe with open-source AMD drivers? Last I heard you can't do that with NVidia proprietary drivers and Wayland.

With Mesa you can. With Nvidia - not sure (depends on DE). Linux gamers are gradually ditching Nvidia anyway, so it's not going to be a problem in the long term.

There was some effort to support Wayland through Vulkan instead of EGL, bypassing this whole mess of GBM vs EGLstreams, so that can help Nvidia users in some future too, but for that all DEs should support Vulkan based compositor as well.


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 May 2018 at 3:17 am UTC

Quoting: noxNvidia however doesn't want to support xwayland

I think it's more accurate to say upstream developers didn't want to support an additional code path (EGLStreams) when they had already settled on GBM. However, latest Xorg does have EGLStreams support for XWayland included.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland-Better-EGLStreams

Quoting: noxso you'd have to only play games that only use wayland which is rare atm.

Any games using SDL have native Wayland support.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SDL-Wayland-XDG-Shell

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: noxNvidia however doesn't want to support xwayland

I think it's more accurate to say upstream developers didn't want to support an additional code path (EGLStreams) when they had already settled on GBM. However, latest Xorg does have EGLStreams support for XWayland included.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland-Better-EGLStreams

Alright, thanks for adding information to that.

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: noxso you'd have to only play games that only use wayland which is rare atm.

Any games using SDL have native Wayland support.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SDL-Wayland-XDG-Shell

While this is true, you'll need SDL patched for wayland, which last time we tested didn't work at all (about 2 months ago).
So, can you really recommend gaming on wayland with nvidia...?

Quoting: noxSo, can you really recommend gaming on wayland with nvidia...?

Can't vouch for it personally; like others, I figured I would stick with X11 in the short term for less gaming hassle.

Quoting: ShmerlSooner than that. KDE is mostly in good shape already with Wayland support. Now we need big applications like Firefox and Wine to catch up, so they won't need to use XWayland as a fallback.

Really depends what your wants/needs are. Besides the NVIDIA situation, and the fact that most games will need XWayland for the foreseeable future, from what I've read there are still various input issues, e.g. mouse cursor issues with games. And then there's the fact that the screen recording and screen sharing tools people have been using don't work, copy and paste seems to work differently meaning potential issues with password managers and more.
And then there are general bugs that always come with huge rearchitecture efforts.

Do keep in mind this is something I've only read about Wayland, also fairly recently, but I don't have first-hand experience so I can't guarantee all of these are still issues. But for me even one of these would make switching now more annoying than the benefits touted.

Quoting: ArthurDo keep in mind this is something I've only read about Wayland, also fairly recently, but I don't have first-hand experience so I can't guarantee all of these are still issues.

The easiest way to figure it out is to test it and note what doesn't yet work for your use case.


Last edited by Shmerl on 28 May 2018 at 1:08 pm UTC

But why do that now and not wait for a couple years? What I have works fine right now, and I'm using Kubuntu 18.04 with an NVIDIA card so it would most likely not work well anyway.