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Another big tick in the box for switching over to Wayland from Xorg, with the release of XWayland 21.1.3.  In the release announcement it was noted that it has no changes over the previous release candidate build.

With this release of XWayland, it brings in support for the latest NVIDIA 495.44 stable driver, released back in October where NVIDIA finally added support for the GBM API.

So what does this actually mean? In short: much better Wayland support. With this and the 470.57.02 release before it, that came with hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan rendering on Xwayland, things are looking to be in a pretty good spot now. This is all needed, as when distributions make the full switch over to Wayland, you will still want your games and applications designed to run on Xorg to work fully and all this together should make the experience good.

It's been a very long road to get to full Wayland support but it looks like 2022 may be the year of Wayland. Especially so with the Valve Steam Deck releasing with SteamOS 3 that will also use gamescope, a Wayland compositor, in the main gaming session (not desktop mode).

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9 comments

LordDaveTheKind Nov 9, 2021
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I'm at the point to finally switch to Wayland then.

Unfortunately with Gnome 40.* I'm still experiencing the issue that the defined refresh rate is the half of the monitor supported one on NVIDIA GPU. Apparently is a EGL issue, which has been fixed for Gnome 42 and GBM (and then NVIDIA Driver 495.44). A few months still to go then for a reliable solution.


Last edited by LordDaveTheKind on 9 November 2021 at 11:19 am UTC
michaldybczak Nov 9, 2021
I just updated to Nvidia 495.44 and the Wayland session won't start. Does it mean I must wait for the update of xorg-xwayland 21.1.3 for it to work or something is wrong on my side?


Last edited by michaldybczak on 9 November 2021 at 11:20 am UTC
ridge Nov 9, 2021
I just updated to Nvidia 495.44 and the Wayland session won't start. Does it mean I must wait for the update of xorg-xwayland 21.1.3 for it to work or something is wrong on my side?

The Wayland session in Plasma is a bit broken at the moment, I don't know if egl-wayland still needs an update but I know for sure qtwayland does; for which there's currently a merge conflict: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwayland/+/373473

I was able to log in to Plasma Wayland but the screen wouldn't refresh unless I moved my mouse, I built qtwayland from source with the above patch and it works now. Still glitchy, but it's getting there!

As for why you can't even start it I'm not sure, but waiting is probably gonna pay off.
axredneck Nov 9, 2021
I just updated to Nvidia 495.44 and the Wayland session won't start. Does it mean I must wait for the update of xorg-xwayland 21.1.3 for it to work or something is wrong on my side?
XWayland doesn't affect your session, it's only for Xorg apps/games
jahid65 Nov 9, 2021
I just updated to Nvidia 495.44 and the Wayland session won't start. Does it mean I must wait for the update of xorg-xwayland 21.1.3 for it to work or something is wrong on my side?

Probaly something on your end. Are you using KDE? I am using 495.44 driver in Fedora 35 (gnome) with wayland without any problem. For full gbm support you need xwayland 21.1.3 and gnome 41.2. Gnome is still using egl-stream for nvidia. 41.2 release most probably use gbm backend. Xwayland 21.1.3 is already in testing repo dor Fedora 35 and 34. Hopefully, it will come within 2 weeks
CZiNTrPT Nov 10, 2021
I just updated to Nvidia 495.44 and the Wayland session won't start. Does it mean I must wait for the update of xorg-xwayland 21.1.3 for it to work or something is wrong on my side?

The Wayland session in Plasma is a bit broken at the moment, I don't know if egl-wayland still needs an update but I know for sure qtwayland does; for which there's currently a merge conflict: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwayland/+/373473

I was able to log in to Plasma Wayland but the screen wouldn't refresh unless I moved my mouse, I built qtwayland from source with the above patch and it works now. Still glitchy, but it's getting there!

As for why you can't even start it I'm not sure, but waiting is probably gonna pay off.

Can you use multi monitoring with plasma Wayland now? I always get a black "bar" at the bottom of my screen where desktop wallpaper and application end, but mouse can travel over. So weird I can't even describe it
ridge Nov 11, 2021
Can you use multi monitoring with plasma Wayland now? I always get a black "bar" at the bottom of my screen where desktop wallpaper and application end, but mouse can travel over. So weird I can't even describe it

I can, for me all three monitors work as they should with the patch I mentioned. Try asking on KDE's webchat for a possible workaround.
Nvidia + Plasma Wayland is gonna be a bit weird(er) in the coming weeks or maybe even months, sadly.
14 Nov 12, 2021
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I've been running Wayland on my laptop for a few months now. It works well there, and it has a crisper feel to it. You know what I mean? Barely noticeable, but seems like some window movement / animation / rendering is a hair more responsive and tight.

But I don't run it on my main machine yet because I need better clipboard access between applications. Also, I couldn't get OBS to work in the amount of time I was willing to fiddle with it. So, there are not many things holding me back.
Eike Nov 13, 2021
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I've been running Wayland on my laptop for a few months now. It works well there, and it has a crisper feel to it. You know what I mean?

I had these moments, when switching from an analog to a digital monitor or from HDD to SSD. (Probably these effects where bigger though.)
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