I was using Wayland for quite a while and things are more or less smooth (NVIDIA proprietary driver). I think it’s time for Manjaro to move to Wayland by default for both Plasma session and SDDM.
Here’s small FAQ regarding the change:
Q: How can I check if I’m using Wayland?
A: Check About this System in System Settings.
Q: How could I try Wayland?
A: Log out from your session and select a Plasma (Wayland) desktop session for the next log in.
Q: What hardware is supported?
A: Any somewhat recent (~15 years old or so) AMD and Intel GPUs are fine. NVIDIA with open source driver (nouveau) is also supported. NVIDIA with proprietary driver is partially supported.
Q: I’m using NVIDIA, am I screwed?
A: Not necessarily. If you are using a current, non-legacy proprietary driver (i.e. it doesn’t have -470xx or -390xx suffix in its package name) or an official open source driver (i.e. with -open suffix) your hardware is supported.
Q: I have unsupported hardware or just don’t want to use Wayland. What then?
A: For unsupported hardware users or for those who has their personal reasons to stay on X11 we’re still yet to figure out how to deliver old X11 defaults to ensure you’ll have a pleasant and smooth experience matching your needs.
Please share your experience with Wayland on Plasma desktop in these polls.
I’m using AMD, Intel, nouveau and my graphics platform is…
Wayland, no issues
Wayland, I have issues
X11, but want to use Wayland
X11, and don’t want to use Wayland
0voters
I’m using a supported official NVIDIA driver and my graphics platform is…
Wayland, no issues
Wayland, I have issues
X11, but want to use Wayland
X11, and don’t want to use Wayland
0voters
I’m using an unsupported NVIDIA driver and I…
want to use Wayland
don’t want to use Wayland
0voters
Also comment on your thoughts/experience/ideas regarding this change.
As it happens, I fully support Wayland as default on Manjaro Plasma. We might expect some push back, as usually occurs with any fundamental change in user defaults, but I do think that will be balanced by those discovering the benefits of using Wayland for the first time.
Wayland has already been my default for two years.
I used KDE on Wayland since 5.25 and no problems at all. I would say that since KDE 6 Wayland is better than X11. I also should mention that I’m full AMD team
At this point I’d be fine with it. I’m already looking to move to Plasma/Wayland from XFCE/X11 due to the AMD vblank issue causing cursor and rendering lag in X11 with kernels 6.12 and up.
My only issue with Wayland is that I cannot really use KeepasXC. The problem they gave us that they cannot determine window titles and as such auto type is not available.
This is not a big issue within the browser but for everything else it is.
I’m using a lot of virtualized-machines, remote-access-applications. kvm’s etc… and x11 is still the infrastructure i have to use cause there are still a lot of flaws with wayland and vm’s. it’s too early to switch to wayland since a lot of the infrastructure must and needs still to be adopted to wayland. there is no time to hurry to switch to wayland explicit. manjaro should stay as it is actually and provide x11 and wayland unless the infrastructure of wayland is a really substitute to x11. at this moment it isn’t.
Manjaro will not be dropping X11. It’ll still be included and supported.
But up until now, Manjaro defaulted to X11 if the user did not manually select Wayland, and that’s the only thing that is proposed to be changed now, i.e. that if you fire up, say, Plasma, it’ll use Wayland by default, unless you explicitly tell it to use X11 — which it will remember for the next time you log in.
While I’m not doubting that you have experienced issues on a VM; and I note others have also occasionally mentioned some difficulty (usually with very little information provided);
I have experienced no Wayland-related issue at all while running VMs locally – perhaps your issues are more related to configuration of the VM client and respective VMs.
so far local vm’s aren’t affected from my experience. trouble starts if you run client-server systems. the x11-protocol is still needed to run them. running applications like remmina,barrier,virtscreen,proxxmox etc… don’t work properly / don’t work at all on wayland in a client-server-infrastructure. using commercial products like vmware or rustdesk are not a solution due to their license-policy to a lot of users. just look at the disaster with vmware. there are reasons why users stepping away from it.
imho it will take some more time (1-2 years) until x11 is really obsolete but meanwhile it is still needed in client-server-systems. this might be a different story on single-desktop-systems.
I use KeePassXC on wayland all the time - albeit without that autocomplete feature.
There is an official extension for firefox (my browser of choice) from the KeePassXC developers which works jsut fine (I’ve always used that, even when I was using Xorg a few years ago):
currently I’m using Wayland because of the “wake up from sleep” issue related to X11+Nvidia.(might have been fixed,didn’t bother to check)
i have no preferences and switch from one to the other according to which one currently works better for me.
as long as i still have the choice on the SDDM screen.
EDIT:
a thing that’s missing on Wayland/Nvidia is the lack of options and customization in the Nvidia X server settings.
it was already dull to begin with compared to Windows.
So my bias started with Firefox and Opera back in the early Noughties… Opera was the first browser to come with mouse gestures, so as you mouse about in the browser, drawing an ‘L’ closed a tab… Later on came Easystroke on X11 which could do the same stuff, plus a whole lot more besides - and when you run out of ideas, you can dream up any kind of shape you like and bind scripts or qdbus commands…
So the joys of having a family of gestures for subtle control - toggle maximise, toggle vertical maximise, toggle horizontal, switching windows - just about everything you can do with shortcuts.
So Wayland killed that, and it never stopped hurting… but I must be honest, however much I despise Wayland for doing that I am finding it faultless in most other respects and - well, I don’t remember the last time I felt the need to kill my X server… never happens
So sucking on Wayland now, and I’m waiting to see if the guys working on it will get gestures (and I’m optimistic that if they crack this, it’ll be better than it ever was before).
I voted Wayland, I use nvidia-open, and I only have a few minor issues - none are bad enough to force me back to X11 for daily use. Only one particular Windows app on Wine is practically unusable but I hardly ever it.
