Switching to wayland with nvidia

Hey!
I’m considering switching to wayland since plasma 6 is going to be that by default anyways. How does one go about doing that? Is it just installing a few packages and then logging into it? Should I something in mind if I do the switch? I run games sometimes so do I need to fiddle around with xwayland or something to get that working fine or does it work out of the box now?

For AMD and Intel users only requirement is install plasma-wayland-session and choose wayland on login screen – everything should work out of box. For Nvidia users, depending on card model (in general newer is better), it may be tricky, see here for details:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Plasma
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia

If you intend to game, and have a great experience on Wayland, I’m not sure you should even consider it at all.

I see. I heard that it can fix a lot of issues with screen tearing with KDE and nvidia though. Is it just hype for now or should I just keep waiting then? I don’t mind doing a bit of tinkering.

Alright. What about xwayland? Does that need any special setup or anything? What can I expect not to work on wayland?

If you aren’t Wayland or Xorg programmer, you don’t need to bother about it.

No. But if you want to use screencast you need to switch to pipewire (just install manjaro-pipewire package)

It depends on how you use system. For me everything works flawlessly, I don’t see any downsides on my everyday use:

  • KDE – works perfectly
  • games native and non-native (Steam, Lutris) – works, some even better than with X11
  • browsers, including screencasting on online meetings (needs pipewire) – works
  • other applications – Code OSS, Obsidian, Godot, Discord and any other I tried – just works

It just works (but I have AMD)

Plasma/Wayland Showstoppers - KDE Community Wiki

Part of Plasma switching to Wayland default with 6.0 is that they want to get rid of at least everything in the “true showstoppers” section before release.

I see. Oh yeah is the screen tearing being gone in wayland true? It gets really annoying on my current setup and I haven’t gotten it to get away without killing the compositor

Probably for the screen tearing it is just you didn’t properly configure the monitor, and the video driver. I have absolutely no tearing on KDE with Nvidia.

I would take with a grain of salt what others are telling you, when they don’t own an Nvidia card. The issue here is not Wayland, but it is Nvidia on Wayland, on KDE.

Anyway, it is very quick to make your mind, just install the few packages needed, do the few configuration here and there, and reboot. You’ll see how bad/good the experience is.

Then go back to X11 probably :rofl:

//EDIT: About the screen tearing, make sure to have the PROPER refresh rate selected for your monitor, for each resolution, their should be an default/optimal refresh rate, for example my Samsung monitor has two “60Hz” options I can select, they both are actually not real 60Hz but slightly under, like 59,85 and the other something more or less similar, but only one of these two get me correct refresh rate, and no screen tearing.

Also it is probably needed to use Composition Pipeline (or the Full Composition Pipeline) in Nvidia Settings, for no screen tearing, this was the case with my Samsung, now with my new ASUS monitor I just selected the default refresh rate for the default resolution, and no tearing at all.

Don’t forget to restart Nvidia Settings with sudo when you have it properly configured, and save the configuration under the /etc/X11/mhwd.d/nvidia.conf file so when you reboot, the defaults are the already pre-configured settings. Without doing that when I required the Full Composition Pipeline, it wasn’t working properly.

Yeah I’ve set my refresh rates correctly and enabled full composition pipeline but that hasn’t fully fixed issues. Killing the compositor helps if it gets in the way too much. I’ve kinda learned to live with it lol. I’ll give wayland a try just to see how it is.

Tried it and it was kinda cool. No screen tearing or issues with the compositor. However there were some slight bugs here and there. Wayland stopped working after a reboot though. Interesting experiment and I gotta say that I’m looking forward to what’s to come