I’m a seasoned Linux user, but mostly for servers and services, not really for desktop use.
I’ve dabbled in some desktop distros on my personal rig a few times in the past, but ultimately due to specific games, I’ve gone back to Windows.
I recently installed Arch and KDE. Upon initial boot I noticed it was defaulted to Wayland. Every time I would try to log in it would just go to a black screen then cycle back to the login screen. Picking X11 would bring me to the desktop.
Basic Specs:
- AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3D
- nVidia RTX 4090
I have been doing some reading into this and it looks like the issue is due to the proprietary nVidia drivers, but there are solutions to work around this.
I know nothing of Wayland other than its supposed to be more secure. My question is, is it worth the time/effort to get Wayland working? I primarily use my system for gaming. X11 seems to be working just fine for me right now.
Forgive me if I’m using some of the terminology wrong, still learning.
EDIT - Selling my gpu is not an option. I knew ahead of time that AMD has superior Linux support, but the 4090’s performance can’t be matched by anything AMD has. Maybe next upgrade I’ll go back to AMD if they have the top performer.
X11 is the old standard, and Wayland is the newer, simpler and more secure standard though still being developed. But desktop environment support is still being perfected as well as applications needing to be written for it. There is an X11 to Wayland driver for things that don’t support it directly. Eventually, Wayland will be what we all use and distributions will move to support it by default as some do now. I’ve ran a couple Wayland distros in VMWare Player that worked pretty well, Fedora and OpenSUSE. But for now, I’d say stick with X11 and wait for Wayland to mature unless you want to submit bug reports and help with development.
Good overview even though a little dated: https://linuxiac.com/xorg-x11-wayland-linux-display-servers-and-protocols-explained/