this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
53 points (100.0% liked)
Linux Gaming
15377 readers
45 users here now
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
Resources
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can someone explain what this means? I’m new to Linux gaming. Don’t really get what the difference is between wayland and x11. Will this improve performance in d4 on distros like fedora?
Simply put, X11 is the bottom of the graphics stack, i.e. everything that makes Linux have more than just a command line has historically been built on top of X11
X11 is OLD. Like really old. And has a bunch of problem because of it (no variable refresh rate, no good multi monitor support, no proper fractional scaling , tearing, no security etc) It's also very mature. Somehow developers have managed to build a decent user experience out of the old X11
The Wayland protocol was designed to overcome the shortcomings of X11 and replace it. Wayland is now at the cusp of being a fully functional complete replacement for X11. It already is for many (most?) use cases.
Many Applications that are not made for Wayland will still run in Wayland, but they run in a fake X11 server inside called Xwayland. But native Wayland is better (performance, security, features)
Wayland very good on AMD and Intel these days. Nvidia was unsupported, but last year nVidia made a business decision to support EGL(?) so with fresh drives work has begun in Gnome and KDE to support Nvidia in Wayland. I'm not sure how mature Nvidia on Wayland is yet
Clarification: GBM is what Intel, AMD and the general "nice players" of the Linux graphics ecosystem decided, whereas EGLStreams was something NVidia came up with because it worked better with their proprietary drivers (AFAIK)
Gnome and KDE were fine going out of their way to support both, but smaller implementations such as wlroots (the thing behind sway and Hyprland and other non-Weston "window managers") didn't feel the tradeoff was worth it (in both philosophical and manpower reasons) and stuck to GBM.
NVidia comparatively recently "caved in" and got GBM support working (alongside kernel mode setting, PRIME & other terms you don't really need to know about), and being one of the few proprietary players in the ecosystem they have not been able to benefit from help from the community, which is one of the reasons why their Wayland support is immature compared to the likes of Intel and AMD.
yeah, wayland is awesome, unless you really need global shortcuts decided by the application, or a tun of other accessibility features. Still though, as you said, for most cases, wayland is good, and even the a11y features are getting ironed out, ever so slowly.