Should you use Wayland over XOrg on an Nvidia card? (Ubuntu 22.04)

Programmeter

10/28/23, 4:40 PM

I've seen a lot of discussion about XOrg and Wayland recently, their compatibility and downsides, etc. so I'm not 100% sure which one is better.

I heard both have compatibility issues with Nvidia cards, and whenever I switched to Wayland I got some weird window flashes and stutters.

To be fair though, I never tried to fix it so it might be my fault.

Should I try to fix it though? Usually people talk about how great Wayland is, but honestly there isn't necessarily something that's bothering me with XOrg. Is it actually better? In what way?

Also, what are some things I should do if I decide to use Wayland? For example, should I use a specific version of the Nvidia GPU drivers?

Any info would be helpful, especially from fellow Nvidia users.

P. S. I don't play any graphically intensive games on Ubuntu, so small performance hits don't really matter to me, as long as there are some nice features in return.

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Esther

10/28/23, 4:43 PM

I suggest leaving whatever is default, unless you have specific problems that can be fixed by switching.

ChanganAuto

10/28/23, 4:43 PM

No, XOrg doesn't have compatibility issue with Nvidia (don't confuse it with the `nouveau` community driver, often referred to as "xorg" that may not work with some newer cards). Wayland is an hit and miss, depends on the card and drivers version.

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Ubuntu

Nattgew

11/4/23, 6:06 PM

There are good reasons that Wayland is often disabled for the Nvidia drivers. Nvidia support for Wayland is still far behind other drivers and there are still many issues along with outstanding caveats.

I was able to enable Wayland on my Nvidia setup to try it out with Gnome. From my experience, the biggest benefit of switching to Wayland is that changing the monitor setup is pretty smooth and seamless, where on Xorg all the monitors go black before coming back with the new setup and windows sometimes get jumbled around.

A few other things may be faster or smoother but I get a lot of issues with Wayland. It just seems much less stable as the display usually ends up freezing and requiring a restart to fix it. Things like menus have glitches where they disappear or otherwise are hard to use (sounds similar to your experience). Some programs are slower or behave very strangely. I think there was some issue with file saving dialogs but I can't remember exactly. Electron-based apps won't open without adding special launch options. Discord crashes on viewing a shared screen and can only share whole screens, not specific apps.

If I'm only going to be doing some light tasks I might use it just to try it out but for anything more involved it quickly becomes a headache trying to deal with all of the things that don't work well. Ideally everything would just work and you wouldn't be able to tell which system you're using, but every time I'm reminded I'm using Wayland it's almost always because something isn't working right. Nvidia on Xorg just works, it's been solid for a long time, and if you have any issues you're much more likely to find a solution than with Wayland.

With time the Nvidia Wayland experience will get better, but we're still not there yet. This site has a good general status of where things are at.

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