[jabirali]

I agree in general that too many things pop up because people want change without good reason. But Wayland is a highly needed replacement, not just in my opinion, but according to the X.org developers themselves. See e.g. this [1] talk by someone who has worked on both X.org and Wayland.

> Why would users ever not stick with something that is stable and just works?

As a user, I switched to Wayland 1.5 years ago for two reasons. The first is that Wayland has way better performance than X. It solves some long-standing and highly irritating issues with e.g. screen-tearing that I and others have been experiencing with X. The second is security. Wayland is nearly a prerequisite for proper sandboxing of GUI apps, as X apps can all keylog each other, screen-record each other, inject keys into each other, and so on, without much restrictions. Since Wayland is backwards-compatible with X via XWayland, which these days has quite good performance, I haven't yet run into an X-only app that didn't just work.

As for the issues with nVidia, that's mostly due to nVidia implementing their own Wayland backend (EGLStreams) that is different from what every other graphics card driver uses (GBM), resulting in every desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc.) having to implement nVidia support separately from generic Wayland support. The single biggest factor holding Wayland back at the moment is nVidia; my experience is that currently Wayland already works way better than X.org if you have an Intel or AMD card, but is highly broken on nVidia.

The second factor holding it back would be that the number of window managers (compositors) for Wayland is lower than for X, currently the main ones are GNOME, KDE, and Sway. But this is changing fast: when I first switched only GNOME worked well; now both KDE and Sway are stable and fully usable on Wayland; and thanks to wlroots, a lot of new window managers for Wayland have popped up [2] and should mature over time.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

[2]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...

[ShamelessC]

Why did Nvidia decide to do that anyway? I understand they have a history of being annoying on Linux, but I'm having trouble seeing what value there is in implementing this with your own backend.

[corty]

Minimum effort. On Linux they are basically only interested in Cuda and Mining working.