How does one start a Wayland session?

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1

I’ve been searching for this and all I’ve found is the following:

dbus-run-session startplasmacompositor

Which resulted in “file or directory not found”

Other articles I found said that a Wayland option is available at login. I’ve never seen it.

How can I try out Wayland?

2

In the login screen, SDDM, on the bottom left, you can pick the Wayland / Full Wayland session.

3

I’ve seen SDDM mentioned before. Sorry, I have no idea what that is. When my computer boots, all I see is Tumbleweed and 2 other options, neither of which is Wayland.

4

Hi
The login screen not Grub, if you have auto login set, then you need to logout of the desktop and then you will be at the login screen (sddm).

5

Ok I figured out what SDDM is. There were two Wayland options, Wayland and Full Wayland session. Both of those just gave me a black screen with a small white line in the upper left hand corner and nothing else happened.

6

Likely to depend on your graphics hardware. Are you normally a KDE or Gnome user? (Reference to SDDM leads me to speculate KDE…I assume that this is the displaymanager you normally use?)

7

KDE with NVIDIA card and drivers.

8

NVIDIA may not play along with Wayland on KDE.

Paste the output of

inxi -SGxx
9 
  inxi -SGxx
System:    Host: linux-k3wl Kernel: 5.6.4-1-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 9.3.1 
           Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.18.4 tk: Qt 5.14.1 wm: kwin_x11 dm: SDDM 
           Distro: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20200416 
Graphics:  Device-1: NVIDIA GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] vendor: ASUSTeK driver: nvidia v: 440.82 
           bus ID: 09:00.0 chip ID: 10de:1c03 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.8 driver: nvidia unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa 
           alternate: nv compositor: kwin_x11 resolution: 3840x2160~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 440.82 direct render: Yes
10

From Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues - KDE Community Wiki

NVIDIA

The NVIDIA blob uses a custom EGL extension which Plasma 5.16 added support for. It requires setting the KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1 environment variable to activate.

Other aspects of the “Wayland experience” with NVIDIA such as XWayland compatibility are outside of our influence.
Partly fixed: Requires manual activation.

From ⚙ D18570 EGLStream DRM Backend Initial Implementation it seems there are more requirements to be met, but that page is not likely to be kept up to date.

11

*KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1

Is this something I edit grub with before starting a session?
*

12

I believe this is what you’re looking for: https://community.kde.org/KWin/Environment_Variables#Set_variables_at_session_start