Current status recommendations I last saw (probabably 6 months ago) was to avoid nvidia proprietary drivers use with wayland. Wayland use is receiving much attention in many web sites. Looking for experiences of those with successes and major problems. I am looking for a way to go to wayland especially if there might be some observable benefits but if problems might be significant I am willing to stay with current Xorg and proprietary drivers as I have things I wish to keep going.
I use nvidia oldish geforce gtx 1050 ti nvidia graphics card. Open source mesa-nouveau nvidia driver is in tabooed. i7 cpu chip, 32g memory, 1920x1080 display. I don’t do games. I do some sophisticated graphing in computational fluid mechanics work. I also look at complex astronomy graphics in such as fits files. My query leads to 4 questions.
Are proprietary nvidia drivers and wayland now a thing on openSUSE (leap or tumbleweed)? What improvements might I see, i.e., or is this even worth considering.
Are nvidia nouveau opensource drivers now a viable alternative to the proprietary drivers? Also what is accepted procedure to switch?
Are mesa-nouveau drivers working with wayland?
If I try an experiment of nvidia opensource drivers and wayland, what are means of recovering and what would be likely system problem that would be seen?
@tckosvic I’ve been running Wayland for some time now on Nvidia (Tumbleweed), some funkyness with sleep at times when testing pure nvidia gpu, but these are desktop systems and are either on or off, so zero impact for my use case…
I use Intel/Nvidia and no issues.
If the GPU it Turing or better (inxi -Gxxz) you can use the open driver.
I assume you indicated that you are using not using nvidia proprietary drives but nouveau open source drivers and having no issues. Are you seeing any detectible benefits?
@tckosvic So your on Pascal, so the 580 series or G06 is the last to support the likes of Pascal, so Leap 16 has the 6.12 kernel, so that should work for a number of years to come with the Proprietary or nouveau and the Leap Mesa series…
@malcolmlewis and @tckosvic … I just installed 580.76.05 today and it seems fine so far … my wayland uses “xwayland” and I haven’t noticed any real differences between that and X11 @tckosvic could try a wayland desktop and if it doesn’t work just go back to SDDM or whatever and switch back to his X desktop … I’ve always used proprietary drivers and don’t have any problems with them
No one has mentioned any benefits of switching to wayland over X11. I generally only make changes when there is an improvement.
I do have some vm desktops using wayland that seem to run fine but I was told that that is not a valid test of how a system would run with wayland on the actual hardware when I asked.
Is it only that soon not all apps will work with X11 in the future and only work with wayland.
@dart364 , I too don’t have any problems with proprietary drivers but I was wondering, with all the hype over wayland, what performance might be better.
Jus t for clarification, there are 3 sets of nvidia drivers; nvidea proprietary, leap-mesa noveau (the one I have had tabooed for a couple of years), and NVIDIA open drivers?
I don’t know what Turing hardware refers to. Pascal was a computer language years ago. Is that the Pascal you refer to? Pascal was also a well known scientist.
Nothing is actually “faster” or “better” … in my case it’s just simply “not any worse”
In your case with a 1080ti there is only proprietary and nouveau … you would need at least a GTX 16xx or RTX 20xx series card with a turing or chip or higher to use open drivers … there are also other cards like the tesla or quadro lines … if you go with a newer card and are not interested in games as you say I would probably go with an intel card … their shared memory usage is working properly … @malcolmlewis would know much better about that
Thanks for the clarifications of Turing and Pascal. I think my geforce gtx 1050 ti is pre-turing.
It seems that there are no observable improvements from wayland. In the future some of my apps will stop working on X11 and need wayland I will need to be aware of that.
@tckosvic the Intel ARC A310 and A380 I have runs fine on older hardware with PCIe 3.0 as it’s only needed to drive the screens but hardware encoding/decoding works too.
Leap 16.0 has Mesa 24, so not the best for ARC…
If you do upgrade the GPU, then would also look at a monitor upgrade to take advantage of DisplayPort rather than HDMI.
The site dedoimedo did a series of tests and found that in several scenarios (with those tested configurations) Xorg does better than kwin and mutter in wayland, link below:
Despite the enthusiasm that a new technology generates, I believe that at the moment, nvidia’s support for wayland compositors is not as complete as it is for Xorg. It seems to me that the choice is between using wayland, with what is new and modern code, but with minor bugs, or waiting for the distro to naturally offer the transition when the time comes.
Hard to say, unrealistic expectations of users with old/decrepit hardware? I probably get better performance (and power consumption) from a $120 MiniPC than some of that hardware?
Ultimately it’s a no win situation, users with older hardware vs users with newer hardware wanting support.
I suggest users need to do their own tests with their own hardware to really find out what works for them for their use case…
For me, I’m all good on GNOME and Wayland on the hardware I have.
