I’m having a hard time deciding whether to use X11 or Wayland for my KDE / Plasma session as I seek the best from both worlds. Wayland has the advantage of being visibly faster, to the point where you can see the mouse cursor and desktop effects working more smoothly. However it has the disadvantage of being a lot more buggy and requiring several tweaks to prevent session crashes, as well as missing features such as no proper clipboard functionality. While I managed to tweak my desktop settings to prevent the base crashes, I’m now facing other major issues that make me ponder trying X11 again… yet I don’t want to go back to the ugly slow renderer, particularly now that I have an 144 Hz monitor and the eye painfully picks up on how much slower it was!
I figured I’d hope for the unlikely and ask: Is there a way to tweak X11 so that it can look and work as fast as Wayland on an 1080p / 144 Hz monitor? I remember KDE / KWin once had a setting called EGL which did in fact make it go as fast, however it was removed years ago and implemented exclusively for Wayland. Is there no other way to get the same smooth rendering to work?
I think more precisely when you are saying X11 you really mean the Xorg implemmtation of X11 vs Wayland’s implementation.
I don’t know that there is a certain answer to your concerns, and there won’t be any time soon.
There are ample good reasons which motivated the development of alternatives to Xorg, but from the beginning there have been few successful alternatives and Wayland is perhaps only the alternative which has had the most staying power… It’s at least 4 years in evolutionary development AFAIK and will continue to improve incrementally rather than by huge leaps between releases. You will likely find that improvements are almost unnoticeable on a daily, weekly or monthly basis but if you compare today’s version vs a year ago, there have been many improvements.
So,
In the same way I don’t know if your concerns will be fixed overnight in a series of bugfixes,
It’s probably more reasonable to expect or hope that they will be fixed over a long period of time.
I don’t know that there’s anything in openSUSE that relies entirely on Wayland that you can’t easily switch to Xorg or implement Wayland as an X11 server so your options are flexible… but if you want something that definitely won’t require any re-configuration at all I’d recommend sticking to Xorg for now.