Somebody sell me on these newfangled tiling WMs. I have been using basically the same xmonad configuration for 15+ years, pretty much updating it only on breaking or deprecated changes. What do all these new Wayland compositors have to offer except "tiling, but for wayland?"
Does Wayland actually work now? I've tried it every few years for over a decade now and every time I ran into showstopper bugs (usually on nvidia cards).
Nvidia + Arch + Gnome3 + Wayland user here. I've tried Wayland on/off for the last couple of years, and made the switch I think late last year sometimes once I stopped seeing very obvious bugs/issues. Just about everything works fine nowadays in my experience.
Mostly made the switch because Wayland seems to run a lot smoother and efficient, especially when it came to Firefox for some reason.
On Gnome + NVIDIA (RTX 2080) + Wayland + 3 Monitors [1DP 4K, 2HDMI (2K, FHD)]
Every time I try it, I am really impressed with the smoothness! But every time, two issues come up, which most likely due to NVIDIA, which are complete showstopper.
1. After inactivity period, monitors turns off. When I resume, one monitor won't come back up. I have to deactivate it on control panel, and cancel to get it back. Doing it many times a day, is extremely annoying. This does not happen on two monitors.
2. Monitors won't turn off ... yeah, after inactivity period the monitor's blanks, but, briefly turns off, and then turns back on. And then never turns off. This mostly happens after playing games.
I think both of the issues are due to NVIDIA.
Otherwise, Wayland has become really solid.
Using i3 now, it's not much, it's boring, and that's a good thing.
Be careful. There are still showstoppers in wayland implementations, if you do anything that isn't common for a Linux user. Example: I am still unable to change the orientation of my drawing tablet.
There are many like this. It mostly works, but it isn't as flawless as just using X11 (unless we are talking about displays and stuff).
Nvidia works since driver 570.
(Edit: grammar and Nvidia note)
Oh weird, I never had a problem like that with my drawing tablet, but then again I dumped Nvidia in 2011 when I switched to archlinux fulltime and had to fix my install twice because of the drivers not being compatible with the latest kernel.
What I still miss is stuff like browser docks in OBS and such things that just work in X but are being dragged on for multiple years to be supported on Wayland now (CEF thing though)
I think "tried it on _what_?" is the question -- which distribution, etc.? I've been using Wayland on Fedora for years and don't have any complaints. My primary laptop/desktop has an Intel graphics chipset, but I've tested it on laptops w/NVIDIA and not had problems.
It's been a few years since I last looked at it, but I've tried daily running it probably 4 or 5 times over the last 15 years. Usually on Arch, but also some Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. It's fuzzy now but I've tried probably every NVIDIA GPU generation since the GTX 500 series.
I can't remember all the bugs, but I've definitely at least encountered all flavors of flickering bugs, stale updates, GPU crashes, failed copy and paste, failed screenshares, failed videoconferences...
From comments on this thread, it sounds like things have drastically improved and its probably time to take another look.
The version of NVIDIA drivers that Debian ships with lacks explicit sync even now. Pretty much every other distro should work though.
In the same boat with you. Not quite the same configuration (some version change issues, lost it once in an 'rm' accident that followed a symlink to / [I learned that day...] and had to start from scratch, rewrote for fun once), but my sole desktop from '09 to '23 when I switched to Niri. My reasoning here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462034
This was on my Bonobo WS (PopOS) w/ 2x NVidia GTX 1080s, multiple screens (2 1080p, 1 4k at 2x scaling), etc. No issues other than app support.
Highly recommend trying it. Very low barrier to entry.
KDE, Gnome and others obviously do provide stacking windows, but you do get the impression that writing a stacking window manager/compositor is just extremely hard to do with Wayland. Someone is maintaining a list of compositors[1] and there do seem to be a number of stacking ones, they just don't really get much attention.
1) https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html
The audience of stacking wms is mainly serviced by the desktop environements. Both Gnome and Plasma are bigger than everything else combined.
I just setup Asus Rog G14 with nvidia 3060, I was skeptical against Wayland but basically got it working straight away with only setting drm.modeset (thanks chatgpt?).
So two external monitors working, except if they are daisy chained I am logged out when (dis)connecting them. So I use one hdmi and one dp over usb-c and it works.
So, not 100% but works better than X for me. Still too recent to have seen all the edge cases though.
This is a scrolling WM (not tiling). I've been using it as my daily driver for over a year now, and it's awesome. I never liked tiling WMs because I do a lot of web work, and I often want a large code editor and a large browser window and a few terminals open. I don't like having stuff scrunched into a little rectangle, but I do like having all of that related stuff grouped in a single workspace. This works perfectly with Niri. I can keep my editor in the center, a peek of my browser to the right and a peek of my terminal to the left, and easily flip between them, resize, stack, etc.
I know it doesn't sound all that interesting, but once I used it for a while, I just couldn't go back.
See my comment above (moved from i3wm) but my spec is
RTX 3090, Pop OS 24.04 (beta), 4K 43" Monitor,
Nvidia cards worked out the box with no problems