Can I finally start using Wayland in 2026?
a day ago
- The author's main obstacle to Wayland migration is nVidia driver support, which only became usable with Sway 1.11 (June 2025) due to explicit sync support.
- An 8K monitor (Dell UP3218K) requires TILE support, which wlroots lacks; a workaround patch was created for the nVidia SRC_X DRM property bug.
- Sway is mostly compatible with i3 configs but lacks some features like layout saving/restoring and workspace window restoration from Chrome/Firefox.
- Key applications (Chrome, Emacs) perform worse under Wayland: Chrome experiences GPU process crashes without hardware acceleration, and Emacs' pgtk variant has higher input latency and different text rendering.
- Screen sharing via xdg-desktop-portal-wlr works but with limitations: no per-window sharing in Sway 1.11, and blurry output due to scaling issues.
- Other issues include laggy mouse cursor, font rendering differences, swaylock requiring special handling, and Xwayland scaling not supported in Sway.
- The author concludes Wayland is not ready for daily use in their high-end setup, requiring weeks/months of fixes for ghost key presses, glitches, Chrome stability, and Emacs performance.