Path to Nvidia Wayland by default?

Desktop
,
1

Continuing the discussion from Desktop Team Integration Squad Updates – Monday 15th April 2024:

Hi - reading the linked updates, I couldn’t help but wonder how recently folks may have assessed the current state of Nvidia + Wayland in Ubuntu Desktop. If 24.04 Noble Numbat will maintain the approach of defaulting to Xorg when an Nvidia card is being used, I do think it would be worth it to re-assess for future versions.

At least based on what I see in these updates, it would appear that at least some upstream (e.g. GTK, mutter) issues that are specific to Xorg are functionally deprioritized, which is understandable given where new development focus has shifted. Meanwhile - and unfortunately all I can offer is anecdotes - I have AMD+Nvidia hybrid and Nvidia-only systems that I run Wayland sessions on every day, without issue.

Those anecdotes of course don’t mean that Nvidia + Wayland should be a default for everyone, but it at least makes me wonder how such an assessment could be done in a more structured way. Is it as simple as stacking up the known issues that are Xorg-specific on one side, Nvidia-specific on the other, and determining which side’s issues are more tolerable? Are there things that are seen by the Ubuntu team as “showstoppers” (borrowing the KDE term) for defaulting to Wayland with Nvidia? Is the process for collecting and assessing those issues and proposing a decision framework something that the community could feasibly help with?

Apologies if this has already been discussed ad nauseam, but I wanted to see if there’s an opportunity to help with some structuring and presenting of the current situation and decisions to come, if it’s relevant.

Thanks,

2

There is something in that Mesa drivers should not be the same for LTS like hwe default Mesa version with default (nvidia) drivers but also Intel/AMD. But in linux world there is a lot of other things involved but some driver update stack is required.

One of the solution is snap mesa stack but also flathub has its own version of drivers(but try GNOME builder and build something and for a few times and 10GBs of not needed libs are inluded on your drive :). Thats something I don’t prefer and if some stack is hwe included that could benefit not only me but maybe also someone like you :smiley:

3

Once explicit sync makes its way into 24.10 then I think defaulting to Wayland would be a good idea. All of my problems with NVIDIA & Wayland have resulted from lack of explicit sync.

4

I think we are going to try to default to Wayland for the Nvidia driver in 24.10. As always, the list of known issues is here.

3 Likes