I want to report I have great performance using 19.10 Wayland session on a mid 2010 Macmini. It is a clean install with no macOS. The display adapter is a gforce 320m, high intiger speed core2 duo, and 6gb RAM. I have tried to install all of the open Mesa and Vulkan that made sense, that is-not any of the 340 driver of Nvidia. Opencl is 2.2 and opengl runs 3d games. It saved the machine as High Sierra all but choked it. The latency was so bad typing a search term in Safari would complete 3 and 4 seconds after typing. It would always use heavy swap even if there was free ram. Now with 19.10 it humms along only about 1.3 gigs of RAM consumed and no swap with Firefox and a couple of Libreoffice docs up. Everything is quick only limited by the hard drive spin and it’s an awesome set top box now. No perceptible latency at all.
That’s a known issue with the proprietary Nvidia driver, and it’s a big one: Bug #1823516 “Nvidia driver installed but X apps are using softw...” : Bugs : xorg-server package : Ubuntu
Yes if you’re using the open source nouveau driver then Wayland should work well. It’s worth noting however today Ubuntu 19.10 is still running GNOME 3.32. By the time it is released in October 2019 it will be using GNOME 3.34 which contains more significant optimizations again.
There are a plenitude of bugs concerning nvidia, gdm3 and wayland.
One of the more annoying things is an apparent lack of understanding that ‘devices’ matter.
What may be true for a nvidia gpu only device is not the same for hybrid/optimus devices, not at all…
Anyway the current state in 19.10 is the worst it’s been since 14.04 for optimus devices. Ironically the only usable session when using nvidia drivers is the wayland session as it fails back to Intel.
(- even 14.04 was better for a while as there was a solution for tearing till changes in ubuntu-drivers-common made it near impossible to ‘fix’
Fractional scaling is ok in Wayland but XWayland clients are unusable because of their blurriness. And there are important X11-only clients: chromium, everything electron-based and others. In pure X11 at least you have the xrandr scale-up-and-down hack which is awful but more palatable now that has been made part of the Ubuntu desktop (for the time being). With most (new) laptops being mid-dpi nowadays, this is a major shortcoming of Linux desktop in general.
Good news: Ubuntu 19.10 (when it’s finished, not right now) will fix a number of the biggest issues concerning the Nvidia driver: https://trello.com/c/6CeAcFWQ
As always, if you have any issues then please log a bug. I only recently (this month) learnt about the tearing problem with optimus and that people use nvidia-drm.modeset=1 to work around it. But I am not aware of any bug reports about it even today.
Is this an Ubuntu only patch or have it made upstream?
Any tearing bug(s), if any, in regards to optimus hardware would have been prior to 14.04. where it was generally accepted that one would get tearing when using the nvidia driver so no real point of a bug…
From 14.04 thru 19.04 tearing was easily fixed on optimus/nvidia driver by 2 different methods.
So the current relevant and by far most important bug for optimus users is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm3/+bug/1716857, don’t see that mentioned in Trello.
It is indirectly mentioned in Trello:
This list does not include all the issues related to Nvidia+Wayland or nvidia-drm.modeset=1. Those are tracked in a different list instead and are not planned for this cycle.
After a little checking it seems that the issue I’m referring to may solely be caused by the Ubuntu repo build of nvidia-driver-430 or how that build’s packages install.
(- So maybe I should un-dupe from it…
In a nutshell -
I purge nvidia* and autoremove the rest.
reboot
Add the graphics driver ppa, remove Ubuntu’s restricted repo, update sources
Install nvidia-driver-430 from the ppa, reboot.
All works fine
Both the repo and ppa have the apparently same 4.30.26 driver source, install the same 66 named packages, why different behaviour, don’t know.
It’s always possible multiple builds of the same source yield different results because of different environments. For that reason some projects uniquely identify each build separately to the software version.
Also, if this is a bug then please comment in a bug.
"We are looking forward to being able to move over to Wayland as soon as we can, and I think that [the release of] GNOME 4 could be the right time to do that.
TR: What release of Ubuntu would you forecast shipping Wayland as the default?
Cooke: I can tell you it won’t be for 20.04. We’re too close to the release now. We’re only one cycle away from the release. The cycle before the LTS release is a final fit-and-finish. We should be going into that cycle, which starts in October this year, with these decisions already made. So we haven’t got time, in six months, to debug and fully test a change to the display server.
In order to try and get it in for the next LTS—Ubuntu 22.04—we will be moving pretty quickly to get Wayland as the default again and shake the rest of the bugs out. So I think we’ll see it move in 20.10, and then we’ll have to see how that goes, and then we’ll make a decision from there. "
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ubuntu-what-does-the-future-look-like-post-unity/
I’d be worried about waiting for GNOME 4. My understanding (although it may have changed) is that there is a chance that will support ONLY Wayland - no X11 support - except Xwayland compatibility for apps.
I didn’t intend to say that we’d wait for GNOME 4 before changing.
We’ll discuss again in 20.10 regardless of GNOME version.
That is already the case.
At least Mark Shuttleworth wants to embrace Wayland early: https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551/comment-page-61
Ten years after this confession Ubuntu remains the one distro to cripple Wayland deliberately by disabling the remote desktop support in the compositor. Maybe for security reasons but who knows. There is just an early review available by the security team. They cannot be bothered by stuff like that.
It’s fair to have different opinions but it’s not nice to be passive aggressive, it certainly doesn’t further your goal.
This is a rather basic feature that is quite broken in Wayland: tiling.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/issues/620
It seems weird to me that it hasn’t got more attention, it’s really quite broken and it’s really rather basic.
10 posts were split to a new topic: Wayland not working with NVIDIA
Folks, please flag support requests so this discussion thread can properly run it’s course.
Another annoying thing in Wayland right now is touchpad scrolling in Chromium. Chromium native Wayland support is not done, so it uses XWayland, and there’s a regression in Chromium so under XWayland it doesn’t use xinput2 like it does under Xorg which leads to the old mouse wheel emulation scrolling. (Reportly Fedora patches their Chromium package to revert this change.)
Chromium bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737
Ubuntu bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1811219