I'll throw my hat in the anti-Wayland ring. I have a 5-year-old graphics card from the most popular graphics card company in the world. And yet, in 2025, I cannot run Sway/Wayland on my Nvidia 3070 for more than 20 minutes without a crash. i3/Xorg works fine.
Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.
AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter!
Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use.
It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
> Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days.
Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
Ignorance is a beautiful shield Against rationality & understanding, little green grasshopper (8 hour old account).
The world has no ability to make Nvidia's drivers good. If Nvidia can't build drivers that work, there's nothing we can do about it. Defending a situation where hackers have no ability to improve or work a situation is unhackerly, dumb. Consumers are free to remain ignorant, but this situation of where we go and what we do has consequences & meaning to the hacker, and the facts and technics ought matter.
Sure mate, but I guess I'll stick to X if it works, I don't care who's fault is it, nvidia's or wayland's. Life is too short to have a crashing UI interrupt my work.
End of the day people buy Nvidia because they need to (CUDA/AI/ML) not because of ideology or driver architecture. Shit just needs to work and bottom line is no matter who's to blame, Wayland doesn't work for every use case that X does.
I want to emphasize again that most people at this point don't have a problem running Sway on Nvidia. It's been working adequately for years, stably. In the past ~18 months especially, Nvidia seems to have been updating their closed source drivers much more actively as well, which is positive to see. As far as I know, the top poster having issues has taken no steps to report the issue, send coredumps, do any follow up on their issue.
I can't emphasize enough how gross this mercenary position is though. X developers were fed up, en masse. The whole project had thoroughly rotted, was unsustainable, had no path forwards to use modern video techniques. It sort of works, but also, it's insecure as hell, and a terrible leaky foundation. We get to claim where politically we are in the axis: are we going to be conservative people, who resist and are afraid of change forever? Or will we have hope and excitement at progress and hope for better futures? Doing nothing and investing nothing and only having a "shit just needs to work" is a refusal to inform yourself, one that makes you quite conservative. There's reasons to be in that camp, and especially for less open-source more consumeristic people who owing to the conditions of their environment have a very strong trained helplessness where there's no sense contemplating alternatives since your hands are tied anyways. But I find it repulsive & immature to be so short, so anti-informed, so un-nuanced, and hopeless and lacking ambition.
I'm not uninformed, and i don't "not care," i agree X needs replacing and i wish all the best to Wayland as a project.
Unfortunately, it doesn't do what i need, today. So what am i supposed to do? I'm going to keep using what does what i need until a viable alternative emerges. Nothing political about it.
I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work.
The number of paragraphs used to explain why the non-working product does not work would be better spent simply pointing people to the working product.
I mean, yeah, Nvidia being fundamentally incompatible with open source ecosystems, not having drivers, and having stuff broken sucks and while I think it's pretty pathetic and low-life to not care and not think about that in any way at all, I get that folks are going to stay on X because Nvidia refuses to work with open source.
That said, I do think the parent post is probably experiencing a very very rare issue. There are plenty of people using Nvidia ⨯ Sway now quite successfully.
Open source grants folks the right to use however they want at whatever level they want, but yeah, I think it's riding dirty to take take take & not give a lick of thought to the ecosystem or concern for it's overall well-being.
When you said:
> I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work.
I see active dis-interest like that as damaging to open source as a whole. It's a mercenary in-it-for-me view, one that's not investing any caring.
do you have any examples of this online to play with? I see the samples in the arvix doc and some documenation at github but not examples I can see live.
I know this conversation keeps coming up again and again, but this is firmly nvidia's issue. Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever.
Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent.
And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows.
Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
>Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever.
Have they? Or have others refused to work with them, refused to make compromises, and refused to offer stable interfaces for them to target. Don't pretend like none of this "antagonism" wasn't self inflicted.
1. The kernel never provides stable interfaces in kernel space. That's just how it is.
2. Nobody can work with them anyway because their drivers are closed sourced. They decided they should be the only ones developing them, so be it. If they upstreamed them they would get thousands of contributor's worth of help.
The other person was talking about Linux. For a Wayland example look at the tight coupling Wayland compositors have with Mesa. It wasn't until 2021 where Nvidia had to be the ones to contribute their own code for being able to dynamically load new gbm backends that weren't already compiled in.
Gnome did land eglstream support by the way, xwayland as well. I think kde too at some point (not sure about that).
Nvidia had a lot of options on the table:
- allow nouveau to reclock gpus or, better, collaborate with them so that at least there's one usable driver.
- follow the community consensus and go with GBM straight away. Didn't seem to be a problem in the first place as it's what they are doing now.
- open source their driver like other manufacturer and be part of mesa.
Community had one option: dedicate a lot of time and effort to create a whole code path for nvidia only and having to debug it against a black box driver
>In reality nvidia just chose to not invest in it. This sums it up
This article is proving my point. People were not willing to work with Nvidia and would prefer to stick to their unstandardized Mesa specific approach with gbm. As a path forward Nvidia tried proposing a cross platform open standard that would solve not only wayland's use case, which to me appears as Nvidia going above in investment.
>allow nouveau to reclock gpus
Nouveau able to if they load the proper firmware onto the GPU.
>at least there's one usable driver
It's quite a stretch to call it usable and would not make sense to be the default experience for the average user.
>follow the community consensus and go with GBM straight away
As I mentioned GBM was tightly coupled with Mesa, so that wasn't directly possible.
>open source their driver like other manufacturer and be part of mesa.
This is an unreasonable demand, that would never happen. Saying that Wayland won't work on Nvidia hardware because they won't open source the driver and port it to Mesa just shows how stubborn and uncooperative one is as opposed to trying to find solutions to deliver user value.
>dedicate a lot of time and effort to create a whole code path for nvidia only and having to debug it against a black box driver
There was never anything nvidia only in this situation. The only "only" was gbm being a proprietary API that was only a part of Mesa.
> This article is proving my point. People were not willing to work with Nvidia and would prefer to stick to their unstandardized Mesa specific approach with gbm. As a path forward Nvidia tried proposing a cross platform open standard that would solve not only wayland's use case, which to me appears as Nvidia going above in investment.
Kwin, gnome and xwayland did end up supporting eglstream, it was shit, people blamed wayland because it became a sport, nvidia did go gdm in the end and the eglstream backends which were a waste of time were dropped.
> Nouveau able to if they load the proper firmware onto the GPU.
Nvidia explicitly prevented them to do so by not providing the ability to load any firmware...
> As I mentioned GBM was tightly coupled with Mesa, so that wasn't directly possible.
It absolutely was and their driver is using GBM now as a proof.
> This is an unreasonable demand, that would never happen. Saying that Wayland won't work on Nvidia hardware because they won't open source the driver and port it to Mesa just shows how stubborn and uncooperative one is as opposed to trying to find solutions to deliver user value.
Why so? Most manufacturer do so.
> There was never anything nvidia only in this situation. The only "only" was gbm being a proprietary API that was only a part of Mesa.
GBM is specific to mesa maybe but far from proprietary what world do you live in? :D
>Kwin, gnome and xwayland did end up supporting eglstream, it was shit
Something is better than nothing.
>nvidia did go gdm in the end and the eglstream backends which were a waste of time were dropped.
If the wayland project was run better and there was proper collaboration this waste could have been avoided.
>Nvidia explicitly prevented them to do so by not providing the ability to load any firmware...
How would the GPU know? They should be able to do exactly what the real driver does to load the firmware.
>It absolutely was and their driver is using GBM now as a proof.
Only years later after due to Nvidia contributing code to allow for it to dynamically load backends. This wasn't a case of Nvidia ignoring an existing way for them to have a backend.
>Why so? Most manufacturer do so.
Because it's a trade secret and potentially can not be legally be open sourced. It also is a competitive advantage for nvidia not to. Plenty of companies also develop closed source drivers. Nvidia is not unique.
>GBM is specific to mesa maybe but far from proprietary
Recheck the definition of "proprietary." Compare how many GPUs and operating systems support OpenGL vs supporting GBM. GBM being exclusive to Mesa makes it proprietary.
Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.