As of this week I’m giving Pop OS a try (coming from Windows 11) and this will be my 4th or 5th attempt at switching to Linux but I’ve always been driven off by odd issues that have no (clear) resolution or just general weirdness like bad performance even when just using a web browser. I was having a terrible time with high resource usage just sitting at the desktop, Firefox being sluggish, the entire DE freaking out for no reason, etc. and I kinda just came to accept that that’s how it is with an Nvidia card.

I switched Pop OS to Wayland since there’s a toggle for it right on the login screen and suddenly everything is fine. Buttery smooth experience so far in terms of performance. Very little time spent playing games on it so far, but in my experience thus far it’s been better on Wayland. In X I booted up a game just to test and it put the game on a secondary monitor, upside down, and completely unresponsive to inputs. It also scrambled all of my windows and made my resolution weird and took a while for it to recover after force quitting the game.

In Wayland, the same game booted up with no issues, Windows-like performance, and it didn’t mess up everything else. That was AimLab which I use for testing since it’s a smallish download.

Second test was with Halo Infinite. Wouldn’t even run under X. Tried different proton versions but nothing worked. Under Wayland it booted up and ran. The campaign worked but I was having odd issues where it was kinda like having really bad ping in a multiplayer game where you rubber band backward and forward. Or like it was showing old frames mixed in with new frames. Low performance, about 55fps when under windows it’s 90-100. Still, better than X and could probably be improved with further tinkering.

Ramble aside, it seems like Wayland with an Nvidia GPU is going well for me so far. I’m really not familiar with the technical aspects of Wayland vs X, but from an end-user perspective, I’m liking what I see so far.