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A day many have been waiting for is here. Following on from NVIDIA releasing the NVIDIA 470.42.01 Beta driver that finally supports hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan rendering on Xwayland, a brand new release of XWayland is out now.

XWayland 21.1.2 would have usually been a cleaning up bug-fix release, however when the Release Candidate went out in late June developer Michel Dänzer mentioned:

It's a bit special, as most of the changes are not the usual stable branch fixes material, but are needed for HW accelerated direct rendering with the Nvidia 470 driver (which is currently in open beta).

I'm making an exception, pulling these changes into the 21.1 branch instead of waiting for the next major release, since the changes are mostly specific to the EGLStream backend and do not affect the GBM backend. And they make a big difference for users of the EGLStream backend.

That release has now been made as of today, July 9, where the only difference is "a fix for a long standing issue where Xwayland wouldn't send events to notify clients of RandR configuration changes in some cases".

Hopefully soon various Linux distributions will pick up the new version, so users don't have to do any manual work for enabling hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan rendering on Xwayland with their favourite distribution. Once done, it should mean NVIDIA users see a much better experience on Wayland.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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BielFPs Jul 9, 2021
Finally Very Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
Hooly Jul 9, 2021
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Quoting: BielFPsFinally Very Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)

Fedora 34 uses Gnome Wayland by default, also what I'm currently using. (They also immediately patched their XWayland package with this patch for Nvidia 470)
Three weeks in, and I have to say it works significantly better than what I was used to on Plasma Wayland (haven't tried Sway, yet).

XWayland windows are not pixelated when using monitor resolution scaling, even when using fractional scaling.
Compare that to Plasma XWayland, where it is obvious if a window uses Wayland or X.


Last edited by Hooly on 9 July 2021 at 7:33 pm UTC
slaapliedje Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsFinally Very Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
Considering this is still a beta driver... nah.
ahoneybun Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsFinally Very Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)

Arch with GNOME does by default as well though Plasma needs the plasma-wayland-seesion package to do it.
kon14 Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: slaapliedjeConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.

Which means absolutely nothing, unless you're a distro maintainer.
BielFPs Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: HoolyFedora 34 uses Gnome Wayland by default
Quoting: ahoneybunArch with GNOME does by default as well though Plasma needs the plasma-wayland-seesion package to do it.
I'm aware of this, I change to gnome because of their wayland support.

Quoting: HoolyThree weeks in, and I have to say it works significantly better than what I was used to on Plasma Wayland
It's nice to know that

Quoting: slaapliedjeConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.
Beta means almost stable, the good part is Nvidia started to show sign of proper Wayland/xWayland support, instead of being deniers about that.

I personally hope the next Ubuntu lts defaults to Wayland, so Wayland support will be probably improve a lot by third party applications.
STiAT Jul 10, 2021
Nice, that could clear the path for a better wayland adoption.
slaapliedje Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsBeta means almost stable, the good part is Nvidia started to show sign of proper Wayland/xWayland support, instead of being deniers about that.
Beta means it isn't going to be packaged by most distributions. Some of us don't have time to muck with betas. I used to, but have too many other permanently beta things going on to mess with my video drivers. Not to mention wayland is still perpetually beta. 😜
slaapliedje Jul 11, 2021
Quoting: kon14
Quoting: slaapliedjeConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.

Which means absolutely nothing, unless you're a distro maintainer.
Sure it does. Means me, as a user, may not wish to muck with a non-distribution driver. I am sure once it is marked Stable, then I can install it without adding third party repos, or other garbage that may or may not contain more than the beta driver.
BielFPs Jul 11, 2021
Quoting: slaapliedjeBeta means it isn't going to be packaged by most distributions. Some of us don't have time to muck with betas.
Which distro you're maintainer?

Quoting: slaapliedjeNot to mention wayland is still perpetually beta. 😜
"beta" or not, it's the x11 replacement.
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