KDE's Xaver Hugl on why Wayland explicit sync is such a big deal

You may have seen news recently about explicit sync for Wayland, but you might not know why it's actually important for the future of Linux on Wayland.

I get it, Linux has a lot of these fancy sounding confusing things that are often a pretty big deal, but there's at times a real lack of a good explanation on what they do and why they're needed. So, KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written up a great blog post going over a bit more about it. I do suggest you give it a read if you wish to learn more about it and what the previous problems where with other methods.

The biggest part of the problem has been, surprise — NVIDIA, since the proprietary NVIDIA driver doesn't support the older implicit sync at all. NVIDIA users have seen lots of issues due to all of this like significant flickering and frame pacing issues. Although seeing the issues does depend on various factors.

To sum it up, as Hugl said: "With the explicit sync protocol being implemented in compositors and very soon in Xwayland and the proprietary NVidia driver, all those problems will finally be a thing of the past, and the biggest remaining blocker for NVidia users to switch to Wayland will be gone."

Sounds great. So once everything is merged in and live, plus a new NVIDIA driver is released to take advantage of it, Wayland on Linux should be in really good shape for all users. A Beta NVIDIA driver is expected around May 15th that supports explicit sync.