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The original was posted on /r/linux_gaming by /u/Jason_Sasha_Acoiners on 2024-04-26 12:29:19.

I know this isn’t really gaming related as a whole, but I figured it would fit, because it has affected my gaming experience.

Okay, for a little context, my GPU is an RX6600 (not the XT version, the regular version) and I’m currently running openSUSE TW KDE 6 (but I have had issues on every distro I’ve tried)

now openSUSE TW KDE 6 (and MANY other distros) allows you to select either X11 or Wayland every time you log into your system. For the longest time, I’ve been using Wayland, because I’ve heard that it’s essentially the default for AMD and that it’s what most AMD GPU users should be using.

So I don’t know if I’m just a statistical outlier, unlucky, or what, but Wayland has always given me more issues than X11 ever has. Don’t get me wrong, X11 has issues (one of which I can point to is that on my specific distro, the lock screen appears completely black on a specific default KDE 6 theme, but there’s workarounds, and this is a known bug, and I also take a lot of screenshots for various purposes, and I’ve noticed that on X11 the screenshot notification window sometimes incorrectly shows in the middle of the screen, rather than in the bottom right where it belongs)

But Wayland seemingly has way more pressing issues, specially with gaming. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve encountered over the months, and I apologize that I can’t remember and list them, but this latest issue is the straw that broke the camel’s back, and made me switch to X11 for the foreseeable future.

So, as some of you may know, Dead Island 2 recently released on Steam, so I picked it up. Honestly, I’ve been having a LOT of fun with it, but that’s besides the point. When I first booted it up, I was using Wayland. I knew that I would have to tweak the graphics a bit, since I don’t quite meet the recommend requirements. I start EVERY game on ultra settings, and then lower as needed. On all games, I play at 1080p (though I do often use FSR upscaling) and on almost all games, I aim for 60FPS and only ever aim for higher frame rates on games where I can EASILY do so. Basically, if I can run a game at either a solid 60FPS, or a frame rate that constantly fluctuates between 60FPS and 144FPS (which is where my monitor caps out at) I’m going to run the game at a capped 60 nine times out of ten.

Anyways, when I first launched Dead Island 2, the first thing I noticed is that mangoHUD was acting…weird. like it wasn’t showing me accurate readouts, and the hud was flickering wildly. So I turned the hud off and said to myself “fine, I’ll just eyeball it or use Steam’s FPS monitor.” The game actually started out running fine, but I noticed that over the course of a few minutes of gameplay, the frame rate got lower and lower, which I have NEVER seen happen in a game before (that I can remember)

So after a lot of tweaking and stumbling around trying to figure out what the cause was, I remembered that I could try the game on X11. I didn’t think this would work, and I tried this as a last-ditch effort before giving up and just running the game on Windows.

Well, lo and behold, guess what? When I launched it with X11, the first thing I noticed is that mangoHUD was now no longer flickering, and it was displaying accurate information. Then, when I got into the game, a solid 60FPS (at first, which I admittedly had to eventually lower to high settings which I fully expected I would have to do) but on high settings with TRUE 1080p (NO upscaling whatsoever), the game never falls below 60FPS when running through X11, and I’ve been playing the game for nearly 10 hours now.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have even made this post if I didn’t see a lot of people pushing Wayland so hard. I’ve literally even heard things (only rumours, admittedly) about certain distros considering dropping X11 support entirely? That seems like a bad idea to me, especially considering Wayland doesn’t work (or at least only BARELY works) on Nvidia cards.

I know I only gave one example as to why Wayland is “bad” (I’m really not trying to call it bad, by the way, I’m just saying it’snot ready to fully replace X11 yet, but I fully suspect that it will be ready one day, but NOT YET.) but I promise you that I’ve had a lot of other problems with it in the past. I’m just bad at specifically recalling and listing them.

Anyways, I made this post just because I want to know if I’m alone or not. Am I just the unluckiest person in the world when it comes to Wayland, or have other people had these types of experiences? Anybody else sharing their stories about this would be much appreciated.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read all of this.