I understand that nvidia support for wayland is lacking, but I know it’s possible.
For context, I was using sway 1.8 for a while (no official support for nvidia). It was working almost perfectly, only minor issues. After the update to 1.9, I get constant flickering.
I can downgrade to 1.8, but the fact that 1.8 was working tells me that it is possible for a window manager to work well for nvidia. The problem is the sway team does not want that headache (understandably so).
Are there any alternatives that work well with nvidia?
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the fact that 1.8 was working tells me that it is possible for a window manager to work well for nvidia
Nope, it’s a race condition for which the visible effects can appear or disappear for plenty of reasons. The only fix is explicit sync, which is being worked on for wlroots
Until its drivers are completely open source, Nvidia will continue to cause trouble every once in a while.
Therefore, if you liked Sway, then don’t leave it expecting to be a lot better elsewhere.
However, Hyprland’s community is pretty big and I can only be positive regarding the pace of its development. Therefore, if anything, Hyprland might be able to offer a solution. But, don’t forget what I said earlier*.
Hyprland works great as long as you make sure to get the build with nvidia patches to prevent flickering. It’s very similar to i3, although not 1:1 like sway.
I don’t think there’s a separate build with Nvidia patches now (at least on the AUR), as they’re included/fixed upstream. Still plenty of config and environment variables to set on Nvidia. And the new Nvidia beta driver, 555, should fix flickering in xwayland windows that was caused by a lack of explicit sync support. It’s been working well for me so far!
i use kde plasma with polonium with zero issues
I think it’s hit or miss. I’ve been having this annoying bug since I switched to Plasma 6 + Wayland and I have no idea whether it’ll be solved any time soon.
labwc is working pretty well these days. Screen tearing for games and all.
There are a bunch of environment variables that I set this time though, which may have contributed to a better experience this time.
Labwc is quite possibly the most stable and sane Wayland WM there is today, but op wanted a tiler. (Sway does crash every once in a while, Labwc doesn’t and the devs are more open minded about features)
Regions give manual tiling possibility though, which is actually how I prefer it. I’m testing a new patch that someone recently did to support focus based on region, which is nifty.
Hyprland is my favorite tilling manager for Wayland. Its really easy to customize or find dotfiles. I have some if you want them.
If you want something that just works, popos-shell gnome plugin
Does hyprland work for your setup?
I tried it about a year ago. I don’t remember why I left it, but I think I did have a couple issues with it related to nvidia. I’ll try it again.
If you’re hopping distros at the same time, CachyOS should just work out of the box with Hyprland.
I have had a few issues with Hyprland / nVidia, ultimately making me abandon hyprland as much as I absolutely loved it.
I couldn’t work with TexStudio and Electron apps were at best buggy.
Get the Nvidia 555 beta drivers or you’ll have flickering. There’s Nvidia specific config in the hyprland docs as well. In addition, if it’s a newer card make sure you disable the onboard firmware via Kernal params.
I have been using hyprland for a while and just switched to using my Nvidia card yesterday. Been running well so far.
