X11 or Wayland?

[Vecna]

So I was looking for the best Desktop Environment for gaming and came across two different windowing systems. Which would be better performance wise and stability wise? I am gonna be gaming on it so I would appreciate if there is minimal screen tearing. Also what is the compositor? Should I disable it?

[Eigenvektor]

X11 is the older one that is more feature rich. Wayland is the more modern replacement that has been in the works for a long time. Just use whatever is default in your distro.

 

Most likely it includes both and you can select which one to use before you log in. That's the case with Manjaro/Gnome in case you went with that.

[Nayr438]

For Stability you would be better off going with GNOME or XFCE.

Wayland and X11 are display protocols. Xorg is the legacy Display Server for X11 and is currently in maintenance mode with Distributions starting to drop it. Wayland is becoming the new Default target and if you can use it you should.
NVIDIA is known to be problematic with Wayland, which may be a case to target X11 until Xorg is completely dropped. If you have Intel or AMD, Wayland should be fine.

XFCE currently does not fully support Wayland. GNOME will be dropping support for the X11 session in May and removing support for X11 at the end of the year. When this will actually happen is dependent on your distro and the age of it's packages.

 

For the compositor. In X11 this was mostly a composite extension used for adding additional effects to the contents rendered on screen, this could be things like animations or transparency and was typically optional. In Wayland the compositor is part of the display server, implements pieces of the Wayland Protocol, and is required.

 

In terms of performance, if your gaming in fullscreen then none of this really matters.

 

[Vecna]

3 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

X11 is the older one that is more feature rich. Wayland is the more modern replacement that has been in the works for a long time. Just use whatever is default in your distro.

 

Most likely it includes both and you can select which one to use before you log in. That's the case with Manjaro/Gnome in case you went with that.

I started second guessing myself. Linux mint looked like an attractive option. Im probably getting linux mint with xfce. Any issue?

[Vecna]

1 minute ago, Nayr438 said:

For Stability you would be better off going with GNOME or XFCE.

Wayland and X11 are display protocols. Xorg is the legacy Display Server for X11 and is currently in maintenance mode with Distributions starting to drop it. Wayland is becoming the new Default target and if you can use it you should.
NVIDIA is known to be problematic with Wayland, which may be a case to target X11 until Xorg is completely dropped. If you have Intel or AMD, Wayland should be fine.

XFCE currently does not fully support Wayland. GNOME will be dropping support for the X11 session in May and removing support for X11 at the end of the year. When this will actually happen is dependent on your distro and the age of it's packages.

 

For the compositor. In X11 this was mostly a composite extension used for adding additional effects to the contents rendered on screen, this could be things like animations or transparency and was typically optional. In Wayland the compositor is part of the display server, implements pieces of the Wayland Protocol, and is required.

 

In terms of performance, if your gaming in fullscreen then none of this really matters.

 

Okay so if i get Manjaro or linux mint with xfce, would I have to change anything. Im using integrated graphics by the way. I will be running games in full screen (minecraft)

[Nayr438]

2 minutes ago, Vecna said:

Okay so if i get Manjaro or linux mint with xfce, would I have to change anything. Im using integrated graphics by the way. I will be running games in full screen (minecraft)

What CPU do you have?

[Vecna]

51 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

What CPU do you have?

I have an i5 7200U integrated graphics (intel hd 620). My only requirement is maximum performance in minecraft. I really dont mind extra work or difficulty level in setting up or anything. I really do not mind how the desktop looks either. Can you please recommend which distro and desktop environment to use?

[Nayr438]

1 hour ago, Vecna said:

I have an i5 7200U integrated graphics (intel hd 620). My only requirement is maximum performance in minecraft. I really dont mind extra work or difficulty level in setting up or anything. I really do not mind how the desktop looks either. Can you please recommend which distro and desktop environment to use?

Linux mint should be fine. Your iGPU is old enough that your experience should be similar across distros.

 

As far as distro and desktop environment, its going to be personal preference. Personally I use Arch with KDE plasma which may be a bad fit for you. KDE tends to be buggy and it's ton of configuration options can be overwhelming. Arch is also more complicated to setup and maintain compard  to most other distros.

 

A good middle ground IMO is PopOS or Linux Mint, both are based on Ubuntu LTS. I'd probably lean more towards PopOS just because it ships GNOME and has Wayland support.

 

If you want something more similar to Windows you can also look at KDE Neon, its based on Ubuntu LTS as well but runs KDE Plasma just consider the note above.

 

GNOME and KDE plasma are the two primary target Desktop Environments in Linux.

[Vecna]

16 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Linux mint should be fine. Your iGPU is old enough that your experience should be similar across distros.

 

As far as distro and desktop environment, its going to be personal preference. Personally I use Arch with KDE plasma which may be a bad fit for you. KDE tends to be buggy and it's ton of configuration options can be overwhelming. Arch is also more complicated to setup and maintain compard  to most other distros.

 

A good middle ground IMO is PopOS or Linux Mint, both are based on Ubuntu LTS. I'd probably lean more towards PopOS just because it ships GNOME and has Wayland support.

 

If you want something more similar to Windows you can also look at KDE Neon, its based on Ubuntu LTS as well but runs KDE Plasma just consider the note above.

 

GNOME and KDE plasma are the two primary target Desktop Environments in Linux.

The thing is that GNOME is kinda slow on my laptop. What do you think about Arch with XFCE? As far as I know XFCE is based on x11 so not sure about its stability. Does Arch run well with games?

[Nayr438]

That should be fine and may be preferable if you want the latest software and drivers. Just keep in mind that Arch is a rolling release distro where things are constantly moving and its up to you to make changes as necessary when updates land. You also need to have a good understanding of what you want and need as Arch itself is mostly just a package repository and wiki.

 

As far as xfce as I said before it should be fine for now.

[Vecna]

29 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

That should be fine and may be preferable if you want the latest software and drivers. Just keep in mind that Arch is a rolling release distro where things are constantly moving and its up to you to make changes as necessary when updates land. You also need to have a good understanding of what you want and need as Arch itself is mostly just a package repository and wiki.

 

As far as xfce as I said before it should be fine for now.

yay okay alright. wait so if i do not update arch after installing for like 6 months will there be any issue? just curious. 

[Nayr438]

Your keyring might expire, but otherwise not anything outside of missing security updates. You can refresh your keyring if that does happen however.

 

You will need to update each time before installing a package however as deps change over time.

[goatedpenguin]

I know this post has been solved but if your gaming with an Nvidia GPU xorg is the clear winner since Wayland has been a big problem with nvidia GPU drivers and I think there is an issue too with screen recording on wayland. I personally stick to Xorg since it gets the job done and its reliable.

 

I use arch btw.

[Nayr438]

3 hours ago, goatedpenguin said:

I know this post has been solved but if your gaming with an Nvidia GPU xorg is the clear winner since Wayland has been a big problem with nvidia GPU drivers and I think there is an issue too with screen recording on wayland. I personally stick to Xorg since it gets the job done and its reliable.

 

I use arch btw.

They are using Intel integrated Graphics so they should be fine.

For Screen Recording on Wayland you need to be using Pipewire and your recording software needs to support Wayland and Pipewire, such as OBS Studio.

[wasab]

Xorg is old, like 1980s old. There hadn't been any major updates to it since then so the whole thing is old. 

 

Wayland is the modern version with higher performance and all the newest technological innovations over the xorg. However, backward compatibility is very limited because of decades long pratice of writting gui for the xorg. All of these application libraries need to be ported over and sometimes the application themselves needed to be ported over.