So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that’s a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time were fair. It was primarily born out some frustrations I had with the entire ecosystem, and it was not like I was the only sole voice. There are other people out there you can find that encountered their own unique Wayland problems and wrote about it.
With that post, I probably cast myself as some anti-Wayland guy which is my own doing, but I promise you that is not the case. You can check my mpv commits, and it’s businesses as usual. Lots of Wayland fixes, features, and all that good stuff. Quite some time has passed since then, and it is really overdue look at the situation again with all the new developments in mind. To be frank, my original post is very outdated and it is not fair to leave it up in its current state without acknowledging the work that has been done. So in comparison to 3 years ago, I have a much more positive outlook now.
To be honest, I switched to Wayland years ago precisely because of the better perceived input/cursor experience.
Change my mind, but having an average of half a frame input latency is much preferred when in return I gain that the cursor position on the screen actually aligns with all the other content displayed.
Plus, I’m very sensitive to tearing, so whenever it happens I get the impression that there was a huge rendering error.
Well and on the note that the cursor might visibly stutter, sure. But it’s a bit misleading. A game pinning the GPU to 100 % and running on 5 FPS doesn’t mean that your cursor will be rendered with 5 FPS. So far I’ve only noticed cursor lag/stutters in OOM situations, but neither under heavy GPU or CPU load.