The last blog post was about Wayland, the new/old paradigm for window drawing where the programs are directly connected to the server without having to go through some kind of middleware that was best suited for a use case that never really took off....

The infuriating thing for me was that switching to Wayland seem to fix an awful lot of the problems I was having with Linux mint. On my Optimus laptop I've had no end of problems with Nvidia drivers. I've written many topics on how crap I think their drivers are, and just how they treat Linux as a bit of a poor cousin....

I don't think anything that I said was especially risky or out there... Nvidia have been very much focused on the AI and cryptocurrency thing for the last 4 or 5 years, and it seems like their graphics cards have slid a little bit in their priority list.

But as soon as I switched over to Wayland, from x11, although I started to get much better frame rates and games stopped crashing when I alt-tabbed back and forth, there were issues with the keyboard, and a few other bits and bobs.

I did an awful lot of reading around the subject, and it seemed that while Linux mints window manager, cinnamon, is very highly regarded, it's still a little rough around the edges in one or two areas. For example, it's quite new to the table when it comes to Wayland. It's still very much an experimental switch.

So I thought to myself, what if I switched away from cinnamon? Linux allows you to do this. Each distribution comes with its own preferred software suite, but there is usually a way to switch out most of the default choices for something else. The window manager and compositor are 2 examples of this.

I remember switching window managers back at university in the 90s. I think I was playing with something called tvwm? And then I tried something called them.. and then something called enlightenment.... All of which are a bit different and do different things.. but the switching was relatively painless, although you did have a lot of config file editing to get it working properly.

Fast forward to today, and switching from cinnamon to KDE, for example, is as simple as typing

apt install kde-full

And that's it... A few hundred megs of download later, and a reboot, and I can now select KDE as my window manager. Adding the Wayland support for KDE was another single command, and another reboot... And then I have the option to use both.

apt install plasma-wayland-session

So here I am, with a Linux mint installation using Wayland and KDE.... Of course! Cinnamon and x11 are still installed there in the background.. I hate to think what would happen if I pulled those out... Although I think removing cinnamon would be fine, but if I removed x11, I think the system would probably just pack its bags and go home...

Anywho, I've been trying Wayland now with KDE for the last few days, and I haven't had a single game crash. What's more, I'm getting about 20% higher frame rates than I was with cinnamon.

I'm putting this partly down to the fact that the Nvidia 580 drivers have had a serious overhaul for Wayland. They've been getting better since 555, but recently they've started putting some more focus onto it... I think the penny has finally dropped that Wayland is here to stay..

The funny thing is that switching from x11 to Wayland shouldn't really have that much of an impact on performance. There's no massive difference between the amount of data and where it's sent to and from, it's more about the process of the data transfer that is different.... But something is definitely better.

All of this leads me to think that maybe it's time to cut the cord and move away from Linux mint. It's been an absolutely brilliant operating system for my desktop for the last 2 and 1/2 years, but now that I'm doing serious gaming on a more modern laptop, I'm starting to cast my eye towards different distributions.

I'm very much a Debian person. I think I would probably be too far out of my comfort zone to shift to something based on arch, and I'm a bit wary of Pop!OS.. so I think that when I get my new sdd for the laptop, I'll be installing kubuntu, which looks like it should be almost identical to what I have right now, but without the mint and cinnamon software stack..

I do find the K-naming of all of the kde tools to be irritating if I'm honest, but I have to admit they're pretty good. The software manager is really tight.

Watch this space!