I love X, etc and use it all the time, but let's be honest, X isn't exactly rock solid either. I had X crash due to video mode switches (mainly via games) so many times that nowadays unless i know a game behaves nicely, i tend to first run it under gamescope[0] which shields against these issues. I do find it kinda amusing that my only use for Wayland so far has been to avoid driver issues by running a compositor inside an X window :-P

[0] https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope - it is a fork of Valve's wayland compositor which actually works under X11 inside a window and effectively creates a nested XWayland environment but also attempts to minimize latency... it doesn't eliminate it completely but outside of twitchy shooters it is ok

The thing is, with X there were a lot of separate parts - the display server, the window manager, and the compositor were separate packages and if either of the latter crashed and you were set up for it you could keep going. With Wayland, the display server is the window manager and compositor - and is directly responsible for handling all audio, video, input devices, color management, clipboard, and probably other things I'm forgetting - so there's only one thing to crash and it's game over. This also is a pain in terms of features, because you can't tack on, say, a clipboard manager, it has to be directly supported, hence things like GNOME, KDE, and basically everything else (via wlroots) having different, incompatible ways to do things like screen shots.

I have never had that ever happen, I am guessing nvidia? Are you aware of VFIO? Its probably a better solution, 100% gaming on linux with a Windows VM that uses GPU passthrough.

No, AMD, i have a Radeon RX 5700 XT with the open source drivers. One of the sure-fire ways to crash the entire server seems to be trying to run Wizardry 6 from GOG via Wine, which essentially runs DOSBox for Windows. Somewhere when it tries to change video mode it crashes. Note that this doesn't happen if i use Gamescope under X (which essentially runs Wine under XWayland under its own Wayland compositor that runs in an X window).

Of course since this is a DOS game i can simply run it with native DOSBox, but this is just a way to replicate the issue.

Since i've found workarounds for these issues i didn't bother much, but i might try and see why it crashes at some point.

Also FWIW i do not really consider "gaming on Linux" when i have to use a Windows VM. Besides Wine (well, Wine staging) nowadays works perfectly fine. And if i wanted to use Windows, i'd just be using Windows :-P.

I would rather not reboot and run windows as a captive OS. Would you call using the Win11 android emulator gaming on Windows?

I'd rather not bother with Windows at all.

Thing is, with Proton and X I have a rock steady and capable env to do all of my gaming, and I have been doing so for years now. I've no need or desire to bring windows back into the mix.

Wayland messes that up, on top of frequent crashiness. Wayland does not solve any problem I have, but it does break most of the things that were working well.

I don't like windows either, just the best method to run 100% games.

>Wayland messes that up, on top of frequent crashiness. Wayland does not solve any problem I have, but it does break most of the things that were working well.

That's all I get from the thread, it works well as long as you don't do anything other than use the browser.