Ah, OK. I wasn't aware of those APIs, only things like OpenGL and Vulkan, but those are perhaps specific to 3D graphics rendering?
And windows managers in the context of Wayland are the same as Wayland compositors? Which compositor would I be using through KDE Plasma 6?
Do you mean that Wayland has had its own security issues, or that enhanced security has caused additional issues for apps to run correctly?
Wayland should be faster. What would you expect to happen? It should just work, while in the background EVERYTHING is changing.
I had assumed that I would get a somehow smoother experience (such as speed, for instance) or some other perceivable benefit, but I think Ramin Honary nicely highlighted the necessity of the change on the backend side. So your point is good, maybe I should just expect a smooth transition where I don't notice anything.
For Freetube, it should automatically detect running on Wayland and use that. But I had one bug on Freetube only on Wayland, may be an Electron issue.
If I run the executable after downloading from the GitHub repo directly, it launches in XWayland. The additional parameters I mentioned in the post used to work to launch it in Wayland, but not anymore.
Thanks for such a detailed account - it really makes sense to move on from X11 based on what you write.
When I first heard about what X11 and Wayland was and how long the transition has been in the making, I found it a bit hard to believe that it should take so long. I am still not fully sure why it would take so long time to mature... is it a chicken-and-egg kind of situation where it cannot mature properly before it is more widely used, but it has not been more widely used because it was not mature enough? Or is it such a difficult task to get this right and that the development time reflects that?
And why would for instance NVIDIA GPUs continue to have issues with Wayland (and what kind of issues would actually be caused by this?)? Is that a matter of closed source drivers and lack of support from NVIDIA's side to implement required changes? Or are such issues on a more fundamental level (i.e. architectural differences that somehow factors into this - I have no idea what I'm talking about now, I'll stop writing...)?
Real question: Is it not possible to install KDE, even though they do not provide an ISO with it?
I've mostly been very satisfied with my InfinityBook 14 Gen7 that I got about 1.5 years ago. There have been some hardware issues (something wrong with the audio subboard that causes the sound from the speakers to go out once in a while, but they sent a new one that I haven't installed yet...). The mic is also not very good (some background noise), and the speakers when they work (which is most of the time) are also quite weak. I decided to spec it out as much as possible, and it does get hot under high loads, like gaming. The case is sleek, but perhaps a little flimsy?
But mostly it works perfectly fine, and it is such a great upgrade over my old MacBook that I finally get to do stuff on my computer now, and run into very few limitations (running newer games and other GPU-intensive tasks requiring more than 4 GB VRAM are the only things). Not to mention that I've had very good experience with their customer service when I n00b out and can't troubleshoot my way back.
An alternative is to keep your eggs somewhat separated so that you don't end up in a locked in situation if their services deteriorate over the years, giving you an easier escape in that scenario.
What I really mean is: can I keep a backup of the game that I can play later without having to use their launcher?
Brilliant list! Starred this to go through it in detail later.
EDIT: A good deal of overlap with me on the type of applications I already use, so looking forward to discovering other hidden gems I haven't yet found.
Nice! Just switched to Wayland, and planning on playing around with Godot again this Summer :)
I got a laptop from Tuxedo 1.5 years ago when I made the switch to Linux. I have been happy with it, despite some minor issues. In my experience, they have provided great technical support when something goes wrong as well that I am unable to troubleshoot myself. I am running Tuxedo OS, and have not tried to use any other distros on this machine yet (but have done so on other).
More so I am very happy with the switch to Linux (coming from about a decade on macOS, with Windows before that).
Thanks for taking the time writing this up, it is very helpful for my understanding (and I imagine many others' as well)! For the things I don't completely understand for now, this also gives me a lot of additional pointers for what to learn more about to get a better grasp. So it goes straight into my notes for future reference.
Sounds like I should dare to activate my dGPU and reboot to check it out now then :) My biggest worry was that it would be so severely broken that I wouldn't be able to switch back, but I know that is just an irrational fear - no way Tuxedo would've switched to Wayland by default if it broke their own laptops. But I've been a little twitchy about larger updates since I deleted KDE accidentally from not properly reading/understanding the prompts during update.