Or be 64 bit now that it’s 2024.

SteamLink not allowing me to stream just my desktop (rather than a specific game) on Wayland is really the only thing keeping me on X11 at the moment. I use that feature almost nightly to keep watching something from my PC while I cook dinner

I made a gradual switch from windows to Arch starting in may. At first I had some issues but since nvidia 555.x drivers launched everything just works. Gsync/VRR? No issues. HDR? No issues. Three monitors, some rotated, with different refresh rates one of them ultra wide? No issues at all. It's amazing.

Made the full switch about 1,5 months back and deleted all windows partitions two weeks ago. Works for gaming, work and casual browsing without flaw and I'm glad I made the switch.

Yo, try it on nvidia...or try some older programs, try playing games. Wayland is already good, but if it keeps being developed at this speed, then its 10 or more years left for this things to work yet.

My very first experience with Linux last year was switching from X to Wayland to get my touchpad to work properly. The only thing I've noticed that doesn't work on Wayland is that mouse following cat.

I do love how they just kind of like picked up Linux and dragged it into mainstream gaming lol. Hopefully they're doing the same thing to Wayland now.

Good luck!

https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/?job_cat=

No "if", no "would", we are millions of gamers using our (portable) PC with SteamOS running on it for few years now already.

As others have pointed out already, the SteamDeck is exactly that. I even travel with it, use desktop mode with my BT mouse&keyboard with a USB-to-HDMI adapter and work on large screen and do my presentations with video projectors.

If they were to sell a desktop too... well I have a Corsair ONE already, naming a gaming desktop (2080Ti) with a very small footprint and relatively silent. It is not easily upgradable due to how compact it is (but can be done) so if I were to have an equivalent of it from Steam and they were to keep on contributing to FLOSS it would probably be an even easier buy because I trust their RMA and I imagine I wouldn't pay a "Windows tax" with it as it would "only" come with SteamOS.

TL;DR: I'd prepare my credit card.

Didn't work out that well last time. But Valve got a lot better with Hardware since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)

After the deck, I'd trust it to be quality

You mean like Steam Machine?

I personally think it is a very bad idea to “speed run development” of protocols.

Stalling the development of protocols for nearly a decade is bad, too.

They should talk and meet somewhere between “Just develop in production!” and “I personally dislike it for non-technical reasons, so I will block it for everyone!”

I've been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we've ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.

I know it's tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we'll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we'll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.

That depends on how you speed it up. For example, the Covid vaccines were "accelerated" compared to normal vaccines but they did that by spending additional money to run the steps of the process in parallel. Normally they don't do that because if one of the steps fail they have to go back and those parallel processes are wasted. For the Covid vaccines, the financial waste was deemed worth it to get the speed up of parallelization.

I personally think it is a very bad idea to "speed run development" of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.

and thus we have slow development which has resulted in absent designs, which has caused each desktop to do things differently to fill the gaps

X has been around forever, it sucks

That right there. X11 was released in the mid-80s and has become an unmaintainable patchwork of additions. Nobody wants to develop or maintain the code because changing one thing breaks five others.

Wayland also takes advantage of 3D acceleration, since each window is a plane rendered in 3D space. There's no longer a choice between massive input lag with a compositor and massive screen tearing without.

but it works

For some definitions of "works"

But Wayland is waaay better than X in basically everything? Performance and security are simply in another league entirely. And these 2 are the most important factors.

The rest of the "features" will be eventually there. In fact, mostly are there already. I've been using Wayland 2 years without issues. The important thing is that now the sofware is solid, the code is clean and the performance is amazing. Growing from there will be so much better than from X11.

From what I can see it mostly does ease of development better; it's a completely new and rather lean codebase, and it's seen as an investment in compatibility with graphical applications.

Also, it has lock screens. X cannot do lock screens; it can have an app being full screen and pray to some collection of deities that nothing will come in front of it or that the fake lock screen won't draw far too small, but it cannot natively do secure lockscreens that are guaranteed to work.
So there, it does something much better: security.

You answered your question of why Wayland exists right after asking it. X sucks. Wayland is a very significant improvement, I'm not sure why you think it's a lateral move.

Also, X works for some cases, but not all, just lime Wayland. Using multiple refresh rates doesnt work well, HDR has no hope of ever working, and fractional scaling is horrible. Wayland has initial support for HDR and great support for the other two.