I recently saw the new 550 drivers fixing a lot of wayland issues as well as KDE 6 being a lot better on wayland and decided, you know what, let me try it.

The first question was, which WM do I use? Initially I wanted to try DWL or Sway, since I currently use DWM on Xorg and like it quite much. However, I was somehow taken in by the Hyprland hype and man their website is flashy. So, okay I’ll try that.

From there, I didn’t last an hour. First of all, hyprland was using 20% of a cpu core and 200Mb permanently, on idle, without blur, shadows or animations enabled. This is absolutely insane, especially since, without these things, it was functionally the same as my DWM setup, which barely uses 0.5% and 9mb of RAM. Now I understand that Xorg included more things and the compositor devs or wlroots have to write more code on their own, but 20% is way too insane for me to even consider the switch. Now I honestly believe that this is an NVIDIA thing, as googling around people seemed to say it was pretty lightweight with some features disabled.

The second issue I noticed was ultimately the deal breaker. I could have tried Sway or DWL next and maybe one of those would have been fine. However, it seems like NVIDIA does not support hardware cursor on wayland. It’s listed as an issue under wlroots, hyprland and sway. Now I will admit I do play video games sometimes and using some floaty unresponsive software cursor is out of the question when I’ve already experienced the bliss that is a hardware cursor. I don’t know when this will be added, but according to a phoronix post, someone added the code to the nvidia driver and it does work on KDE now, so maybe it will be added to wlroots and the likes soon.

That’s it, just wanted to talk about it a little since I was somewhat disappointed. I have wanted to move to wayland for a long time, it seems like I will still have to wait. One thing’s for sure, I’m never buying an NVIDIA card again.