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Comment by BaculumMeumEst | Hacker News Reader

does wayland have a good tiling window manager that supports nvidia gpus yet?

I'm using Sway with my 3080 and nvidia drivers.

Why does the window manager require any type of GPU?

Because window managers don't exist on Wayland. What used to be a window manager is now an entire display server. Talk about well-designed.

Because Nvidia doesn't implement APIs used by display servers and requires them to write code that's specific to their closed driver.

> APIs used by display servers

Used by the kernel. When you are using proprietary nvidia drivers you literally binary patch your xserver executable. That will obviously not work with other executables.

due to changes of how Nvidia handles things I think all maintained WM do so by now, through idk. if this applies to both Nvidia drivers or only one of them.

i tried sway recently with those changes, but it still needed the —unsupported-gpu flag and had lots of flickering. i thought there might be an alternative i don't know about

I've had some luck with Hyprland (after following https://wiki.hyprland.org/Nvidia/) but it does take some hacks, and I'd imagine results will vary.

i was more charitable about trying unofficial/unsupported nvidia setups that require hacks in the past, but not any more. they take extra work to set up initially, constantly break on updates, and leave a minefield of unknown unknowns that rear their heads when you’re trying to work. the result is a compounding amount of wasted time.

official support is the way to go for me, so i’m back on X for the time being

I'm using wlroots-nvidia package in arch for a few months and made swaywm totally usable.

I'm using a ryzen laptop with external display via the nvidia GPU. All good!

XWayland is still completely broken on Nvidia too, due to disagreements and lack of progress on supporting explicit sync in the graphics driver protocols.

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