Some recent experiences with KDE Wayland on a NVIDIA 3070TI

I've dipped my toes into the Wayland waters a few times of the past years, and I've always been immediately impressed and jealous of the buttery smooth performance, only to come crashing down to Earth with the severe showstoppers and bugs when using a NVIDIA based card.

Despite general instability of the environment, it was lacking support for VRR as well as GAMMA LUT for night mode, among some others.

I had heard that with the latest drivers there actually is GSYNC support now (at least for later model cards), which is something I think a lot of people still don't know based on what I read.

So I went about installing KDE Wayland to give it a try, and I'm really pleased to report the general desktop experience is getting a whole lot better, like almost ready for prime time good!

Pros

Amazingly smooth performance. In X dragging windows when a video is playing , or resizing a browser window made me feel like a second class Linux citizen.

Multi-monitor support with mixed refresh rates!

GSYNC works! (kinda) .. I'm able to enable VRR within the KDE settings, and my monitor does response by adjusting the refresh rate while gaming. I haven't tested this extensively, but my initial impression is that it kicks on "sometimes" and not as stable as in X. With other games its been very stable holding the refresh rates. So there are factors involved that still need working out, but it's basically here guys.

On the topic of GSYNC, I'm acutally getting better game rendering performance. A better and more stable FPS compared to X. I also have not tested this extensively, but general impression is really positive.

Many more apps support Wayland now wihtout a lot of fussing.

Electron apps are running a lots more stable. Firefox and Chromium support is easily enabled with a flag, and makes the performance so good.

MPV , and SMoothVideoPlayer just work without any extra configuration. All little hangups I had in the past

Steam works great. All the wine games work great though it, and also in Lutris / Bottles.

Cons

Still no Night mode support, although I know this is coming.

Still some buggyness with KDE which causes the panel to freeze up sometimes. I set a hotkey to run 'plasmashell --replace' when this happens, and it seamlessly fixes it without interrupting anything else.

Very rare kwin_wayland crash while doing some intensive xwayland stuff.

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I know I'm forgetting some things so I'll answer questions, but I've been basically in Wayland for the past few weeks, and unless I run into any major showstoppers I haven't already, I'm good to stay.