Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite a bit lately with the announcement that Fedora KDE is proposing to drop the Plasma X11 session for version 40 and only ship the Plasma Wayland session. I’ve read a lot of nervousness and fear about it lately. So today, let’s talk about it!
System76 is a Linux-first hardware OEM, but not open source first. Nvidia’s GPUs using proprietary drivers function almost as well as AMD’s open source drivers and have the added functionality with NVENC and Cuda. It really depends on your use case.
The problem is that those drivers are awful if you plan to keep your computer for more than a year or two. Most Linux-first OEMs are shipping Nvidia, not just System76. I’ve had two computers I got secondhand with Nvidia GPUs, and that damn GPU was the bane of my existence, and from what I’m seeing, that situation hasn’t changed for the better at all.
Ideally, I would love to see things change, but it definitely seems like the majority of Linux users and OEMs are still using Nvidia GPUs, so Nvidia has no incentive to change.
If you can avoid buying Nvidia I’m in favor of it. AMD’s all around a more supportive company when it comes to Linux and Open Source. But some people are stuck relying on Nvidia for their hardware.