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Wayland: Not a step but a jump

Recently I've built myself a new desktop computer, replacing my now 6 year old machine. When doing so I thought I would try and pick hardware that aligned with my more of what I spend my time with on my computer these days. As such I went with a Radeon card for their open source driver support in Linux. With this came the chanes to try the new wayland suite of compositors and associated client programs. Wayland has been a breath of fresh air in terms of desktop enviornments, most of the uglyness of configuring things like displays to use specific drivers, multi head and even fonts have been dealt with. Not to mention that everything just seems much snappier, it feels like linux has started to get caught up to the rest of the world in terms of graphical displays. Another nice perk is that with the hardware acclerated vulkan support, it makes it quite easy to make good use of Valve's work with proton. For which I have yet to have any real problems with. I think with these recent improvements I am finding the need to dualboot less and less, most of everything I need to do is done within Linux and I get the bonus of a mostly UNIX feeling system. I dont think Linux will ever replace windows in for those that aren't already interested in it, but it certaintly has gotten better for those who want to stay inside of it.

Wayland itself is an interesting idea and there already has been the start of a good community that is slowy picking away at the modern X11 toolkit that people have gotten accustomed too. However, just as using a system without systemD leads to some friction so does using wayland. It's not too hard to tweak some things here and there to make it work, but its worth noting it here. For my personal experiance using it has not not been any worse then using your own window manager with X11, and even popular DE's like KDE and GNOME offer wayland backends now that you can use.

For me personally I think this is the first time I haven't felt like I was making sacrafices for using Linux for my desktop machine, and I was actually geting a lot out of the hardware that I picked. Of course you still deal with the headache of configuring things and dealing with all the quirks that come with the decentralized nature of the Linux ecosystem but I'd be lying if I didn't enjoy that process a little bit. I am looking forward to see where things go from here.