Hi y'all,
So I read recently that the latest NVidia drivers (550 I think) had some big performance and compatibility improvements to work with Wayland. So I went and gave it a shot. I went ahead and upgraded my drivers to the aforementioned version, installed plasma-workspace-wayland and rebooted.
For your info, I have a 1440p 144Hz monitor and a NVidia GeForce RTX 3070. My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and I got 32GB of RAM.
I tried Mullet MadJack and GhostRunner, which are running fine using X11 on current drivers btw. The performance was awful. I was getting no more than 10 FPS. I did a bit of searching and found I was missing the libnvidia-egl-wayland1 package. Installed it, rebooted just in case and tried again. The FPS was much better. 144FPS for Mullet Madjack and in the 100+ FPS for GhostRunner.The problem I noticed however was how BAD the shearing was in the image in both games. Even if it had no problem running the game.
I went ahead and upgraded the NVidia driver to 555 since some other Reddit post recommended it. But I ran into a slew of other issues. The Plasma compositor crashed all the time, and if my PC went to sleep, my desktop and windows, menu, everything wouldn't get drawn completely and the mouse cursor left a trail everywhere. I had to eyeball click through my menu to log out and go back to X11.
It looks like there's still some improvements that need to be made. Until then I'll stick with X11.
Kubuntu is fine. But for gaming, having old packages is very good for stability, but bad for gaming. In the latter use case, having access to the latest drivers and compositors, will grant you a better gaming experience.
A humble question: have you considered switching to another distro with newer packages?
Yeah I've looked into other distributions. So far Kubuntu fits the bill just fine for me.
I don't have enough spare time to mess around with troubleshooting issues, so stability is what I'm looking for and the Ubuntu flavors provide just that without being too outdated. And they provide 3rd party drivers out of the box.
I hear Fedora might be a good alternative, but I heard it's a bit more difficult to find 3rd party support for hardware.
Adjacently, Nobara is based on Fedora for gaming, uses KDE, and has a lot of packages pre-installed for a nicer end user experience. I used to use Kubuntu as my first foray into Linux desktop but I ran into a few issues. Nobara has been overall more stable and more reliable for my daily use.
Oh yeah! I haven't tried it out yet. I've been testing some distros on VMs (I know, not the best way to test but that's the best I can do.) It has a patched kernel for gaming and everything. That's nice.
I'll give it a shot. :)
Hey, I wanted to get back to you on this.
I've given it some thought and I think I'll stay with Kubuntu. I think it's best if I stick to a standard generic distro and simply report any problems I can come by to help developers know what challenges users face and how they can improve their software for general distribution. Nobara seems to do a lot of customizations which I think might lead to specific cases for that distro alone.