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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Yay!
Why would i want wayland?
Better security, better fractional scaling, and proper support for mixed refresh rates and VRR, to name some of the bigger reasons.
Steam VR
I started up Steam VR with my Vive a week ago, for the first time since installing Mint. Spent forever trying to get it to work. Eventually got it to connect sometimes when I start Mint in “software rendering” mode. I’m not linux literate enough to know what that means, but man do I see some fun new ways the OS breaks. Usually right after I turn off my headset, so it’s OK.
Try this, under the Ubuntu section: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/18A4-1E10-8A94-3DDA
Software rendering is slower than hardware rendering, this is certainly not a Linux exclusive.
You’re essentially telling it “Hey! I have no graphical processor or that my graphical processor is so underpowered that I need my CPU to do the rendering at an attempt to speed things up.”
Suggest you sort out your GPU and or GPU drivers because you should not be using software rendering.
I think in this specific context software rendering actually means that SteamVR is having to coordinate with the window manger or whatever to draw the game to the headset's screens rather than rendering directly to them
SteamVR as of today cannot do desktop capturing on Wayland, as opposed to X11
SteamVR on Wayland environments requires a support for DRM leasing, which to my knowledge is supported by Plasma only (my knowledge here may be out of date though)
First time I fired up my Index on Linux, I was on a fresh install of Zorin. The SteamVR app said it required a Plasma Wayland desktop session. Thankfully, it linked to a guide an moments later I understood a little bit more about the ease of Linux customization.
Since Mint tends to advertise itself as being gaming friendly, or at least people say it is, it would be nice to see them add that desktop to Mint.
X11 and Wayland are the bits that handle windows, mouse inputs and stuff around graphical user interfaces. They’re what makes GUIs work.
X has been around since the 80s and is throughly decrepit and just does not support a lot of modern functionality. If you’ve had some issue with your windows and display being janky or monitors not working properly, it’s probably due to X11. It works for the most part, but there are just a lot of situations where it creates issues.
Wayland fixes a lot off issues because it is built to handle modern situations better. If you want to see an easy example, if you’re on mint with X11, go to settings and set your UI scaling to some uneven value like 136%, you’ll probably see some weird buggy stuff happen. That’s the kind of thing Wayland fixes.
I was shocked to learn a couple days ago when I installed Mint on my wife's Surface laptop that the UI scaling only had 2 options for scaling in the basic settings. 100% and 200%. I had to click advanced settings, enable fractional scaling or something similar, go back and then I had options for 50, 75, 125, 150, etc. i don't remember if I saw a box for custom values though.
It's supported.