Is Wayland worth using?

For a first dive into the Linux ecosystem, I recommend Xorg. I use Wayland myself (Hyprland), and that’s why I know that it’s simply not ready for general adoption. There are many features that are missing, won’t be implemented, or are done much differently compared to X. Some say Xorg is old and bloated - I say it’s a mature technology.

There are also some applications that need root privileges to work (Veyon Configurator is one that I struggled a lot with) and you have to do some weird pkexec hackery to launch them.

Wayland’s development has more drama and bickering than an average sitcom - I recommend Brodie Robertson’s channel if you’re interested.

advantages/improvements to using Wayland

Wayland is better for gaming. It has a noticeably lower latency because the entire Wayland stack is implemented in a single program (what they call the compositor) as opposed to several in the X11 stack (X server, compositor, window manager) that need to communicate with each other. Unfortunately Steam and some other applications often produce graphical artifacts on Wayland+Nvidia.

Does bloat actually matter

Compared to Windows, it is insignificant. My work laptop is a Macbook Air from 2015 running Linux Mint on just 4G RAM without issues.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

Install the tldr program. It’s a bit like man but lists practical examples of a command instead of a full documentation.

What are some habits I should practice

Make use of your home directory. Most user applications will have a config file in several places - usually in ~/.config (user config) and /etc (systemwide config). You should only edit the systemwide config when it makes sense, and always prioritize the user config.

A common practice is to have your /home directory on a different partition, or a different physical device. If the system breaks or you decide to distrohop, you can unmount/disconnect /home and only wipe the root partition while retaining your user files.

I also recommend using Timeshift to back up your system. It’s even better if your root partition uses btrfs since it natively supports snapshots.

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux

I needed to leave the Windows ways behind me. On Windows, I had a hard drive mounted as F: and an external HDD mounted as H:. Moving to Linux (Manjaro at the time) was basically a snap decision since Windows had obliterated the boot partition during an update and then broke itself, and I had no idea how to properly set up the filesystem, so I mounted them to /mnt/f and /mnt/h. It caused me many hours of headache later.

If you’re going to use nvidia, don’t even touch wayland. Truly an awful experience.

Bloat does matter it is extremely important, not because having a bunch of apps slows anything down or has any tangible impact in that regard. Because it isn’t as sexy as somebody’s hyper specific gentoo install compiled without some specific module.

The reason bloat is such a big deal, particularly if you’re new to it, is because it’s confusing. if you’re trying to fix a problem that you have run into / possibly contributed to, a dozen different programs running in the background that you didn’t put there is going leave you frustrated and disenfranchised.

Pick a modular distribution like Arch, take the loss that is your weekend putting it together and develop an understanding of how the pieces fit together. If you really don’t have time choose something like eg endeavourOS. ( or even Void is quite nice (but non systemd so less conventional))

I would personally recommend avoiding something like fedora or Debian. They are both fantastic distributions that work very well. They are not good at teaching new users how to fix problems and that should be your primary goal here.

Wayland has proper scaling and should be the way of the future. Many apps are starting to properly support it, which should bring a few advantages.

Regarding NVIDIA, what I’ve heard is that with the latest proprietary drivers, there are very few issues (although I can’t promise you anything, currently using fedora KDE on a Mac of all things).

Bloat is relative. It all depends on what your hardware is, and as such, on how many resources you’re willing to “waste” for convenience.

The arch wiki is a really decent resource.

And I wish I knew that NVIDIA proprietary drivers don’t get installed by default in a lot of distro, but they’re usually well maintained by most distro maintainers

the gentoo wiki is also a great resource !!

1) Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card. Are there any real noticeable advantages/improvements to using Wayland over Xorg.
If you have an Nvidia card you’re probably best sticking to Xorg for now. I’m currently running Xorg with Gnome 45 since I have a GTX 1060. As I understand it Wayland is better at handling refresh rates across multiple monitors, as well as DPI scaling. These are minor issues compared to having everything working smoothly. I do feel like Xorg is on the way out now however, and I expect to switch off of it in a year or two.

2) Does bloat actually have a noticeable negative impact on your system or are people just over reacting/joking.
It’s mostly just a meme. It certainly won’t slow you down. What it does do is take up space on your hard drive and in your menus. I do understand taking pleasure in ensuring that your system is trimmed down to only what you really need. But don’t worry about it at all.

3) What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
The same habits you have on Windows. Keep your files and folders in order. Beyond that there’s not much you need to worry about, especially with Kinoite.

4) Any habits or standards that I should abide by in order to save myself headaches in the future?
Not that I can think of off the top of my head. Most important is leaning to RTFM, meaning go read the documentation for your distro (or just look at the Arch wiki) when you have an issue. If you run into a problem and need to ask for help, make sure you don’t do the XY problem.

5) Any other resources besides the AUR that I should be aware of?
I don’t think Fedora Kinoite supports AUR, that’s an Arch Linux thing. You’ll be getting 99% of your apps from Flatpak.

6) What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
A long time ago I made a thread that got shared around a bit about how I thought the command line was pushed by Linux anoraks who didn’t understand the needs of the common user. I’ve used Linux a lot since then and I’ve changed my perspective: the command line is your best friend. It lets you do exactly what you want to do very quickly. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s beautiful. If you learn it a whole world of additional tools command line tools will open to you (ssh, grep, etc). There’s a reason that places like /c/unixporn love pictures of open terminals with neofetch loaded up.

I wouldn’t worry about wayland vs xorg at this point. There are reasons to prefer one over the other but, as a new user, if it works it works. And if something is broken, it’s easy to switch between them (I assume it’s an option in the login screen?).

I’d just recommend whatever your distro defaults to, because that’s what they think works best.

Same as systemd if you stumble upon an argument about that at some point. It’s something the distro has made a decision about and taken care of, so it’s not something you have to choose.

As for a tip: On Linux, the “app store” (I think it’s called “Discover” in KDE?) is actually pretty good compared to Windows. If possible, applications should be downloaded from there rather than directly from websites.

Using NVIDIA please use the image from ublue.it, the official Fedora one can work but noveau is not ready. You can install Kinoite from Fedora though and give it a try, report your experience with noveau (should work and proprietary drivers are pretty scary) and then rebase to ublue (unsigned, reboot, signed, reboot)

Wayland is worth it, Plasma 6 will come out soon and primarily target it. It just works for me, always, I have like no problem with it. Flathub flatpaks always worked because they have loose permissions.

Xorg is an insecure mess and it is not maintained.

Also, give the Plasma 6 preview a try! and report bugs. Its like 99% ready.

Bloat: yes of course. Fedora Kinoite has none. If you install a few flatpaks, dont be scared by duplicate Libraries, they use deduplication to actually need less space.

Bloat matters as a huge LUKS drive is notably slower, but only a matter of seconds on an NVME/ any SSD. And yeah, please use LUKS, encrypting afterwards is not easy. Also use a Password that can be written in US QWERTY too, a bug in current Fedora Atomic, it doesnt use your native keyboard layout. Seems to be fixed on 40 (rawhide, Plasma 6 prerelease Version of Kinoite)

Habits:

• install huge apps like RStudio, an IDE, a programming environment etc. in a Distrobox. If you program hardware it needs to be a root distrobox, otherwise no USB access.
• if you git clone stuff, create a “Git” folder in your home, put that there. Guides never mention that.
• if you use Appimages, compiled apps, binaries; create a “Programs” folder in your home
• use Czkawka to find duplicate files

Resources:

• alternativeto.net
• itsfoss.com
• discussion.fedoraproject.org
• discuss.kde.org

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

• Fedora Kinoite (Ubuntu broke, stable Distros suck, …)
• use Flathub Flatpaks, they are often better

I highly recommend timeshift. It makes it easy to make system snapshots (think system restore points) at regular intervals so that if you try something and it breaks your system, you can restore it to a working state. It has saved me hours of work from all of the reinstalls that I didn’t have to do. I wish I had something like this when I first started out with Linux. It would have saved me dozens of Linux installs.

• Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card.

Short answer, no. There are advantages, but not worth it on an nvidia card. Wayland will replace Xorg very soon is a saying for over a decade, there’s reasons it hasn’t happened yet, nvidia is one of them.

• Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?

For starting up, just a meme, on the long run it’s nice to have a small system, but not that important i£ you have the disk to spare.

• What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?

Yes, the main one is “use the package manager”. The second one is keep your /home in a different partition.

• Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

I would say that any community is also a good resource, since people are usually helpful.

• What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

Set your /home to a different partition, I know I already mentioned this but it will save your ass the first t*me you break your system and have to reinstall.

This would’ve saved me a headache!

From what I’ve heard. I’ve you have an Nvidia GPU the easiest thing you can do is to run Ubuntu. They have partnered up with nvidia and they provide you will all drivers you need right out the box.

It can be a hassle to sort out nvidia cards with certain distros.

• “Is Wayland worth using, especially with Nvidia” I have no personal first-hand experience with Wayland; I run Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, which is still X11 for the moment. MY personal philosophy is I’ll adopt Wayland when Mint does. Basically don’t worry about it.
• “Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?” It is 93.3% just a meme. The most extravagant diamond encrusted froie gras kitchen sink apocalypse bunker mega yacht Linux distro you can find is going to be slim and trim compared to any currently supported edition of Windows. You will legitimately find some folks in the community who would just rather go edit a config file than have a GUI that edits it for you, and you’ll find some woodworkers who prefer to use hand planes and chisels. A hobby’s a hobby.
• “What are some habits/standards to keep my system organized and manageable?” Mainly, learn how the file system works, learn what /opt and such are for. Otherwise your skills for managing your files on WIndows should suffice.
• “Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki to be aware of?” Man pages. You can read the documentation for any command in the terminal by typing “man commandname.” For example, to learn more about the change directory command, cd, type “man cd” and it will tell you all about it. It even has its own man page, you can type “man man”. All of this is stored on your system locally, so you don’t even need an internet connection for this.
• “What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux?” What middle click does. There’s a thing called the primary buffer which allows you to highlight and paste text simply by highlighting text, then middle clicking somewhere else. It’s separate from the Ctrl+C Ctrl+V feature. Also, what dotfiles are. Short answer is, hidden files on Unix-like systems start with a dot (.) and there’s a ton of them in your home folder. These often hold things like configuration files for applications, so backing up your entire home folder including hidden files will catch all your preferences. Plus, there are directories like .fonts where you can put TTF font files and they’ll be available to applications. It’s something you don’t often get shown during onboarding but it’s there.

No, no, none, no, learn vim.

Don’t listen to the trolls please, you have to think long term, how will you grow in the next 2 to 5 (or even 10) years, because without a doubt you will grow and have a learning curve which alters the way you will use your machine. There are tons and tons of solutions and people pitching it from their Linux ricer power user perspective.

Don’t make yourself regret and/or spent countless hours switching back and forth, solving issues, looking through help articles, etc etc

I know it’s hard but trust me, you literally cannot make a good choice now with your current state. Just install Ubuntu and get a hang of it, use it, do your stuff you want to do and when you are comfortable with Ubuntu, then throw that piece of junk in the trash and switch to Debian Stable - no, not SID, no you won’t miss out on all the cool bleeding edge AUR packages.

When you take this path I described you will grow with the system and you will be able to make the decision based on your needs, wants and use cases. Trust me or suffer, I am sorry new guy.

I’d say avoid Wayland for now. There’s no real benefit to it at the moment and at least your card works with X11. If the Linux Mint team are happy to wait and just test it out at the moment, that tells me that is the way to go.

Not sure what bloat people mentioned but Linux doesn’t have bloat. The distro chooses their preferred apps which they hope everyone will like but it’s easy to remove them if you don’t and use the app you want. If it’s a system app (.deb, rpm etc) it will barely take up any space anyway. Only flatpaks and snaps take up huge amount of space. I wouldn’t recommend using alot of those as you’ll be pressed for disk space

Linux doesn’t require maintenance. It typically just works. It’s not like Windows where you run a cleaner every so often. Just just use it normally and don’t work about it.

What I wish I knew at the start: Linux Mint is the best distro. I wasted a lot of time distro hopping only to realise I just want a stable distro that gets out of the way but is thoughtfully put together with nice touches. Mint is that. I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I don’t like canonical.

It’s been rock solid except for when the kernel broke my WiFi, but I had a time shift backup so in 5 minutes I had my pre-update system back and working.

One suggestion I haven’t seen addressed: use a filesystem with snapshots such as Btrfs and combine it with Timeshift.

With Timeshift you’ll be able to roll back in time on your disk and undo stuff. It can take advantage of the lightning fast snapshots of Btrfs to do that.

On Btrfs, separate your /home into a subvolume @home so that, when you do roll back, your personal files aren’t affected.

Configure policies for daily and weekly snapshots on Timeshift. Don’t worry about space, they’re basically free.

That way you can feel better experimenting with your setup, as long as the system is Bootable.