Linux, Wayland, and NVidia.

For some time, I’ve been trying to run my Linux under Wayland. It’s… always complicated. VERY complicated.

I have what people call the “unholy trinity” – Wayland, NVidia GPU (in a laptop to make things worse), and I use an Electron app (Pulsar). Pulsar is my main editor, so it’s basically “the reason I use a computer most of the time” really.

So it was a good surprise when I found out that things work… except…

Gimp.

And Darktable.

These flickered like crazy. And because they are image editors, this flickering is insane – it makes editing things essentially impossible (imagine you’re adjusting brightness and the screen is flickering between darker and lighter, and then stops… in the wrong frame, meaning you have no idea if it’s correct or not). So I tried to track the problem, and I finally have a solution (hopefully). This post will give the results, but the TL;DR; is – update your Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 is the MINIMUM version that you need), update your KDE to at least 6.2 (or use some recent desktop env with good wayland support), don’t use the Open Kernel NVidia driver, and update your Xwayland to at least version 24.0.
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