I mostly use AMD and have been using Wayland since GNOME 40 without any problems, loving the consistently perfect frames and fantastic scaling (with Wayland programs, but nowadays I use nearly no X11-only programs).
I tried Nvidia with Wayland a few times and it always was a clusterfuck. I remember when Nvidia just released GBM support on their drivers I actually compiled my own Mutter to try Wayland because there was a bug with the hardware cursor that overflowed the GPU memory. I even tried eglstreams a few times with the Nvidia-developed GNOME backend. No matter what, I always had problems with invisible programs, programs leaving trails like the cards falling in Windows 98 Solitaire when moving the window, slow programs, blurry programs, unresponsive programs, etc.
Today I tried again Nvidia with GNOME 43/Wayland on Debian 12 and also experienced lots of the same issues as I always had. I then moved to Sid with GNOME 44 and was pleasantly surprised to see nearly all my issues just go away. Have not seen any invisible programs, nor any trails behind windows when moved. I have seen abnormally slow programs though, the GNOME terminal seems to struggle when scrolling fullscreen, whereas my laptop with and AMD APU works perfectly.
Currently happily using GNOME 44 with Wayland on Nvidia, never thought I would get to say this. I’m hyped for GNOME 45 to drop in Sid!
Let me suggest you to switch to Fedora, Arch or Opensuse. Debian Sid may have problems, and stable is simply too slow for how fast Nvidia is moving. My suggestion is to use Fedora or Arch, or Opensuse, with newer packages. Everything was super smooth on Fedora.
I love Fedora! but sadly I have been burned twice by Red Hat already. I refuse to be burned a third time so I’m moving my servers over to Debian. I like to use the same ecosystem on all my computers, so I also moved my desktop and laptop over to Debian.
I tried OpenSUSE a few times, but I disliked YaST, disliked the unclear future of Leap and disliked the unclear future of ALP. I thought I would love Aeon (I used Silverblue when I used Fedora) but I didn’t like being unable to compare my system against a “base” one. So for the time, at least until the situation over SUSE clears up, I’m going to stick with Debian.
Anyways, once GNOME 45 hits Debian Testing I think I’m going to move over to that, I would prefer to use Stable (which I use on my laptop and job) but I really want a recent GNOME for my Nvidia GPU. I have a bunch of BTRFS snapshots ready to go back to stable at any moment if anything happens, so I’m not too worried.
agree! here’s my experience with an nvidia card…
tl;dr fedora is awesome, although rn i am a happy debian user as long as i stick to x11
Debian is a great distro itself. I just happen to love Fedora and appreciate their stability (meaning, the software usually works very well)
Yeah the Fedora team getting everything to work seamlessly really speaks to their expertise.