YMMV but I've found both to work fine, with Wayland providing the advertised tear-free video experience that X never could. Granted, when I tried OBS about a year ago I had to resort to an X-session, and that worked as expected. Not that OBS works properly on Wayland, my own use for X - I think - is done.
It absolutely works with Wayland... I just recorded a screencast yesterday with OBS on Wayland. The only thing that changes is you have to explicitly grant OBS rights to your display/window when it starts.
I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad?
The issue for me is that I'll need a working video driver and framebuffer on the remote device, whereas with X I only need to set those up on the viewing end. Theoretically, someone could make a Wayland server that didn't render locally, but no one has made one of those yet.
OBS is intimidating. I found it a bit daunting compared to Windows gamebar (Win+G) and MacOS (CMD+Shift+5, pick a mic). The power is worth the pain if you need it. Yet I don't recommend it to normies.
Of course Wayland is usually Linux so users are often more technical anyway.
Nope! I used it for a while and had issues with screen sharing/capture in Firefox and OBS (it did work in Chrome but then my webcam didn't work there - classic Linux).
I never thought it would take 3 decades for Wayland to be mature.
obs is a qt app. If you start it with -platform xcb it overrides the environment variable set to use wayland and uses x instead. It works fine for me with that change.
Is your system running Wayland? I recall OBS screenshare wasn’t compatible with Wayland at all. I had to log out and log in using the X11 fallback to get it to work. It’s a rather unfortunate condition that past tutorials say “just do XYZ and it works” but they quietly assumed X11.
Indeed. I wonder if these alternative tools are guaranteed to work no matter what compositor the user chooses for their computer. In X, the user has complete freedom over their WM and the tools will always work. You can build confidently on top of them. I'm concerned the same can't be said of Wayland.
There won't be a killer app for Wayland specifically. It's infrastructure. It's also not the place where all the showy (but ultimately annoying) user interface fluff will be found. It's infrastructure.
The question is what can it do that X can't, and there are plenty of examples mentioned in this thread (including no tearing, high refresh rates, multiple monitors with different DPI, etc).
These days it’s pretty much done and finished. Xwayland works fairly well to the point you almost couldn’t tell.
The only issue with wayland usage currently is apps in the xwayland compatibility layer are lacking the new features wayland adds like dpi scaling across screens.
I’m very happy that wayland + pipewire + flatpak now gives us basic security practices like apps having to ask permission to record the mic/screen/webcam vs the state of things in X where being able to draw a window also grants full access to everything.
Considering Waylands history with lacking screen capture support and the amount of work that's gone into creating plugins like https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs to support screen capture for wlroots based Wayland compositors this really doesn't looked like something OBS can or should fix. Until there's a standard way for applications to actually do screen capture similarly to X, Wayland is going to continue to be stuck as the 2nd choice for a lot (most) people.
Not to mention all the other things that don't work on Wayland, like VM key capture and Peek's event passthrough.
Wayland was literally made with the explicit intent of providing extensions and they are a core part of the protocol — a client app is free to query the available protocols with versions, while there was nothing similar to that under X.
And really, “every frame is perfect” of a display manager managing.. frames is somehow strange? Would it be strange for a video player as well?
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