I want to say that the GNU/Linux desktop experience has improved tremendously, with thanks to some architectural changes with display rendering. Wayland is a good replacement for XOrg, as it deals with a lot of the redundant pathways and legacy cruft preventing more responsive rendering.

One of the remaining obstacles to Wayland properly working is the incomplete drivers shipped by NVIDIA. I think I've eliminated the possibility of misconfigured settings, as NVIDIA's kernel modules now load correctly with OpenSUSE, and with secure boot enabled. Their instructions actually explain how to enrol and sign the key into the EFI firmware. I think I've begun to rule out any configuration or packaging issues, as recently I found a modprobe.d config file inside /var/lib that was blocking nvidia kernel modules for DRM and KMS and UVM from automatically being loaded, which I promptly fixed.

I have a Lenovo ThinkBook, with AMD Ryzen integrated graphics, and a dedicated NVIDIA Geforce RTX-3060. Wayland works much more smoothly on my AMD integrated GPU, but I am getting marginal results in improvement across the board with different applications. I prefer using GNOME at the moment.

The problems come with Firefox, leaving an empty window, unable to draw drawing the window contents. Chromium works better, and ideally, on NixOS, where I was getting 60FPS on this WebGL Aquarium demo with 30000 fishes selected: http://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

I struggle to understand why NVIDIA has shipped drivers which are plagued by these minor issues. This could be related to an unwillingness due to a possibility of revealing proprietary information, and their competitive advantage, although Microsoft uses an AMD GPU in the current generation of Xbox gaming consoles. AMD has already shipped opensource modules for Radeon and other cards.

At the time of writing this, I'd reccomend buying a laptop with an AMD 7000 series Radeon card, with something comparable to the RTX-3060. In New Zealand, this is pretty challenging, as the most popular brands like HP, Lenovo come with NVIDIA GPU's. Maybe driver support for NVIDIA will improve before September 2026, but for now, I'll have to stay with Windows 11.

I have started a petition, to try and attract more attention, which may (or likely not) change NVIDIA's stance towards improving support for their current generation GPU's at least: https://www.change.org/p/make-nvidia-gpu-drivers-properly-open-source-and-more-compatible-for-gnu-linux