Full Version: H22 Wayland on Linux support?
Simple as title said, can someone share details about Wayland support with Houdini 22, is ti finally fully supported or we are still to count on luck to have all working?
Every developer has an opinion on X11 vs Wayland. Almost none of them have measured it.
Bt someone actually did. They ran controlled benchmarks across multiple setups and found that X11 beats Wayland by 0.14 to 0.22 milliseconds. That is smaller than the margin of error in most human perception studies.
So why does Wayland still feel worse to some people?
XWayland. Running an X11 app through the compatibility layer adds 3.13ms of latency on its own, more than every other factor in the test combined. If you are blaming Wayland for feeling sluggish and you are actually running XWayland apps, you are blaming the wrong thing.
The single biggest win in the benchmark was enabling VRR. Variable Refresh Rate reduced latency by up to 0.45ms and, more importantly, made frame delivery dramatically more consistent.
The takeaway: the display server war is basically settled on performance. Native Wayland apps are fast. XWayland is the bottleneck. VRR is the upgrade worth making.
Bt someone actually did. They ran controlled benchmarks across multiple setups and found that X11 beats Wayland by 0.14 to 0.22 milliseconds. That is smaller than the margin of error in most human perception studies.
So why does Wayland still feel worse to some people?
XWayland. Running an X11 app through the compatibility layer adds 3.13ms of latency on its own, more than every other factor in the test combined. If you are blaming Wayland for feeling sluggish and you are actually running XWayland apps, you are blaming the wrong thing.
The single biggest win in the benchmark was enabling VRR. Variable Refresh Rate reduced latency by up to 0.45ms and, more importantly, made frame delivery dramatically more consistent.
The takeaway: the display server war is basically settled on performance. Native Wayland apps are fast. XWayland is the bottleneck. VRR is the upgrade worth making.
Honestly there is no more war. Every single distro dropped out X11 completely from it. Only Waylaid available and bringing back X11 is a pain and disaster waiting to happen. Now they can either stick to ancient distro versions with X11... or finally move forward! 
I think that's a bot. Anyway, I hope the new UI redesign had something to do with support for Wayland.
Well there is our answer. Wayland is NOT supported in H22.
Rocky Linux 9.8 is awesome so not that big of a deal for me. But it would have been nice to update to Rocky Linux 10.
https://www.sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/ [www.sidefx.com]
Rocky Linux 9.8 is awesome so not that big of a deal for me. But it would have been nice to update to Rocky Linux 10.
https://www.sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/ [www.sidefx.com]
I will say the UI change seems to have fixed the issue I was having with Nvidia drivers past 580. I installed 610.43.03 today and so far have had zero UI freezes. The mouse scroll issue still exists, but that can be fixed by appending this to your houdini.env file:
QT_XCB_NO_XI2 = 1
I switched to old UI in H22 preferences and froze/crashed. Then switched back to the new UI and it seems stable so far. Could be a coincidence, or could be a glimmer of hope.
So far so good on Cachy OS...
Will see how it goes with more extensive work
Will see how it goes with more extensive work
Unfortunately it's even worse for me than with H21. Also CachyOS but with an integrated AMD gpu on this particular machine. As soon as I try to resize a pane it's straight up freezing and I have to kill the process. Bummer 
I just want to remind people that CachyOS and Arch are unsupported operating systems - no internal testing has been performed, so your mileage may vary. If possible, I would recommend that if you are relying on Houdini for production work, to stay on our supported operating systems so that we can quickly reproduce and solve any issues that you may have.
If you are interested in the integration of Wayland, I encourage you to follow the Wayland for Artists Working Group through the ASWF: https://www.aswf.io/blog/academy-software-foundation-launches-new-wayland-for-artists-working-group/ [www.aswf.io]
If you are interested in the integration of Wayland, I encourage you to follow the Wayland for Artists Working Group through the ASWF: https://www.aswf.io/blog/academy-software-foundation-launches-new-wayland-for-artists-working-group/ [www.aswf.io]
Oh man, that's a bummer that Wayland is not supported. I think this is a must in 2026.
You are completely right about production settings.
But X11 is dead, they are not developing it and every single distro is removing it and switching to Wayland only.
Still truth to be told Houdini is still better on Wayland then Maya... since 2025 it is totally unusable on Wayland. Not taht there are reasons to update Maya after that version or even from 2022 anyway
In any case as long as it is running fine I'm happy for it. Once it is a problem there is always Rocky to fall back on.
But honestly worse issue is mandatory windows 11... that thing is not coming on my machines.. no matter what
Anyway once again for what is worth, H22 is running great for now and it even fixed my problem with GPUs falling out of bus when rendering in Solaris and frequent freezes that I had with H21.
ryzen 59550x, 128GB ram, 2xnvidia 4090 on cachy os
But X11 is dead, they are not developing it and every single distro is removing it and switching to Wayland only.
Still truth to be told Houdini is still better on Wayland then Maya... since 2025 it is totally unusable on Wayland. Not taht there are reasons to update Maya after that version or even from 2022 anyway
In any case as long as it is running fine I'm happy for it. Once it is a problem there is always Rocky to fall back on.
But honestly worse issue is mandatory windows 11... that thing is not coming on my machines.. no matter what
Anyway once again for what is worth, H22 is running great for now and it even fixed my problem with GPUs falling out of bus when rendering in Solaris and frequent freezes that I had with H21.
ryzen 59550x, 128GB ram, 2xnvidia 4090 on cachy os
Mirko Jankovic
But honestly worse issue is mandatory windows 11... that thing is not coming on my machines.. no matter what
I'm in the same camp. It still launches fine (so far, I haven't done any heavy tests/new features) on Windows 10, so to me it seems like a "it works, but we aren't responsible for issues that might occur" type of "not supported".
It launches? A friend tried installing and he could not...
Alright... (I know it's not supported, I know I shouldn't be using it for production).
I installed H22 now on my main workstation, running both CachyOS and Win10. I was about to complain that H22 feels a lot more sluggish and everything has lag, but it turns out that only happens on Windows. It runs A LOT better on Cachy. It's honestly a night and day difference. Rightclick menu opens instantly on Linux, has a 1 second lag on Windows. Resizing Panes has about 3x the "fps" than on Windows, and generally everything seems a lot more snappy. So, despite it not being supported, I have a pretty good feeling about this on Cachy .
edit: and no, I won't switch to Win11 for as long as I can avoid it
edit2: I realized just now that win10 is no longer supported by sidefx. That's an odd choice frankly, and disappointing. There's still a 30% market share for 10 and lots of people (myself included) are stuck with it whether we like it or not, due to microslops stupid hardware requirements and the hardware prices being what they are.
I installed H22 now on my main workstation, running both CachyOS and Win10. I was about to complain that H22 feels a lot more sluggish and everything has lag, but it turns out that only happens on Windows. It runs A LOT better on Cachy. It's honestly a night and day difference. Rightclick menu opens instantly on Linux, has a 1 second lag on Windows. Resizing Panes has about 3x the "fps" than on Windows, and generally everything seems a lot more snappy. So, despite it not being supported, I have a pretty good feeling about this on Cachy
.edit: and no, I won't switch to Win11 for as long as I can avoid it
edit2: I realized just now that win10 is no longer supported by sidefx. That's an odd choice frankly, and disappointing. There's still a 30% market share for 10 and lots of people (myself included) are stuck with it whether we like it or not, due to microslops stupid hardware requirements and the hardware prices being what they are.
i got it installed on nixos/nvidia with a costum niuxpkg overlay to force the official package on nix to use the latest version. so far it works and im not getting the usual wayland ui crashes after handling the interface for a while. need to do some more testing but except for the missing shfs directory for the new nodes it works like a charm. couldnt be happier.
cant wait that the official nix package gets updated so i can remove the overlay xD.
cant wait that the official nix package gets updated so i can remove the overlay xD.
racoonart
edit: and no, I won't switch to Win11 for as long as I can avoid it
edit2: I realized just now that win10 is no longer supported by sidefx. That's an odd choice frankly, and disappointing. There's still a 30% market share for 10 and lots of people (myself included) are stuck with it whether we like it or not, due to microslops stupid hardware requirements and the hardware prices being what they are.
Not supporting software that its developers have abandoned becouse it is old and outdated is not an odd choise, and neither is having hardware that is more secure for storing your passwords.
just use linux with x11. use a windowmanager like leftwm or a more normal desktop env that`s stil on x11.
"Not supporting software that its developers have abandoned because it is old and outdated is not an odd choise"
This same goes to X11 as well, that is also abandoned and not developing any more So we need proper and full Wayland support
Also windows is more add platform and data collection / spy tool then OS, especially for work, so it makes all sense in the world to get off it as soon as possible.
This same goes to X11 as well, that is also abandoned and not developing any more
So we need proper and full Wayland support Also windows is more add platform and data collection / spy tool then OS, especially for work, so it makes all sense in the world to get off it as soon as possible.