With the news from Friday that Fedora 25 will run Wayland by default I loaded up the current Fedora 25 development packages on a test system this weekend and I used that as my primary system for all of my business/production work this weekend. It went well and included are some early gaming benchmarks of Fedora 25 Workstation GNOME on Wayland and X.Org.

I spent Friday night loading up Fedora 25 on a test system for my weekend adventure with using its GNOME 3.21 development packages running directly atop Wayland as is the default. Like with previous versions of Fedora, it's easy to change to/from Wayland and X.Org via the log-in screen.

In the full two days of using the Fedora 25 development system, it's gone rather smoothly. My daily workflow was not interrupted, I did not run into a single crash, and at least for my usage I didn't encounter any shortcomings or areas where my Fedora experience was impaired at all. In fact, it felt just like using the traditional Fedora Workstation atop X.Org. As a note going along with the Wayland testing, I'm quite happy with how the GNOME 3.22 desktop is shaping up.

For some benchmarks of the current Fedora 25 state, I ran some tests when logged into GNOME on Wayland and then rebooting and logging into GNOME on X.Org. I ran a variety of benchmarks from this current Fedora 25 state, including some Steam Linux games on Fedora Wayland. Fedora 25 packages presently provide the Linux 4.8 Git kernel, Mesa 12.0.1, and with the latest packages is basically up to the GNOME 3.21.90 state.

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For my tests I was using a Core i5 6600K system with Skylake HD Graphics 530. Under both GNOME on Wayland/X.Org I ran it in an out-of-the-box configuration. I did attempt a second run of the GNOME on Wayland OpenGL tests when setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland, but the results had not changed at all for the sub-set of the games tested that were SDL2... As I haven't run any other Wayland tests recently, I'm not aware if anything has changed or simply the XWayland/Wayland performance is currently around a performance parity or what, but nevertheless the default performance results are quite good as benchmarked via the Phoronix Test Suite.