HN

Comments (130)

• Menu

  ndiddy
  I think the KDE developers in particular have done a great job of pushing Wayland forward and getting features that people want and need added as new protocols. KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11, and by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland so I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage.> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
• Menu

  suby
  I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution.The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland.I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work.For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem.I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.
• Menu

  senfiaj
  What's sad is that after many years Wayland still lacks several things/features that X11 has/allows. Some of them are intentionally not implemented because of security paranoia. For example, Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top. If I had a lot of time I could list how Wayland breaks many applications.Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
• HiPhish
  I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo.The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell.[1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/
• Menu

  pseudalopex
  Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues[1]No ability to save and restore positions of native Wayland windowsReal-fake-session-restored apps don't remember which virtual desktop their windows were onNo full-screen aspect ratio correction"Spare Layouts" feature not implemented"Per-application Keyboard Layout" does not workNo way to change the gamma or manually adjust the colors without generating or finding an appropriate ICC profileCan't switch between multiple touch strip modesNo headless RDPOpening files using command-line binaries in Konsole doesn't raise existing windowsGlobal Menu is not supported for non-Qt appsSome apps' non-maximizable windows are broken with placement policy set as maximized[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...
• Menu

  aidenn0
  Anyone on the most recent LTS Kernel (6.18) with an older nvidia GPU will not have a good experience on Wayland. I have two machines with Pascal GPUs and:- The nvidia binary driver is shit with Wayland- The nvidia OSS driver does not support Pascal GPUs.- Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly.You can get a stable system either by using the latest kernel+nouveau or: MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=kms_swrast but performance is rather abysmal.
• Menu

  Postosuchus
  As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of.In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.
• Menu

  alyandon
  I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11.I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.
• oofbaroomf
  Wayland is great and I generally prefer it, but it's worth keeping X around for KDE Plasma I think. Things like remote desktop are nicer on X, X is much easier to use on Android compared to Wayland, etc.
• Menu

  MBCook
  > Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations [sic], and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
• Menu

  brooke2k
  in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.
• janice1999
  A huge thank you to the KDE team. Plasma is good (finally) on Wayland for me (AMD graphics, single hi-dpi screen). I finally switched over from GNOME and I am happy with the experience.
• Menu

  skeledrew
  I've been using Kubuntu for the past 12 years without any X-related issue, and have and am actively working on stuff that requires it. I guess it's time to switch to another DE.
• Menu

  bluGill
  The only downside is several of the *BSDs don't have wayland. Not all the world is linux and sometimes that is a good thing to encourage.
• NoboruWataya
  Slight tangent but has anyone moved from AwesomeWM to a Wayland-based tiling WM? Interested to hear what people chose. I tried Sway for a bit and while it's not bad by any means it's a bit too unlike what I'm used to. SomeWM is an attempt at "porting" AwesomeWM to Wayland and looks very promising but not quite there yet (I couldn't get Vicious widgets working and not sure if supporting them is even a goal).I'm still on AwesomeWM for now because I have no real reason to incur the pain of switching, but still curious to know what path others are taking.
• bjoli
  Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.
• Menu

  mug1
  I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps
• Menu

  feverzsj
  How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?
• self_awareness
  RIP Linux Desktop
• Menu

  mvdtnz
  I can't be the only long time Linux use who still has no real idea what X11 or Wayland are. Except that sometimes software won't work properly with one or the other and I need to paste some arcane command to fix it.
• Menu

  superkuh
  This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support.I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.
• gjvc
  until the next one
• calvinmorrison
  "We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. "What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
• calvinmorrison
  Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity.Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
• rid
  My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily.KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable.I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.
• startpage_com
  So long KDE. Xlibre for life.
• jccx70
  [dead]
• Menu

  shevy-java
  Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11.Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.