cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39342270
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
Wayland dragging Linux nerds kicking and screaming into the 21st century
As soon as I saw this i knew I had to go to the phoronix comments and bask in the shit flinging
Despite all its shortcomings, I do believe Wayland is the future. Sooner or later, all the funky decorative quirks will be some relics of the past.
Maybe someday, they will be added back, and we’ll once again have that jelly window effect, but at the moment, people actually depend on this thing to do some work, even more true with the Windows exodus.
I’d rather that they focus at the risk of being dull rather than fumbling on this chance.
Yes, I know that popularity isn’t everything, but considering how big they (and GNOME) are, they can really make The Year of Linux Desktop™.
Wobbly windows is back already, as is The Cube.
Hell yeah! Scratch that part about being dull and boring then!
yeah the wayland effects are way nicer than what was possible on x11.
Honestly for the best. X11 was great for what it was, but Wayland is the future. XWayland covers X11 apps that haven’t been ported yet.
Now I just wish Cinnamon would hurry up and move to fully default Wayland.
It may be the future, but it’s unusable for me.
I have a high dpi screen. Upscaling does not perfectly work for me in every program, but simply setting it to Full HD does work and looks fine.
However, when I set it to the lower resolution in Wayland, I have 50% of the display active with black bars all around.
So far, there seems to be no fix for this?
Same thing happens if you start older, lower resolution fullscreen apps (retro games and such).
Which desktop are you using? The high dpi experience is desktop dependent until every one supports fractional scaling
I tried it on KDE (or rather, it forced me to after it simply updated to Wayland by default). I tried to set it up correctly, but it just didn’t quite work.
I also need no fractional scaling, but some software does not honor that anyway (e.g. VST interfaces).
Simply reducing the resolution is a simple fix, also easier on the GPU, but Wayland will not fill the screen and intead just shows the tiny original 1:1 image in the middle.
Are you sure that’s not a monitor setting?
The KDE bug tracker now:
Apparently, this is hardly hyperbole. For example: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377162
Talk about arrogance. In the window paradigm, only a few desktops ever REQUIRED a similar look and feel for all windows. Apple was the worst offender for that. I suggest that if Edmundson wants a similar look and feel, he should go get himself a Mac and stop mucking up KDE.
From a quick look at the proposed patch - and obviously without having the full picture - it’s true that it would add some complexity. But it’s code for the sake of people’s convenience, not the other way around, right? IMHO, as long as:
- shading is off by default,
- users get a clear message about limitations and SSD/CSD complications before enabling it,
- the implementation doesn’t introduce impossible-to-maintain logic and limits some weird edge cases like resizing a shaded window, then it’s worth doing.
So there is no shading on KDE Wayland? This feature works in Labwc. Death by thousand papercuts…
I suppose not. Not yet.
I know people are particular about WMs, but having to minimize a window vs keeping the window decoration in place seems like a… very minor distinction.
Is the use case rearranging a ton of windows? Something like that?
If I have to cross reference info from two windows I like to have one floating and always on top. In that case its nice being able to roll-up the window to see whats behind it. Minimizing would be similar but it feels more permanent than rolling up.
RE: use case
It’s really nice to be able to see the whole titles. A vertical panel cuts off most text, so you just have a bunch of icons when you minimize. if multiple windows are from the same app it’s confusing.
If you use a horizontal panel you have a bit more room, but a significant amount of text is still cut off, and the panel fills up quickly.
Even with as few as 6 windows open (lets say two browser and three file manager, and a terminal) minimizing is a mess. I find it better to just leave the window bar somewhere visible and shade it, since i can read all the text on my window at a glance. Combined with “keep above others”, you can get a really nice way to quickly refrence something infrequently while you do most of your work in another window.
A more typical workflow for me is 1-4 windows of a pdf reader, 1-3 file manager windows, 1 browser window, and 1 terminal window. It’s just easier to keep it all organized with window shading.
I find it much faster than a bunch of alt-tabbing, or playing hide and seek with the panel just to get a specific two PDF windows up side by side for a second
Oops, thanks.
“For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session”
So happy to read this as there is always somebody still claiming that “Wayland does not work” and “nobody wants to switch to Wayland” just because they have not.
Also great to see that the plan is for Wayland on FreeBSD as well so the Open Source desktops can stay aligned. GNOME on FreeBSD is more problematic, not because of Wayland but because of Systemd.
The problem isn’t really with Wayland not working though, it’s with other software not being caught up to work fully with wayland.
For example, in X, I can have my single screen windows work laptop display to my multi-monitor linux machine with remmina and be able to interact with the laptop as if it had multiple monitors.
Remmina cannot do this with Wayland as far as I have been able to determine.
Clearly not the fault of Wayland, but also kind of a pain in the ass that there are issues like this since some other maintainers/devs haven’t implemented what is required in their software yet.
lol read a few comments down.
It’s a very Linux thing.
People get very particular about their setups.
It’s understandable on some level: if you’re suddenly no longer part of the majority tribe you know you’ll get fewer bug fixes and so on.
So bullying and FUDing people into staying with your tribe could pay off.
What I don’t get is how they don’t realize that they’ve lost. PulseAudio (through PipeWire) is here to stay. Systemd is here to stay. Wayland is here to stay.
Maybe they just like being contrarian if they can’t win.
The main thing is that pipewire is a drop-in replacement because of how it works, wayland isnt
xwayland makes things a near drop in replacement for wayland and people still complain.
What made you think that that’s a relevant answer?
I specifically said PULSEAUDIO is here to stay, you know, as opposed to manually managing a trillion ALSA devices.
Then I mentioned PipeWire to placate the nitpickers who would point out that PulseAudio (the implementation) isn’t actually around anymore, only the device management paradigm.
And somehow you honed into that word, completely ignored everything around it, and said some stuff that sounds vaguely related to the topic at hand, yet has no actual meaning.
Why?
I still have almost no idea what PulseAudio and PipeWire even do, aside from them being two of five(!) different audio-related subsystems that any given sound problem might be related to. (The others being OSS, ALSA, and JACK, which I also don’t understand.)
OK, let’s see if I remember well:
OSS is obsolete.
ALSA is a basic primitive way to do play audio streams integrated into the kernel.
PA is an abstraction on top of ALSA that helps with network stuff, per-application volume control, …
JACK is an alternative to ALSA/PA for low latency professional use cases: you can plumb it yourself, connect inputs/outputs, …
PW is an efficient implementation of both PA and JACK, which is better than the original PA in latency.
Well shit. I would like this better if more things played nicely with wayland, as wayland itself seems pretty great. Remmina for example can’t do multi-monitor outside of x for example and this is breaking for me when i remote into my work computer.
I realize that this is the fault of remmina and not wayland. Any RDP client recommendations that work on wayland for this?
I don’t think they’re removing XWayland. Just the X11 session option. You can still run legacy X11 apps in XWayland AFAIK.
I honestly don’t know a tonne about the topic. If you happen to know, what exactly is xwayland and how would I go about implementing it (on debian 13). Curious if it would have ramifications for my system for better or worse, might be interested in trying it out until other software can get caught up with wayland proper.
XWayland is the compatibility layer in Wayland to run X11 applications within Wayland. I’ve never had an issue with it on any application that still used X11 and it’s pre-installed, so you don’t have to do anything, if you’re running Wayland.
Ahh I see. Doesn’t quite solve all of my problems then, but at least it’s doing some heavy lifting already without me knowing. Thanks!
I’m curious… What problems are you referring to?
Primarily my aforementioned issue with Remmina not being able to span multiple monitors while running under wayland.
I think when I looked it up I saw the Remmina devs have been aware of this problem for a couple years now, but the problem is surprisingly difficult for them to fix for a few reasons I can’t recall at the moment.
RDP has been my biggest gripe moving to wayland for my workstations at work. I’ve done a ton of looking and found nothing that actually replaces the extremely mature RDP environment that X has. For the life of me I cant get the built in KDE remote desktop to work.
In the meantime since everyone is just moving forward with wayland without much for remote desktop support I just use a virtual X session over xrdp.
Try KRDC.
I did earlier and it bugged out for me for some reason and was unusable. Possibly a config problem, will try later on when I have a bit more time.
Damn. I guess it’s finally goodbye window shade or goodbye Plasma. I really wish they’d figured out a solution.
I get it though. The edge cases will never be fixed until devs know what they are, and GNOME proved this is an effective way to find out.
labwc has it :) I use it with XFCE, integration is pretty rough but will hopefully get there over time. No crashes so far!
I don’t even know what window shading is…. What is it?
It looks like it’s still being discussed:
The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:
allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.
It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.
It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.
And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.Thanks for the link! Heartening to know there are others that love this feature like i do
Wow!! What a news! :)
“KDE: We hate Unix.”
KDE:
“The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Xorg is a monolith with essentially one implementation. Wayland is a modular system with almost every component available from multiple sources.
Saying adopting Wayland means you “hate UNIX” is one of the least thoughtful arguments I can imagine.
If X11 is so good why is there no X12?
X11 is already perfect as it is. Everything left was fixed in the X11Rx releases.
One of the great aspects of Open Source is that you can continue to use any software you like for as long as you want. Enjoy Xorg (or your other favourite X11 server).
Of course, a majority of Xorg devs disagreed with you which is why they started Wayland to begin with. And a majority of desktop Linux users disagree with you now as three quarters of them have switched to Wayland.
Wayland offers a lot that X11 does not at this point. So, nobody is coming back. But if you are happy with X, stick with it.
You are going to lose access to a lot of apps though. There are very few Wayland only apps now but there are going to be many more in the coming years. And when toolkits like GTK5 go Wayland only, you may lose a some you already use.
But if you are happy with X, stick with it.
There is no Wayland on some of the systems I use.
Linux is not UNIX. And X isn’t part of POSIX.
Also, Wayland works on FreeBSD.
Linux is not UNIX. And X isn’t part of POSIX.
Please refrain from replying to things I haven’t said. None of your points invalidate mine.
So, you just decided to say “KDE: we hate Unix” for no reason whatsoever, because it has no relation to the OP at all?
It does have a relation. KDE worked just well on most Unices for decades. “Going all-in” on Wayland means that they’ll drop support for all operating systems except Linuces and FreeBSD. There are two explanations for that:
- They don’t care about (most of) Unix.
- They actively despise (most of) Unix.
I’m not quite sure where you’re misunderstanding me here. Care to elaborate?
I guess their mention that X isn’t part of POSIX very much applies, despite you being dismissive of it. This is an absurd take. Wayland can obviously be ported to whatever is still developed. It’s just software.
God dammit, everytime I have to use wayland I find something that I need to use which doesn’t work.
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11 and not pretend just showing a desktop is all it needs to do?
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11
Unfortunately there’s always devs that refuse to change so long as their setup still works, even if there’s significantly better alternatives. The only option for dealing with them is to rip off the bandaid. Either they’ll put in the work to keep up or they’ll fall into obscyrity
You’re so right:
- $thing isn’t perfectly complete so I won’t switch over my project
- but without your project, $thing can’t be perfectly complete
- idc lol
Do you have some examples? Most things I (and others) do are in the category “showing a desktop”, multiple desktops with different resolution / scaling / refresh rate, maybe opening a virtual monitor using krfb.
Wayland has been a complete game changer for me regarding performance and reliability (as soon as it hit a certain stability lol).
Yeah I second this. I’ve been on wayland for a few years now and while my needs are pretty standard I also regularly need slightly-off-the-beaten-path features. Not everything used to always work, but in the last, I want to say 18 months, I never found my needs lacking.
Multiple monitors work, adaptive sync works, mic / webcam works, screen / window sharing works, remote desktop and wayland forwarding works, etc.
That’s not to say everything is guaranteed to work all the time, but I am surprised to see people saying that even today they always find something fundamental that is broken when they attempt to switch.
Screen sharing is a great example. I used to have issues with it, but since about a year I’m able to share my screen in the MS teams PWA in Firefox and even the Discord flatpak without a hassle.
Yeah. In the first months, there were clipboard issues. Until 2 years or so ago for me, screen sharing wasn’t perfect.
I searched for or filed issues whenever I could, and there’s not a trace of a problem left.
I wonder if these people just complain on social media and give up immediately without informing anyone relevant and then feign surprise when shit’s not magically fixed later.
I use Talon voice. It’s software that let’s me use the pc still, due to write severe RSI.
However, Wayland doesn’t allow a lot of functionality that tools like this need.
Therefore, anyone who requires a tool similar to Talon, needs X11.
KDE is out.
2027/2032 is still some time away.
However, accessibility features provided by third-party applications may be worse in some aspects. Please open a bug report if you have any special requirements that we don’t cover yet! This is an active topic we’re very interested in improving.
Let them know what you need.
Wayland compositors lack the APIs necessary for Talon and Wayland support is not planned.
Sucks that they just claim that and give up instead of trying to work together with Wayland compositors to make this happen.
I don’t understand why they would drop you like this.
Because instead of just using a common well defined API, every developer is supposed to ”work together with Wayland compositors”, of which there are many, none of which are up to feature parity with X. Working together with the (at least) three major compositors is far top much work for most projects, if you can even get them on board.
Every compositor must reimplement everything previously covered by third party software, or at least define and reimplement APIs to cover that functionality. We have been screaming about this obvious design fuckup since Wayland was first introduced, but nooo, every frame is perfect.
Take a look at https://arcan-fe.com/ for what a properly architected display server could look like instead of the mess we currently have with Wayland. I’m holding off on moving to Wayland for many reasons, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Arcan becomes mature and fully usable before Wayland. If I get to place a bet on either on Wayland or a few guys in a basement with a proper architecture, I know what I’ll put my money on.
Yes, they were supposed to reach out at some point in the last 17 years, idk what to tell you.
Someone did it for them even: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blob/main/talon-requirements.md
That list is hilarious. I especially love how gnome just gives up on Wayland protocols and wants everyone to run a sidechannel over dbus instead.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I don’t get what you mean. Isn’t the list just a status quo and not how things are supposed to be forever? What’s “hilarious” about somebody painstakingly going through all the features and checking how close they are?
Like I wouldn’t put it past GNOME to give up on interoperability at the slightest inconvenience, but I don’t see that here?
TIL (Today I Learned)!
Yup.
X11 forwarding which I use extensively - I realize there’s waypipe which is supposed to allow you to do this, but I’ve not had a chance to test this yet as there’s always something else.
Remote desktop woes - Feels like a total crapshoot with this one, on a box I was experimenting with the build in RDP seemed to work ok, but being able to connect to the actual working desktop vs. start up a separate session that isn’t connected to the running desktop doesn’t seem to be a thing. aka, I could use x11vnc to connect to the running desktop or regular VNC to get a separate X session which wasn’t attached to the monitor and didn’t interfere with the desktop. There’s probably a way to get this working but it seems this is all built into KDE or Gnome now instead of being separate functionality. Tell me if there’s something I’m missing here.
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
OBS window capture - Just had this happen to me, went to update my streaming box and it swapped to wayland with no X11 option anymore, Ubuntu has completely dropped support, not even “you can install it yourself”. So the pipewire window capture is woefully lacking in features, I’m not sure it had the ability for me to crop the captured window at all, which I need to capture a pixel perfect section of the window to line up the control pixels in the stream exactly. But even if that feature was hidden and I was missing it, when it tried to capture the window for the serializer it was utterly munged, smeared and stretched and total trash. Regular OS windows captured ok, but the serializer, which is a unity app, was unusable. A full restore of the out of date OS was required to get things working again.
Yeah, I realize I’m using all the most esoteric features in the world, but that’s what makes X11 so damned functional, yeah it’s crufty and old and has issues, but damn if it doesn’t do all the things.
Edit: I’m sure if you just need it to do normal desktop things it works great.
Edit2: One more thing while everyone is going to be looking at this post, is there a way for me to set the display I want a window to show up on? I don’t mean multiple monitors, I mean like I can be ssh’d into a box and set my display variable to DISPLAY=“:0.0” and anything I run from that session with a GUI will show up on the main desktop display on the monitor, and if I have additional X sessions I can set it to :1.0 or whatever to have the window pop up on that one, does wayland have anything analogous to this where I can control where my windows appear from sessions not attached to the display manager at all?
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
Barrier has been unmaintained for a while now. The two active forks are deskflow (upstream) and input-leap. Deskflow has limited supported for Wayland. It seems that they’re working on resolving the remaining issues: https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/discussions/7499
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll check out deskflow!
Tablets and color calibration it seems https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide#1-wayland
I’m not the OP, but tbh the only thing that doesn’t work for me is the apps that replace your input by the same thing in another layout.
For example, you have 2 keyboard layouts, type something and realize afterwards that you forgot to change the keyboard layout. You press the hotkey to trigger a script that removes your input, translates it into a different keyboard layout and pastes it back.
People who only use 1 keyboard layout don’t even think about this issue and usually don’t know such software exists.
I miss it a lot. There’s 1 script that works in wayland but it’s pretty buggy and it’s not in arch repos, so I don’t trust it too much. X11 had many options.
that’s mainly because of Wayland’s security model I think, it’s trading a tiny bit of convenience for lots more security in terms of things like preventing easy keylogging.
You can still do keylogging in wayland but that has to be done at the compositor or evdev layer, which requires root access or control of the DE, which makes it more secure. I’m sure you could write something in C to do this though
It might be an annoyance for you and I get that, but your small annoyance improves security for lots more people than you realise. I’m sure you can adapt to not using the script though (I also use multiple layouts and I work fine without a script like this)
I get what you are saying and understand the balance between convenience and security, however most end users don’t care. Their thing stops working and they complain “Wayland bad, my workflow now broken!”, nothing you can do.
Right, but the point is that for most end users, their workflow isn’t broken.
Orca slicer, bambu studio
To be clear: that’s their issue.
Those work fine in Wayland for me.
At least Orca Slicer works fine for me in Wayland.
Those both work fine in Wayland.
As someone that is stuck with an Nvidia card rn, I’ve had a few applications just refuse to work with Nvidia and Wayland on KDE Neon. Maybe I just need to tinker more.
I have had a lot of luck forcing broken apps to use ZINK (Yes, you can do this on the nvidia propriety driver! Yes, it will use the proprietary vulkan driver as a backend.)
I have a 3060 12GB and have yet to run into something broken that I couldn’t get to work, although it is annoying that NVIDIA still can’t be fucked to have a driver that doesn’t reek.
yeah you sometimes need to force applications to run with xwayland, for qt apps I think you just assert the environmental variable:
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcbthat usually works for me
Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try!
TBH this is one reason I got off Ubuntu/KDE Neon.
It kept trying to roll Nvidia+KDE fixes forward (including one I dealt with in their bug tracker), which I had to manually figure out and maintain, which I kept breaking, so I finally decided “why don’t I just use a distro where everything Nvidia/KDE is up to date?”
Meanwhile, my OS switched to Wayland while updating at some point and I didn’t even notice.
Meanwhile, most Unices don’t even have Wayland.
“Most Unices” haven’t been relevant for a decade or more. At this point it’s really just Linux, OS X, Android (to the extent it counts as a Unix), and BSD as an also-ran. Obviously OS X and Android don’t care about Wayland or X11 to begin with, so all you’re really saying is that BSD is getting left behind.
Which isn’t true, at least one of them has Wayland support already, the rest is following suit.
My brother in arms, given Linux’s desktop market share (which is where KDE is used), Linux is the also-ran in your list. For the point I have made, however, market share is not really relevant. Unices don’t stop becoming Unix just because of how many people use them.
The point is, nobody gives a shit about Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc. anymore and your argument is stupid.
Every Unix or Unix-like OS that matters in 2025 is either switching from X11 to Wayland or never used X11 to begin with.
I think if you have some use-case that Wayland doesn’t fulfill, it’s totally fine to just pin some version of Plasma and stick with it. Maybe even switch to Trinity. Chances are it will keep working for like a decade or more.
I still use kdenlive 18.08, because I know how to use that version, and it does what I need it to do perfectly well. They broke something I needed in 19.whatever (I don’t remember what it was anymore), so I just pinned it and kept using it ever since. Maybe one day I’ll try to figure out the latest version, but there’s no real incentive for me to do so.
Yeah, you are right. Just a massive pain to deal with as things continue to diverge and I’m forced to deal with maintaining more and more custom solutions just to maintain functionality.
I want wayland to get there, just not seeing it yet.
You can always switch to Slackware Linux.
The current release doesn’t even include a Wayland session yet (nor systemd).
And judging by the project’s history, the next major release is likely going to drop in 10+ years.
