Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/596/

by jandeboevrie • 2 months ago

238 378 2 months ago

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk

ndiddy2• 2 months ago

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.

igor47• 2 months ago

Yeah agreed. I switched to kde from gnome a few months back, and it's amazing how much better it's been in a thousand little ways.

LtWorf11• 2 months ago

I mean… gnome has always been worse quality than KDE. I'd say even when the awful KDE4 came out was still better than Gnome3

bityard• 2 months ago

When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years.

Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine.

Good job, KDE team.

ahartmetz5• 2 months ago

I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.

fhars• 2 months ago

On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.

pmontra2• 2 months ago

For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.

hgoel• 2 months ago

I recently installed Kubuntu 26.XX on my desktop, was worried about having to use workarounds and giving up on fractional scaling to use it with my NVIDIA gpus (previously had to do this), but was also pretty surprised that it has been smooth sailing.

shevy-java3• 2 months ago

KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11

Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less?

by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland

Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared?

I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage

Why is this contradicting what others report then?

I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.

David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :)

Though, I am hardly the first with that either:

https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...

Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like?

Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from last year:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell....

bluGill3• 2 months ago

Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this.

That is because people who don't have a problem don't think about this and so don't comment. Many wayland users don't know. I think I switched this machine I'm using now to wayland a while ago but I don't remember, and maybe it switched back in an update and I didn't notice (which is the point, I know I switched at some point and I couldn't tell the difference - which is how it should be)

Zardoz845• 2 months ago

Perhaps the Wayland code path does not have to do thousands of workarounds with an ancient API made thinking on remote graphical terminals.

DonHopkins2• 2 months ago

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

account4225• 2 months ago

Yeah, I'm not optimistic about KDE's future with recent attitudes from them.

LtWorf11• 2 months ago

I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage.

I use it on a touchscreen and the on-screen-keyboard crashes several times a day.

I would not say it's fully ready.

feverzsj2• 2 months ago

How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?

ijustlovemath• 2 months ago

Probably with Special Window Settings (right click top bar of your mpv window)

krs_3• 2 months ago

qimgv uses libmpv for video playback support for example. I'm guessing that's not what you mean, but I'm struggling to think of how one might "embed" one application inside of another on xorg.

feverzsj2• 2 months ago

x11 supports foreign window embedding. You can embed window from other application into your own window. That's why lots of mpv/vlc based players/editors don't work probably on wayland. The only way to achieve this on wayland is writing a custom compositor for the foreign window.

magicalhippo• 2 months ago

On Windows it's trivial, just reparent[1] the main window of the subprocess to a window in your process. Technically you should clear a couple of window flags as well, but that's trivial too.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...

startpage_com• 2 months ago

So long KDE. Xlibre for life.

calvinmorrison4• 2 months ago

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.

pmdr• 2 months ago

KDE 3.5.x really was peak desktop at the time, especially when all the K* apps were working as intended. As a Windows user discovering Slackware 10.2 back 2005, I was really blown away. KDE 4 just didn't feel the same.

calvinmorrison4• 2 months ago

One thing in watching the 30 years of KDE talk is the DE-emphasis on apps. The whole thing got to big so it went from SC4 or whaetver into different strains. Modularized, etc. About then serious desktop apps seemed to have died off too

I guess one cares less about DE's when my DE is a front for a terminal and a VM (my browser).

It's sad to see sidelining of KOffice, Konqueror (of course still exists), Amarok and other great apps.

A desktop environemnt is not just a WM + Panel + Decorations.

KDE3.5x has is own... well everything tied together.

therealrootuser• 2 months ago

Sorry to be dense. What does this have to do with Red Hat?

calvinmorrison4• 2 months ago

redhat, the NWO funders of many projects under the guise of freedom

shevy-java3• 2 months ago

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.

segbrk• 2 months ago

Funny, my impression of KDE in the 3 and 4 eras was “Wow, this is shiny and sleek— oh, and it crashed. Nevermind.” Nowadays there is nothing I would recommend more to the average user who just wants something normal that works. It just works. What you’re saying just sounds like a pointlessly personal and ideological attack. Against a piece of software. Why?

ahartmetz5• 2 months ago

I don't really like Systemd neither - but Wayland and Systemd are pretty much opposites of each other. Systemd does (too) many things, many of them badly. Wayland does well what it does, but it (still!) does too little. Wayland is adding features and is pretty close to doing "everything necessary". Systemd keeps accreting worse replacements for existing services.

josephcsible2• 2 months ago

They're similar in that they're both new things that are worse than what they're meant to replace.

account4225• 2 months ago

Its similar in that Wayland assumes responsibility for all interactions between programs instead of providing unrestricted interfaces that can be used to implement accessibility, automation and whatever other tools people can think of. It's the systemD way or the highway and it's the wayland way or the highway. But yes the situation is also different in that there is one SystemD but many little incompatible wayland compositors.

vkazanov• 2 months ago

I dont know when where these "good old days" but in 2000s KDE was superunstable. It seemed to have all the cool UI tweaks but 30% of them barely worked.

Modern KDE is nothing like that, and i cannot see how this is a bad thing.

tuna747• 2 months ago

More and more Free SW will depend on Systemd (like next gen flatpak). Make something better or adapt.

account4225• 2 months ago

No, I will use software that respects me instead of software that makes demands of me.

okanat• 2 months ago

David is the definition of old-school KDE developer. Do you know how far back his commits go? I remember his name from my first rodeos with KDE when I was a teenager. He was blogging about KDE in 2009 FFS: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/2009/09/

account4225• 2 months ago

2009 was already after KDE 4 which many agree is the point when things started going to shit.

senfiaj6• 2 months ago

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.

laszlokorte• 2 months ago

I know nothing about the detailed technical differences between X11 and Wayland but with Hyprland for me the PIP is working as expected so I assume its not just a Wayland issue but specific to the window manager you are using? Maybe somebody else can explain?

tambre• 2 months ago

Gnome has a "Always on Top" toggle for each window. I imagine there's a protocol for an application to set it by default but the OP's window manager might not implement it or there might be an incompatibility.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 months ago

Isn't that usually how it goes? Wayland is a million little optional protocols, which in the abstract is a lovely idea but in practice means which things work depends on which grab-bag of features your compositor supports.

senfiaj6• 2 months ago

As far as I know, there are multiple Wayland implementations. Which is also not good because it creates fragmentation and potential inconsistencies (some subtle differences in behavior, differences in bugs, etc). Maybe Hyprland solves the issue, but I don't want to use this DE just because it solves this particular issue. I have tons of other needs and preferences.

moritzruth2• 2 months ago

I think in Hyprland it just works because floating windows stay on top by definition.

aquova• 2 months ago

I can't speak for Chrome, but I can right click a Firefox picture-in-picture window, tell it to remain on top, and it does, no problem. I've been using Plasma Wayland for years now and this has worked for ages

blendergeek2• 2 months ago

The issue is you have to do that every single time. On X11, they remain on top by default

csr86• 2 months ago

I fixed this like this:

1. Right click PIP window 2. More Actions -> Configure special window settings 3. Add property -> Layer Force Popup

After this it spawned always in middle, I also added property Position Remember, so it spawns where it was previously. I have no idea if this is the best way to fix but worked for me.

ndiddy2• 2 months ago

If you use KDE, you can work around this because of the powerful feature set the window manager has for setting custom window behavior.

1. Right click the PIP window and then click "More Actions-> Special Window Settings".

2. On the window that pops up, click "Add Property", and add "Window title". Change the drop-down from "Unimportant" to "Exact match" (this works on Firefox because the window title is always "Picture-in-Picture", you might have to do something slightly different on Chrome if it does something different).

3. Click "Add Property" again, add "Keep above other windows", change the drop-down to "Force", and change the radio button to "Yes".

4. From now on, all PIP windows will show up on top of other windows.

It would definitely be nicer if there was some sort of "always on top" permission that applications could request, but it's not too bad.

TiredOfLife3• 2 months ago

For Chrome it's "Picture in picture"

idoubtit• 2 months ago

Not too bad? A hidden procedure with ten clicks, which the user has to repeat for each web browser. And it may break at any time if the browser changes some details. Or if KDE changes. And it's specific to KDE, with no alternatives in most Wayland WMs.

All that for _one_ feature which works out-of-the-box with Xorg, and which Wayland removed for security reasons. From what I've seen, sharing the screen is another common feature which was broken with Wayland and is still painful.

I don't think Wayland's security model is very relevant to me since I have faith in Debian for filtering out rogue applications. So I have to reason to drop my smooth UX for a world of "not too bad" workarounds.

boca_honey• 2 months ago

Wow, I guess Linux is only free if you don't value your time.

mixmastamyk2• 2 months ago

I tried this for getting windows to open where I want them instead of the center of the screen. Couldn't figure it out in five minutes. Though I'll probably try again, this shouldn't be a problem.

extraduder_ire• 2 months ago

One difference I notice in x11 gnome vs wayland gnome is firefox's PIP window is always on top on x11 even if I deselect "Always on top" (super + right click menu) in wayland that works fine and is even always on top by default.

I much prefer the latter, especially since I get the choice.

MegaDeKay3• 2 months ago

I have a virtual pinball cab with two (and soon) three displays. Wayland really makes life difficult here because the software needs to always put the playfield on one display, the backglass on another, and the "dot matrix display" window on a third. That's a big no-no with Wayland. Fortunately KDE has window rules as a workaround. Sway and Hyprland allow similar rules. Mutter on Gnome has no equivalent.

I'm guessing this would mess up other games as well, like multi-screen flight simulators or driving games. It would be really nice if user-trusted apps could be granted permissions on an app-by-app basis to allow absolute placement of windows for these cases instead of making us jump through hoops.

senfiaj6• 2 months ago

Yes, exactly. This security paranoia makes the devs' lives much more complicated. I have seen many apps turning off advanced features, such as screen color pickers. Automatation tools can be broken. Apps cant know their window positions, etc. You can see countless dev rants about Wayland and how it's generally unpleasant experience to work with.

kmeisthax• 2 months ago

Ironically, the use case you described is exactly the sort of thing Wayland really excels at - if you're willing to write your own compositor. There's plenty of embedded devices that ship with an extremely simple Wayland compositor that does exactly this. It opens up one app, accepts as many windows from that app as it has displays, and renders one window per display. That's that. There's no super-secret desktop that could wind up accidentally displaying if the app crashes or gets its window accidentally moved about, because there's no desktop and no moving any of the windows. You just take output from an app and put that on the display, then send input back to it.

kelnos4• 2 months ago

That's strange; you should be able to do that with the standard xdg-shell protocol, though I suppose it depends on the app's behavior. The app can tell the compositor which output to fullscreen each window on.

Alternately, if it's using layer-shell windows, those can also be pinned to a specific output.

If it's not layer-shell, and the windows aren't fullscreen, then yes... it's annoying. The xdg-session-management protocol will likely fix that in this particular case (at the expense of having to manually place the windows in the right places once, and then it can remember in the future), but that protocol has just recently been stabilized and of course no one supports it yet.

It's all so frustrating watching the Wayland folks reinvent everything, poorly, and after more than 10 years it's still not there yet.

branon• 2 months ago

Ah, for some reason I figured this was a minor bug that'd be fixed eventually. Wayland windows are never allowed to spawn always-on-top? Sort of lame.

If the logic is that it's the window manager's job to set window rules for this, fine, but in that case Plasma should probably ship with preconfigured rules matching the Chrome/Firefox PiP window.

I also find the lack of an Xlib-compatible macro API disruptive but I usually run an X11 session inside Xvnc for this purpose anyway.

Zardoz845• 2 months ago

Strange... with Firefox in KDE/Plasma just works.

krs_3• 2 months ago

I definitely have to right click on the window in the taskbar and select Always Keep On Top with Firefox on Plasma Wayland. Not too big a deal but would be nice if it was something Firefox could just set on its own.

babypuncher3• 2 months ago

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.

Wayland doesn't allow apps to force themselves to be always on top. I would argue that it is up to the window manager to provide this functionality at the discretion of the user. Kwin does this.

account4225• 2 months ago

I would argue that software that I choose to install already has my discretion and should not be limited by the windowing system in what it can do.

jimmaswell• 2 months ago

Isn't it also impossible to spawn a window in the last place it was open (or any arbitrary point) because you're not allowed to know or change where your window is by design? Nonsense like that makes me dread having to eventually use it.

ranger_danger• 2 months ago

They "fixed" that by implementing multiple conflicting and optional experimental extensions that may or may not randomly be supported by your particular WM/DE, and may or may not be DE-specific protocols in the first place.

https://wayland.app/protocols/

killerstorm• 2 months ago

There is some resource leak in Chrome / Wayland combo, I mysteriously run out of memory after few days of keeping several Chrome windows. On X11 Chrome can keep going pretty much indefinitely

foresto3• 2 months ago

My Wayland pet peeve:

It still lacks keyboard LED control, so unprivileged X11 programs that use the Scroll Lock light as an indicator cannot be ported to Wayland.

This Plasma change is going to be painful for me. I wonder if there's an up-to-date list of Wayland shortcomings.

teo_zero3• 2 months ago

unprivileged X11 programs that use the Scroll Lock light as an indicator

I didn't know such apps existed! What do they use it for?

redeeman7• 2 months ago

assign yourself permission to the device(may or may not happen by default depending on your distribution), and you can actuate it in /sys/class/leds/inputXX::scrolllock/brightness.

probably also exists other tools to do it. this is then generic linux LED framework

teo_zero3• 2 months ago

doesn't allow windows to stay on top.

Are you sure that windows that, without your consent, are allowed to stay on top and grab your input are a good idea? And spawned by Chrome? As if we hadn't already enough ad-ware, click-harvesters, and spoofed dialogs popping up everywhere!

I know there is a couple of legitimate uses for this, but the ways it can be abused are vastly more.

I think the sensitive default should be to block it, and allowing it should be behind some user's conscious action. Yes, it adds some friction to some workflows and it takes a bit to get accustomed to. But it doesn't deserve the label "security paranoia".

account4225• 2 months ago

Are you aware that if software misuses the capabilities its given by the system you can choose to stop using that software?

throwaway7356• 2 months ago

Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top

I use Wayland and it has a "stay on top" option for windows.

calvinmorrison4• 2 months ago

"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?

account4225• 2 months ago

You will install the update and you will like it (or be banned).

mug1• 2 months ago

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

ahartmetz5• 2 months ago

Crash reports are only mentioned as confirmation of other statistics, and in any case, the vast majority of crashes have nothing to do with the window system used.

account4225• 2 months ago

The other "stats" being "all my buddies use Wayland".

MBCook4• 2 months ago

How do you get that?

They showed the statistics based on their telemetry tools and said they match crash data.

Not that it was 100% from crashes.

Also the fact they can tell which one is in use does not mean that’s the reason it crashed. It could be crashes due to bad network handling or file corruption or something that has nothing to do with the GUI.

tosti5• 2 months ago

Linux users are more likely not to opt-in and actively opt-out of spyware, telemetry, or whatever you want to call it.

The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to privacy cincious people. There was a study that backs up this claim, but I'm not google.

OTOH, xfce is doing fine.

nickserv2• 2 months ago

Linux are also more likely to contribute bug reports and crash dumps.

Security conscious doesn't mean not getting involved with the community and helping useful projects.

mcosta• 2 months ago

privacy concious people use wayland

akimbostrawman3• 2 months ago

Since KDE telemetry is privacy conscious too, I as a privacy conscious linux user see little issue with enabling it.

superkuh3• 2 months ago

And the statistics are only from the latest release, not over all KDE users. They mention this in the text but the disengenuous plot is what people see.

For transparency, the one caveat in all of the above is that I've deliberately always focused on people using the latest Plasma release. We do still have a sizable chunk of users on X11 still using Plasma 5.27. Including them, the total Wayland adoption rate is about 76%.

account4225• 2 months ago

Yeah, and considering how KDE developers have been introducing bugs for X11 as their main strategy for Wayland to reach feature parity I expect many X11 users are holding out upgrades as long as possible.

alyandon3• 2 months ago

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.

exe344• 2 months ago

Thank goodness I never jumped back on the KDE bandwagon once KDE4 stopped sucking donkey balls. I just went with xmonad and the few apps I actually use.

moritzruth2• 2 months ago

When was the last time you tried? What compositor?

alyandon3• 2 months ago

I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system.

What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides?

Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.

bitwize2• 2 months ago

Well, there's SonicDE, but like many such projects it's probably maintained by reactionaries which introduces its own suite of issues around security, code quality, and "will this be maintained in a year, 5 years?"

bsammon• 2 months ago

Is that "reactionaries" in the "we object to certain technology decisions" sense, like the anti-systemd crowd, or in the "software compatible with our political views" like the xlibre project?

A quick search (in which I found no evidence of heated controversy) suggests to me that it's the first one.

MegaDeKay3• 2 months ago

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.

The risk in that in this age of AI-assisted bughunting, X11 security vulnerabilities are more numerous and as nasty as they've ever been. And that says a lot.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTU1NzA

https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-9-Vulnerabilities-AI

alyandon3• 2 months ago

I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.

account4225• 2 months ago

X11 is not and has never been a security boundary.

throwawee• 2 months ago

I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.

solumunus• 2 months ago

Still no support for high resolution monitors though?

skeledrew• 2 months ago

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.

exe344• 2 months ago

try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!

zubspace2• 2 months ago

Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....

bluGill3• 2 months ago

Most people are not you. A small minority do things that really need X. However there is good reason to say that the things that really need X are things you shouldn't do anyway.

Meanwhile there is a slightly larger minority that need things that cannot be done in X.

For the vast majority of people they cannot tell the difference, either works just fine. If there are issues they are tiny things they don't notice until somebody points it out - and then they forget in a few days.

krieger_857• 2 months ago

(?) they didn't say otherwise

j1elo• 2 months ago

the things that really need X are things you shouldn't do anyway.

I had just finished reading the link in the first post and, frankly, I'm grateful for.the insight it gives. I think we all should have more perspective than what we have around things that we take for granted. Wayland itself would be better if its own devs had done the same.

https://nocoffei.com/?p=451

LtWorf11• 2 months ago

Meanwhile there is a slightly larger minority that need things that cannot be done in X.

List of things that cannot be done in X:

MBCook4• 2 months ago

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.

fishgoesblub• 2 months ago

They're still trying to figure that one out themselves.

MBCook4• 2 months ago

I’m not surprised they’re not nailed down. But I’d appreciate seeing a “we’re looking at X or Y or if Z is now possible” kind of thing.

The maintenance and performance stuff is good, but it’s not exactly end user stuff. Yeah you benefit but it’s less obvious.

I don’t follow this stuff closely so personally I have no idea what kind of Wayland only features could exist that couldn’t before.

bigyabai• 2 months ago

One nice feature is trackpad gestures. x11's trackpad gestures are awful, but on Wayland you can have the 1:1 multitouch that everyone loves.

jebenesty• 2 months ago

Did you really just [sic] a British guy using British spelling?

MBCook4• 2 months ago

Is that a British spelling? Oops.

Honestly my computer gave it a red underline so I decided to do that. I didn’t think about it harder than that.

If I recognized it like “colour” I wouldn’t have.

Tade0• 2 months ago

HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.

krs_3• 2 months ago

That already works with Plasma Wayland. It's still a bit finicky to make it work with things running in XWayland (Windows games primarily) but it's getting better.

ChocolateGod3• 2 months ago

I wouldn't say its "plain impossible" with X11, but its significantly easier on Wayland because its a far simpler design that aligns better with the graphics hardware, we're sending surfaces (or pointers to them) with metadata to the compositor, not drawing APIs.

chadgpt37• 2 months ago

Which is odd, because X11 has all this visual and depth stuff leftover from the days of 1/4/8/16-bit displays, and mixing windows of each type on the same screen. You would expect it to be capable of representing 48 bits just as well.

janice1999• 2 months ago

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.

superkuh3• 2 months ago

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.

creesch• 2 months ago

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

Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago.

I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time.

Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes.

There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each.

I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.

novafunc• 2 months ago

here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland

I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight

superkuh3• 2 months ago

That is good to hear. But the third post down on acidiclight's mastodon page is a link to another user's blog post:

As a KWin developer and KDE's accessibility engineer... https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 This is a problem. We need to solve it. Fast.

And this is a quote from the page intro,

As the Linux Desktop transitions to a Wayland-only future, I will be locked out of my computer, as the accessibility software I rely on is left behind. The desktop environment I use, KDE Plasma, has announced that in early 2027, X11 support will be removed from the system. That means in about roughly 9 months, I will no longer be welcome on that desktop environment, being forced to cling to an older version or switch to a more niche environment that still supports it.

The problems described therein haven't been fixed. And mclassen's (of gtk) comments on the fedora bug tracker make it clear that even if KDE tries to implement GNOME's new AccessKit it still won't solve the problems. mclassen seems to think the people asking for things like getting and setting cursor position are just sealioning "accessibility maximalists". The core idea of his argument argument is valid, you can't get it working all at once and progress is incremental. But if that's true then don't remove X11 support that works while the waylands are still progressing towards working.

bluGill3• 2 months ago

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.

ChocolateGod3• 2 months ago

There's nothing about Wayland that ties it to Linux. Wayland compositors tend to require a few features exposed by the graphics drivers (e.g. DRM) but there's nothing stopping the BSDS adding these (iirc FreeBSD already does).

dark-star3• 2 months ago

at least FreeBSD does already have Wayland. It has a few more hiccups and rough edges than on Linux (at least from my PoV on running it on an older laptop) but otherwise it works fine.

Here is a short setup guide on how to get it working rather nicely: https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/

qweqwe142• 2 months ago

You wouldn't pick BSDs for a desktop anyway, assuming you want a working system and don't want to use Windows/macOS.

Now the concept of a "working system" can be a bit hard to grasp for some people, so let me put it this way: There are vastly more things that normal people do on their computer that work on Linux than on BSDs.

suby3• 2 months ago

I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451

It 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.

nvme0n1p1• 2 months ago

I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE.

Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant.

My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life.

Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now.

I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?

suby3• 2 months ago

I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users.

He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me.

Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland.

I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.

tuna747• 2 months ago

"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."

I think that is the only way forward. There is no "Linux desktop". There is KDE, Gnome etc. and if you want to do "system utilities" you have to target one of those.

setopt3• 2 months ago

The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.

kelnos4• 2 months ago

No, that's a terrible idea. The right thing to do is design a Wayland protocol that gives you the access you need, get it accepted into wayland-protocols, and wait for all the compositors to implement it.

Yes, that's a slow, annoying process, but doing something bespoke means either you do the same work over and over for every compositor, or you only support one or two compositors. Neither of those is a good result.

cwillu2• 2 months ago

Screentearing has been solved on x11 for a decade; if nvidia don't support TearFree in the driver, that's an nvidia issue, not an X11 issue.

amlib• 2 months ago

Until you connect a second monitor.

cmxch• 2 months ago

It’ll be a better place when Wayland (and by extension Gnome/KDE) stops becoming a cargo cult hell bent on destroying X11/Xlibre.

bayindirh3• 2 months ago

X11 is not dying because of Wayland, it's dying because it became an unmaintainable code mountain over the years since it has been tried to be converted to something which is not designed for in the first place.

...and I'm saying that as a person who likes X11.

account4225• 2 months ago

It's not just accessibility software but really any customization. Like always the people making the decision to break compatibility and benefiting by being able to work on the cool new thing don't even pay a fraction of the pain inflicted by it.

chadgpt37• 2 months ago

The web solved this decades ago by removing customizability. That's why all your extensions can do is add context menu items and toolbar buttons at the right side, and mess with the page itself.

rid• 2 months ago

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.

gjvc• 2 months ago

until the next one

bjoli• 2 months ago

Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.

SuperNinKenDo• 2 months ago

Same. Given that no Wayland compositors implement it, or anything like it, and from some of my surface level reading about how compositors work, I get the impression Wayland is particularly ill-suited for this feature. I don't understand enough to understand exactly why, or why a new Wayland "protocol" would be required, though that seemed to be the answer. I hate not having this feature, it makes me feel trapped in an entire desktop paradigm I don't desire to be locked into.

mvdtnz• 2 months ago

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.

mixmastamyk2• 2 months ago

It's what puts graphics on the screen. If you are not interested in hacking or developing it, there's not much else to know except X11 is deprecated and Wayland is not finished, leading to this suboptimal situation.

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

Yep and Xwayland is an X server that runs under Wayland and provides compatibility for native X11 applications, which don't natively run under Wayland.

l724• 2 months ago

I think it is amazing that Linux has reached such an audience that the knowledge of what windowing or desktop system being used is unknown.

But at the same time it makes me a little sad. Part of the draw of Linux was being able to understand what was under the hood and how to bend it to your will.

I’m hope the community doesn’t lose sight of that in trying to gain new users.

People often talk about the year of Linux or what success is, and in my opinion, Linux had achieved success by 1996.

Trying to pull a casual user from windows or Mac OS is a worthy goal, but that shouldn’t be the end all be all metric.

brooke2k• 2 months ago

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.

Eduard• 2 months ago

can you give examples of games not working?

what about emulation / virtual machines?

doublepg232• 2 months ago

I was under the impression that the Steam Deck runs under KDE Wayland? I wasn't aware of it having video game support challenges due to Wayland.

mhitza• 2 months ago

SteamOS recently shipped KDE with Wayland by default (for desktop mode).

They have their own custom compositor for handheld-mode, named gamescope. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-fil... XWayland based.

bigstrat2003• 2 months ago

I can't say I've run into issues running games under XWayland, but I have only been using the Wayland session for a couple of weeks now. The blocker for me was Discord (you wouldn't get messages on your phone if you were afk because the idle detection didn't work in Wayland), but the devs there seem to have finally fixed it.

dark-star3• 2 months ago

funny you say that, given that the SteamDeck (the largest/most popular Linux-based gaming console) runs on KDE on Wayland.....

elxr• 2 months ago

Can you give examples?

tmtvl3• 2 months ago

As someone who likes games from various periods (from Ultima IV to WH40K: Rogue Trader), I haven't ran into many games which do work on X11 and don't work on Wayland. Though I don't really have any of the old Loki games (I believe there was a port of Unreal Tournament?), so I might be missing out on the specific games which really lean into certain X11 features which XWayland doesn't support well.

quasigod• 2 months ago

I'm very surprised to hear that. Ive seen some issues with apps using Xwayland, mostly scaling related. I dont recall ever seeing an issue with a game running on Xwayland. Its also how the Steam Deck runs all games.

nickserv2• 2 months ago

You can try running in gamescope, although in my experience Wayland has not been an issue. The few games I have that gave me problems in Wine didn't work any better when using an X11 session.

TiredOfLife3• 2 months ago

SteamOS, and majority of the big gaming Linux distros like CachyOS and Bazzite default to wayland

redeeman7• 2 months ago

everything I have on steam works fine with xwayland

NoboruWataya3• 2 months ago

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.

Elv13• 2 months ago

(one of AwesomeWM core dev here)

Vicious is getting quite old. We put tons of effort in AwesomeWM to be perfectly backward compatible all the way back to the 3.5.0 API (ok, 4.0 had documented breaking changes, but still had compat code to minimize the porting work), like bug-compatible level using a **ton of `if` in the code. I really can't blame any effort to implement wayland to nuke that compat code mess when it blocks them. The older Vicious most people use is also using blocking code in the main thread, it it locks the entire WM when its calling a shell command. AwesomeWM had async APIs for that kind of stuff for a decade now. IMHO, using some LLM call to port the widget to use the declarative widget API, which AFAIK SomeWM supports, is probably worth it for performance alone, even if you keep using AwesomeWM.

NoboruWataya3• 2 months ago

Yes, when looking into it I realised how dated Vicious is these days. It goes to show how long I've been using AwesomeWM I guess because I think it was the shiny new(ish) thing when I first started using it. It doesn't seem like the functionality I want would be that difficult to replicate without it (famous last words) so I may just do that.

Thanks for all your work on AwesomeWM - whether I keep using it or not it has been a great experience!

JNRowe2• 2 months ago

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.

NoboruWataya3• 2 months ago

I had seen river but for some reason didn't look too much into it. I think it's because at first glance it looks like a protocol that you can build a WM on, rather than a WM itself, but I guess it's probably easy to build your own tooling over it (a lot easier than "building your own WM" in the traditional sense)?

I'll give it a look - thanks!

trip-zip• 2 months ago

not sure if supporting them is even a goal

Technically, it is a goal, though perhaps an optimistic one.

I won't support vicious widgets in the 2.x releases, but I should definitely add support for it in the release/1.4 branch that follows AwesomeWM master/4.4. Not that I think vicious widgets are the best, but technically if it runs on AwesomeWM, I should support it in 1.4.

I created an issue (https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm/issues/599), even if you decide not to use SomeWM. Thanks for trying it out.

Postosuchus2• 2 months ago

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.

outofpaper• 2 months ago

Time to fork and move on...

doublepg232• 2 months ago

a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means

They started doing that in early 2024 with the release of KDE 6.0 by enabling KDE Wayland by default. The Wayland-only change won't happen til 6.8 which will be an early 2027 release.

https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayla...

And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.

Yes, that's the current step they'll be at with 6.8.

Postosuchus2• 2 months ago

I was not aware of that and literally read into this particular article. Thanks for clarifying!

wizzledonker• 2 months ago

That is quite literally exactly what they have done

kelnos4• 2 months ago

The problem with that strategy when it comes to desktop software is there's no way for the developer to know what the user has done (unless the software phones home, which is a no-no when it comes to privacy-respecting open source software).

If it's a SaaS API or a web application, the developers can look at access logs or analytics to determine what endpoints and features are being used, and when users need to go back to the deprecated interfaces to get what they want.

There's no way for a KDE developer to learn "$NUMBER users went back to X11 because $FEATURE is missing in the Wayland version".

(Of course they can ask their users, or hope that users file issues on the bug tracker, but things will definitely fall through the cracks via these imperfect communication channels.)

oofbaroomf• 2 months ago

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.

pseudalopex3• 2 months ago

Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues[1]

No ability to save and restore positions of native Wayland windows

Real-fake-session-restored apps don't remember which virtual desktop their windows were on

No full-screen aspect ratio correction

"Spare Layouts" feature not implemented

"Per-application Keyboard Layout" does not work

No way to change the gamma or manually adjust the colors without generating or finding an appropriate ICC profile

Can't switch between multiple touch strip modes

No headless RDP

Opening files using command-line binaries in Konsole doesn't raise existing windows

Global Menu is not supported for non-Qt apps

Some apps' non-maximizable windows are broken with placement policy set as maximized

[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...

The_President• 2 months ago

The Bluetooth integration needs work - missing features such as "never connect automatically."

Default lock screen experience still has a needless delay of 5 seconds when entering a wrong (even blank wrong) password, even on the first attempt.

+1 on the gamma controls

mariusor• 2 months ago

That sounds like tarpitting, or perhaps timing attacks protection, rather than anything wrong in the password check pipeline.

timhh• 2 months ago

Default lock screen experience still has a needless delay of 5 seconds when entering a wrong (even blank wrong) password, even on the first attempt.

I suspect that is not KDE's fault (or Wayland's) - it's probably PAM, which by default has a 2 second delay (+/- 50%). That default is extremely difficult to change, but you can configure it. See my instructions here: https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/issues/778#issuecomme...

Also if you follow that issue you can see I've been trying to convince the PAM developers to fix it (by changing it to a 0.5 second delay, which is much more tolerable and no less secure). Unfortunately they have this weird idea that users want the delay, because it lets them recompose their thoughts after getting the password wrong or something like that.

bayindirh3• 2 months ago

Well, seeing how systems are brute-forced and how much speed you can achieve today, these delays are more and more welcome on my end.

dannyfritz07• 2 months ago

Bluetooth autoconnect configuration is a Wayland issue? I honestly would have never guessed. I always figured it was the responsibility of the DE or bluez service.

bsder• 2 months ago

Pointer warp not generally supported so CAD programs fail in bizarre ways.

Although I think that there is FINALLY an actual spec for pointer warp. However, very few compositors support it.

account4225• 2 months ago

The story of Wayland - restrict what applications can do in the name of "security" only to re-add the same thing in a compositor-specific way after years of pain inflicted on everyone. Wayland is fundamentally designed for the smartphone model and has no place on an open desktop.

mminer237• 2 months ago

Also, I still haven't found a clipboard manager that works normally on Wayland.

And I rarely get it to recognize all my monitors first try. And it crashes semi-regularly.

Not sure how much is inherent to Wayland vs Gnome, but life is way better since I upgraded to Xlibre & Cinnamon.

Diti• 2 months ago

Also, I still haven't found a clipboard manager that works normally on Wayland.

I recommend Vicinae. https://docs.vicinae.com/clipboard

monooso2• 2 months ago

I've found the built-in clipboard manager on KDE Plasma 6 to be very reliable.

When I used GNOME, the Clipboard Indicator extension [1] served me well.

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/779/clipboard-indicat...

tosti5• 2 months ago

KDE on wayland doesn't let me roll up windows. I've been doing that for nearly 3 decades.

Saris• 2 months ago

Also recently discovered KeepassXC can't do auto-type on Wayland for some reason. It seems to have a massive amount of limitations.

genpfault• 2 months ago

KeepassXC can't do auto-type on Wayland

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281

Though it looks like there's a recent PR for that:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/13359

aidenn02• 2 months ago

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.

LtWorf11• 2 months ago

My touchpad still works like shit on libinput (which is the only input method available on wayland).

I guess in a few years I'll need to patch it and carry my patches forever. Yay progress!

aidenn02• 2 months ago

Taking a wild guess that this may or may not help you: https://github.com/kekekeks/waynaptics

self_awareness3• 2 months ago

RIP Linux Desktop

dark-star3• 2 months ago

Time to switch to Windows! yay! Where all of this stuff just works: HDR, remote desktop, gaming, Picture-in-Picture, ... all the stuff that Wayland devs are too stupid to get done correctly

/s (maybe?)

self_awareness3• 2 months ago

Eh, IDK. Maybe? After 20 years of using Linux I'm looking on Windows more and more.

Linux Gaming is now better than ever, and ideological Linux dev community torpedoes it hard with Wayland.

I mean who Linux wants to be anyway? An OS for bleeding edge hardware? I think we have Windows for that. Because Wayland doesn't even work correctly on average-aged hardware.

Greybeards have created Linux, and cool new generation will shut it down (on Desktop).

tosti5• 2 months ago

You forgot accessibility.

shmerl• 2 months ago

+ Long live Linux Desktop!

self_awareness3• 2 months ago

You mean: "Deskop Long + live Linux", because Wayland devs decided that's it's the best way to order the words you want to use

HiPhish• 2 months ago

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/

tmtvl3• 2 months ago

Have you tried LXQt? It made things easy for me when Plasma 6 broke a KWin script I was using to improve the multihead experience.

falsaberN12• 2 months ago

I use LXQt with virtual machines, is it good for using on bare metal too?

drnick12• 2 months ago

Sadly, recent GNOME versions introduced a hard dependency on systemd and can no longer be used on systemd-free distros. This is the kind of problem that the anti-systemd people had in mind back then when debates about systemd raged.

lionkor2• 2 months ago

I'm sorry, but are we still going on about this? I love a good debate as much as the next guy, but being able to just have one interface (systemd's) for all services and having a more-or-less consistent language really helps.

At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.

qweqwe142• 2 months ago

It's Linux bro, we absolutely need to have 500 different options for every single thing. Doesn't matter if every option sucks, diversity is above everything! /s

There are some truly special people among Linux users that think diversity in init systems/libc implementations/etc is a good thing for a general-purpose desktop. They don't understand that people just want stuff to work, and developers don't want to support more than 1 init system (or other trivial thing) for their package.

Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that.

account4225• 2 months ago

You could also just use one system (Windows) for everything if you wanted. Some of us decided to use Linux because we want things to work how we want and not how some bigshot decides they should work.

hulitu• 2 months ago

This is a good thing. Gnome and systemd both suck.

melodyogonna2• 2 months ago

I installed Arch on my old Mac few months ago, alongside Xorg and i3, they were what I was used to before I switched to Mac about 6 years ago. Back then Wayland was a mess, so I never even bothered to check it out this time.

However, few days ago my non-technical girlfriend wanted to use my laptop, I couldn't see her using i3 so I decided to install Plasma, a proper desktop environment. Lo and behold I couldn't launch it. After searching I found out I needed plasma-x11-session as the default plasma install now included just a Wayland session. I found this a bit surprising, so I did further digging and discovered a huge chunk of Linux desktop community have basically migrated to Wayland since the last time I was here. Very surprising I must say.

So I decided to try Wayland again; I installed Sway and was pleasantly surprised. My screen resolution was automatically calibrated, operations seemed to run more smoothly, my laptop's fan kicked in less frequently (don't know why), and I didn't need a compositor package to fix screen tear (bye Picom). But all these weren't the reasons I decided to stick with Wayland. You see, in x11 I've been having a persistent problem: playing videos from certain websites, notably Twitter, introduces noticeable flickers. I tried everything to get rid of this: media drivers, verifying GPU acceleration, calibrating refresh rates, nothing worked. When I installed Sway I decided to see if this issue got magically fixed, and lo! It was. Wayland has come a long way since I last tried it. Now that I mentioned it, I have just remembered I need to figure out a way to share screens on Google meets, at the moment I seem to be limited to sharing just the Chrome window.

strobe2• 2 months ago

I recently had opposite experience - I been using NixOS with X11+i3 for about 2 years and never had any significant issues beside some troubles with one Nvidia driver version, even most Steam games worked for me without any issues. But out of curiosity decided to give try Wayland+Sway. First Sway remind me that Nvidia GPU completely unsupported and probably wont work at all, but in really fix for that just to use some 'unsupported' flag to launch it. After that I found that displays fractional scaling only can multiply original resolution to bigger size so is no way I will able to set up my 3 different displays in way I would like. Then I found that Zoom app can't share display even if everything for that is provided and it thinks that sharing actually happen (it can share if used thought web-browser and it also some workaround with virtual camera thought kernel module and OBS). After that I found that Barrier app (that I been used to share cursor/keyboard between desktop&laptop) while has support for wayland it can't work with Sway yet and is no any real alternative.

For now I can deal with that stuff but it looks like more I use wayland more issues I see so not sure that I will able stick with it long term.

oh now I also has flickers with discord app

melodyogonna2• 2 months ago

Interesting. From looking into it Wayland had issues with Nvidia, I thought that was already fixed? I admit, it is a bit of a hack getting screen-sharing to work; I've not really had time for it yet as it isn't a daily driver for me.

notepad0x90• 2 months ago

dumb question, with LLMs being so prolific now, why is this sort of a thing.. a thing? Why not us an agent to maintain code people use, but humans don't have time to keep up with? or at least, are agents being used in FOSS software widely for such ends, at least to reduce the burden and cheapen the cost of delivering quality FOSS experience?

poulpy123• 2 months ago

Lol

unethical_ban• 2 months ago

It seems to me like such a drastic change in the underlying system (removing support of one of two major display platforms) would mandate a major version change.

Complete removal of X11 should be an event to trigger KDE 7.0.

4thguy• 2 months ago

I agree. IMO this is a breaking change. It seems like some (many?) accessibility tools don't work on Wayland, so this breaks users' workflow if they need those tools

account4225• 2 months ago

KDE 4.0 has already shown that KDE developers have a very different understanding of version numbers compared to users.

justinclift2• 2 months ago

Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland

Wonder how representative of the real end user population this is?

ceayo3• 2 months ago

I think most people who even know the difference between x11 and Wayland are much more privacy conscious then those who don’t. 0% of people going out of their way to jump through all the hoops to get plasma working on x11 would ever opt in to such metrics.

LtWorf11• 2 months ago

The hoops: "select Xorg in the login manager"

Dude…

justinclift2• 2 months ago

Nah, don't think so. When I setup my main dev desktop (a Debian variant) a few months ago it defaulted to X11 and getting Wayland to work on it was a pain in the butt.

That being said, on a different box with an older gen Nvidia card (3070) it defaulted to Wayland and just worked out of the box.

So, bit of a mixed bag. ;)

edumucelli• 2 months ago

Been using Linux as sole OS for 25 years now. I will stick to X11 no problems, I am sure it will be just fine for my usage. When we thought Gnome 2 was gone, MATE fork appeared, X11 will be there for a long time. I am also going through the struggle of porting a software I maintain (github.com/edumucelli/docking) to Wayland and it is awful: "this compositor do this part, that one does that part, no compositor does this :shrug".

toenail• 2 months ago

I have a feeling xorg will still be there, when devs have moved on from wayland to the next new thing.

LtWorf11• 2 months ago

I'm still thinking wayland will be like pulseaudio. Going from "the future" to "the past" without ever being "the present".

I went from ALSA to pipewire. I tried pulseaudio but it never worked decently.

Yamboho2• 2 months ago

Great! Now fix screenshot

Yamboho2• 2 months ago

That's great progress! Now fix screenshoting

account4225• 2 months ago

Also automation - and not just limited to use cases that the compositor developers can think of.

TiredOfLife3• 2 months ago

I run CachyOS that defaults to wayland. I just pressed Prt Scr button and took a screenshot.

shevy-java3• 2 months ago

By the way - David refused to publish the source for the image he showed, aka "nobody uses x11 anymore".

This reminds me of the systemd folks - they also don't allow for discussions yet alone cite anything related to their claims. They just claim. If the earth is flat, they don't need evidence. Their word must be enough.

It is this image:

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/...

David claims "internal metrics", but he also does not explain how those metrics were gained, is there bias in how they were gained, which time span and so forth.

I am not saying he is fabricating the graph, though this could be the case too. What I am asking for is to show (ALL of) the data and explain the graph and data. Otherwise this is simple propaganda, with a pre-set goal to cover-my-ass (aka explain why KDE devs try to eradicate all xorg users).

By the way, next step, as you guys may know: systemd-only. Both David and Nate also announced this before. I wonder if there are financial kickbacks.

ceayo3• 2 months ago

Gah I’m switching to TMUX.

LaGrange• 2 months ago

It's so funny reading about how the problem with Wayland is that you have many, often incomplete, implementations while being old enough to remember the time when X11 was actually popular (and thus had many, often incomplete, implementations).

anaisbetts• 2 months ago

No headless RDP solution is pretty unforgiveable in 2026 - right now I use Nomachine and indeed it requires X11. Why wouldn't Wayland have a solution for this? It is not a niche usecase. It is like, a headline, completely mainstream use-case.

aniou• 2 months ago

Blind spot that comes from incompetence and arrogance. See https://lwn.net/Articles/553415/ for example and remember famous words of Daniel Stone that brought the need for remote work to - merely - launch xeyes.

Thus, that particular comment (https://lwn.net/Articles/555124/) was prophetic: "With that sort of attitude, I have no confidence that remote Wayland will ever work properly. Clearly Daniel just has a laptop and does all his work on it, and damn everyone who uses more than one machine for anything."

redeeman7• 2 months ago

this take is ridiculous, of course remote wayland will work, there are still some things missing, which are gonna come shortly in KDE atleast.

milliams• 2 months ago

The main blocker I have for moving is the poor session management. On X11 for decades I've been able to log out of my KDE session and when I log in again, all my Konsole windows re-open with the tabs open in the same folders, Dolphin opens with all the tabs open to the same locations etc.

I think they recently added support at the KWin level for reopening windows to the right desktops etc but as far as each individual apps, it seems to be up to them individually to get this working again. I would have thought that at least for the KDE apps, they could just have a compatibility layer from the X11 session management to make it work but it doesn't seem there yet.

akimbostrawman3• 2 months ago

it seems to be up to them individually to get this working again

Just like on x11 for the overwhelming majority of applications it's implemented in and handled by the applications framework like GTK, QT, electron, ...

trashface• 2 months ago

Maybe its better under KDE but on gnome/wayland, VSCode can't even remember its window position and size or even which display it should be on - at least for me. Reminds of the bad old days of windows 3.1. I have a shell script to reset it now.

But I have to use wayland because I've got nvidia and the force composition vsync hack is just too slow to game with reliably.

jackyard86• 2 months ago

I prefer software rendering, I don't use compositor, and I never will.

In software rendering, CPU only updates screen when changes are detected. And the change completes as fast as the computer can. So that's minimal latency + minimal resource consumed.

If you're on a compositor, the 3D accelerator in your computer has to update the screen 60 times every second. It's even worse when you have a higher refresh rate display. And compositors update the buffer as soon as the previous buffer is pushed after the v-sync signal, and then it just waits until the next signal comes in. So there comes the terrible input delay. As a result, it comsumes more power and has higher latency.

So in conclusion, fuck Wayland, and I'm going with xfce without compositor.

lousken• 2 months ago

I hope Debian 14 will have the last x11 version such that users that need it will be able to use it for another 5 years

Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

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