As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.
Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?
Checkout the Wayback project on fdo
What exactly isn’t ready? All I know is the lack of trackpad gestures and fractional scaling(even though I don’t use it) in x11. X11 is the one that feels more janky while wayland has been smooth sailing.
I’m even developing a gtk4 program, I assume if there were problems with wayland I’ve would’ve noticed it by now. On the other hand, testing my program on debian 13 with x11 did make the experience a little jankier.
Given such huge differences in reported experiences, I can only assume it’s a difference in hardware compatibility? Are some machines just better in x11 and others in wayland? Is that why everyone has such different experiences?
Wayland has improved a lot in the last few years. And yes, there are and have been differences in hardware.
I think the biggest difference is likely to be software though. Primarily in two ways.
First, a lot of people are using older software. Not to pick on Debian but it is a good example. A Debian Stable user may be using NVIDIA drivers that are literally years older than what an Arch user is using. Paired with Wayland compositors and XDG portals that are older as well. So when they talk about Wayland (even today), they are really describing the experience from years ago.
Second, what use cases are well supported on Wayland still varies from compositor to compositor. Somebody using Plasma 6 may experience that pretty much everything just works. Somebody using Sway may find that some uses cases are still immature.
Put these together and you have a lot of NVIDIA on Debian people telling you things don’t work and a lot of AMD on Fedora people wondering what they are talking about.
Today, Wayland and Xorg are more “different” than better or worse. If you are happy with Wayland, migrating to Xorg would probably feel like a real step back and there would be all kinds of issues and deficiencies. But, for some, the reverse can still be true. Wayland still has a few gaps.
Finally, they ARE different. Which means that if you insist on trying to make Wayland work exactly like X11, it is easy to make it seem like it is not working, even if Wayland can do exactly what you need in some slightly different way.
The important thing to acknowledge though is that more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And the majority of new users start in Wayland and will never switch. So X11 is the weird one now. And while Xorg is about as good as it is ever going to be, Wayland gets better every day.
I don’t notice any difference in performance between x11 and Wayland, but there are some things I just haven’t been able to get working right in Wayland. Changing font DPI. Screenshots, when I want to capture a selected area and not the entire screen. Color pickers. I’ve tried several that supposedly work with Wayland, but they don’t. Screensavers. Alt-tabbing between a fullscreen game and the desktop or another window. I should mess around with it some more. I know my own distro is getting rid of x11 at some point.
Plasma and Gentoo user here.
The transition has been so uneventful and simple that I didn’t even noticed. I run some 15 desktops with different mixed hardware setups and use VNC / RDP sometimes too.
One day I started noticing on some desktops Wayland was now in use, by chance. Then I started taking notice.
I can say the ones moved to Wayland are smoother, but might be aneddotical. Beside that, cannot care less about X11 or Wayland, they both work just fine for all my use cases.
For the sake of future, welcome Wayland!
/smallrant Sorry for X11, have to say I have been in the business since kernel version 2 and I DO NOT miss losing X11, its a bunch of half assed half baked spaghetti tech that has done its own time and would not have kept up with life. /rantover.
RDP
How do you approach RDP? Do you have multiple monitors at all? Is your approach scriptable? The reason I ask is because I can easily access my machines like so:
exec xfreerdp3 /u:<user> /p:<pass> /v:<address> +f +clipboard /drive:/home/<user>>,Z: /drive:/,Y: -grab-keyboard /monitors:0,1 /multimonThis can be added to a script that also checks the state of the target machine, and boots it via my IPMI console if necessary, waiting until the machine is ready to login. And, as you’ll note, I can specify which monitors I would like to provide for the connection.
grab-keyboardallows me to set a keyboard shortcut that minimises the remote session, and you’ll note the mapped drives also. This is pretty much the lowest level of functionality I’m after. If that can be replicated on Wayland, that’s at least one hurdle down.Cool, but – they didn’t ask for your experience. Are you a shill?
On the contrary, they provided a piece of information that I’m very interested in. They’re hardly shilling.
Ok, i deleted it.
I feel similarly, especially about remmina, though as I understand it, this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland, but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I’m quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).
It’s too bad because on Debian 13 here, wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren’t for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.
I would hope plasma’s decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.
Remote access is the one pain point. There is very little for RMM or remote software that works on wayland. KDE has that in the works already.
Everybody says Rustdesk but it is a bad joke regardless of wayland.
Personally I host a simplehelp server(paid) and it’s really good but wayland support is a no go so far.
Everything else has been categorically better and fixed a lot of issues for me that I used to have on X11 which I’ve used for like 15 years.
X11+Gnome until gnome 3 then KDE for me because I’m not using a damn tablet (or workspaces).
It obviously won’t work for everyone, but for remote access I’ve been very impressed with waypipe. I use it to pull windows from headless machines onto my main workstation, like X forwarding.
I’d like something for persistence, like wprs, but it’s not quite there yet.
I think realistically the best option is to stick with an older version of KDE until your issues get fixed upstream or switch to another DE.
Anyone technically literate enough to port KDE back to X11 is likely also literate enough to fix the blocking bugs.
… Unless they’re doing it purely on ideological grounds, which is probably not a healthy way to run a project.
Well… Unless those blocking bugs relate to getting new Wayland protocols approved.
you don’t need approval to make a protocol, make an implementation and just use it yourself
I switched from x to Wayland eaely/mid last year, prior to that there were quirks. But now: no screen tearing, no nvidia issues when using their driver, steam games play instead of black screen.
The bonus is security.
Seems like it would take less effort to improve Wayland than maintain a forked DE for X11.
Probably true, but iirc, there are already people planning to keep X11 going, because change means fucking up their personal workflow.
this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.
The wayland team simply doesn’t give a shit about that. They’re locked in an ivory tower debating the perfect protocol for allowing applications to position their own windows near 15 years after starting their project.
I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.
Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.
I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.
I habitually use a clean install whenever I move OS - so much so that I’ve been buying new storage drives for the sake thereof. I actually have one ready to go for Trixie, once I finish a current project.
There’s already Trinity.
Don’t know what their stance is on Wayland but it exists.
Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this.
I have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.
The issue is that maintaining X11, like any large and old software, is a lot of work, even if it does not add features. Probably way more than you think.
And as far as I understand, the people who used to work on X11 are moving to Wayland, too. Unless volunteers pick that work up, X11 will rot and become unusable over time.
The other thing: Replacing and modernizing a very large piece of software which is so much integrated will always be a lot of work, take a lot of time, and be somewhat painful. That’s just life. And there will always be early adopters and late movers - which is fine, too.
And by the way, I am using stumpwm on X11. It is called the Emacs of window managers for a reason, and WMs written e.g. in Guile Scheme are still catching up.
Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.
People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.
Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.
I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.
Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.
The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.
Pipewire and alsa are completely different things. Pipewire uses pulse/jack which then use alsa, or am I missing something?
People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).
When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.
Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.
I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.
It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.
