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melodyogonna 4 minutes 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.
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 5 hours 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?
suby 5 hours 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.
cwillu 50 minutes 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 28 minutes ago [-]
Until you connect a second monitor.
tuna74 5 hours 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.
setopt 1 hours 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.
ndiddy 7 hours 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.
bityard 7 hours 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.
ahartmetz 5 hours 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.
httpsterio 4 hours ago [-]
my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps.
in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
d3Xt3r 3 hours ago [-]
If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS.
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.
Kaliboy 2 hours ago [-]
I upgraded to the latest PopOS with Cosmic running on Wayland.
Honestly everything just worked, but using it made me so nauseous. There was some latency somewhere, never figured it out. Running Cinnamon on X11 now. I did read some suggestions to improve latency but I have PTSD so it's going to take a while before I try Wayland again.
Zardoz84 8 minutes ago [-]
Then something os wrong is in your machine. I'm just using KDE on Wayland on Debian 13 and just works fine.
craftkiller 3 hours ago [-]
What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
pmontra 2 hours 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.
igor47 7 hours 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.
LtWorf 2 hours 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
LtWorf 2 hours 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.
shevy-java 6 hours 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. :)
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:
> 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)
DonHopkins 5 hours ago [-]
"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski
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
senfiaj 7 hours 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.
ndiddy 7 hours 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.
idoubtit 5 hours 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.
thesuitonym 5 hours ago [-]
Look, I'm not a Wayland booster, I still prefer X11 most of the time, but this is really the way it should work. Applications should not be allowed to dictate how windows appear. That is the job of the window manager. Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.
porridgeraisin 4 hours ago [-]
This is the issue with imposing semantics of the programming model on the behaviour.
User behaviour is the only _real_ thing, it happens. Everything else is in your head. If people in the real world use PiP, then it should happen. The programming model has to bend and change to support it. It simply does not matter if the window manager does something or the window does something.
Sure, there is always the security argument wayland folks fall back to. But what ever is the problem with making a one-time permission popup? "Google Chrome wants to open in PiP: allow | allow once.". Just expose the existing PiP code in the window manager as an API guarded with an `if` that apps can call. It's not even that much real work, just pure bikeshedding and architecture astronauting.
thesuitonym 4 hours ago [-]
Right right, and I'm not saying users shouldn't be able to have a floating window with video (or whatever) in it. I'm saying it shouldn't be Chrome making that window floating and always visible.
porridgeraisin 4 hours ago [-]
I don't get it, if you're on google meet, and you want to make one of many videos PiP. How can you ever do that in the window manager? It has to be done in the application! You right click or click on the menu on that particular video, and click Picture in picture.
How the heck can the window manager do it?
thesuitonym 1 hours ago [-]
If things were designed well, it would be as easy as clicking the pin icon on the window border.
21 minutes ago [-]
pseudalopex 4 hours ago [-]
The application could tell the window manager it wanted an always on top window. The window manager could ask the user if it should allow or reject and remember for this application or not.
porridgeraisin 3 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what I said... and also not how wayland works.
I cannot comprehend the way wayland folks think... quote from the xdg-pip discussion:
> To not make PiP windows effectively "always on top" and "on every workspace" dialogs - a terrible and sadly by applications used concept on X11 - PiP windows must be input-only, i.e. not receive keyboard, pointer and touch input
Like what the heck even? That is how pip windows are expected to work? And of course you want inputs on them? e.g to mute/unmute on a video call? Like these are use cases used daily by people. And its "terrible".
senfiaj 5 hours ago [-]
>> Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.
What are you talking about? It's very convenient when I watch video while I do some work or entertaining thing on other web page or app. It's fine if you don't want to use it but many people do.
thesuitonym 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's fine, but it shouldn't be necessary. If Windows and Mac OS just had native support for always-on-top windows, you wouldn't need it.
c-hendricks 4 hours ago [-]
I actually prefer macOS's PiP handling compared to other operating systems. In that it's a blessed concept that only goes to one corner of the screen and can be shunted out of the way easily.
thesuitonym 59 minutes ago [-]
Now imagine if that was designed properly, and you could just do that to any window, regardless of what the program thinks it should look like.
mixmastamyk 4 hours 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.
TiredOfLife 6 hours ago [-]
For Chrome it's "Picture in picture"
boca_honey 5 hours ago [-]
Wow, I guess Linux is only free if you don't value your time.
MegaDeKay 7 hours 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.
senfiaj 6 hours 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 38 minutes 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.
jimmaswell 2 hours 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.
laszlokorte 7 hours 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 7 hours 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.
But users do not want to have to toggle that for every PiP video they watch.
Its why I am still on X11
babypuncher 5 hours ago [-]
I can't speak for Gnome, but KDE makes it pretty easy to create rules that apply automatically to any new window that meets whatever arbitrary criteria you set.
Zardoz84 6 hours ago [-]
Plasma/KDE always had it.
senfiaj 7 hours 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.
yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours 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.
moritzruth 7 hours ago [-]
I think in Hyprland it just works because floating windows stay on top by definition.
branon 6 hours 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.
csr86 7 hours 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.
aquova 7 hours 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
blendergeek 6 hours ago [-]
The issue is you have to do that every single time. On X11, they remain on top by default
5 hours ago [-]
babypuncher 5 hours 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.
Zardoz84 6 hours ago [-]
Strange... with Firefox in KDE/Plasma just works.
krs_ 6 hours 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.
Postosuchus 5 hours 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.
doublepg23 3 hours 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.
> 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.
outofpaper 5 hours ago [-]
Time to fork and move on...
aidenn0 3 hours 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.
LtWorf 2 hours 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!
Cool, seems useful. I should try it and package it for debian if it works.
alyandon 7 hours 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.
MegaDeKay 7 hours 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.
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.
throwawee 5 hours ago [-]
I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.
moritzruth 7 hours ago [-]
When was the last time you tried? What compositor?
alyandon 6 hours 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.
kombine 4 hours ago [-]
You are using a 3 year old Plasma release (5.27). Give the latest Plasma a try and you should hopefully be positively surprised.
MegaDeKay 5 hours ago [-]
They've made major strides in the last two years. Give the next LTS a shot and I think you'll agree.
Zardoz84 6 hours ago [-]
Just works out of the box without problems in Debian 13.
The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.
bitwize 7 hours 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 4 hours 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.
exe34 7 hours 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.
HiPhish 2 hours 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.
> 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 7 hours ago [-]
They're still trying to figure that one out themselves.
MBCook 7 hours 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 6 hours 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.
Tade0 6 hours ago [-]
HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.
ChocolateGod 5 hours 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.
krs_ 6 hours 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.
jebenesty 7 hours ago [-]
Did you really just [sic] a British guy using British spelling?
MBCook 7 hours 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.
spider-mario 4 hours ago [-]
It would be a good habit to check (for example on the Wiktionary – I have a Chrome search keyword dedicated to that) because those are not the only differences.
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.
bluGill 7 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
(?) they didn't say otherwise
exe34 7 hours ago [-]
try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!
zubspace 7 hours 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....
6 hours ago [-]
exe34 7 hours ago [-]
nmtui
zubspace 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :)
And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.
But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.
Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
coryrc 2 hours ago [-]
XFCE. Supports the tray plugins, has GUI settings, I don't ever have to use the CLI to configure it (actually... I'm not even sure how I would...).
exe34 5 hours ago [-]
I have jgmenu mapped to F4 but I never remember to use it. I usually just CMD+P and type what I need.
I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.
janice1999 7 hours 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.
oofbaroomf 4 hours 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.
brooke2k 5 hours 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.
nickserv 34 minutes 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.
tmtvl 1 hours 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 1 hours 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.
doublepg23 3 hours 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 hours ago [-]
SteamOS recently shipped KDE with Wayland by default (for desktop mode).
funny you say that, given that the SteamDeck (the largest/most popular Linux-based gaming console) runs on KDE on Wayland.....
bigstrat2003 3 hours 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.
drnick1 1 hours 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.
bluGill 7 hours 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.
ChocolateGod 5 hours 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-star 2 hours 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.
Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.
NoboruWataya 5 hours 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.
feverzsj 7 hours ago [-]
How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?
krs_ 6 hours 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.
feverzsj 6 hours 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.
ijustlovemath 7 hours ago [-]
Probably with Special Window Settings (right click top bar of your mpv window)
mvdtnz 5 hours 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.
mixmastamyk 4 hours 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.
mug1 7 hours ago [-]
I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps
ahartmetz 7 hours 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.
MBCook 7 hours 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.
tosti 7 hours 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.
nickserv 30 minutes 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.
superkuh 6 hours 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%.
superkuh 7 hours 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 5 hours 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 5 hours 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
superkuh 36 minutes 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.
self_awareness 2 hours ago [-]
RIP Linux Desktop
dark-star 2 hours 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_awareness 2 hours 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).
calvinmorrison 7 hours 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?
calvinmorrison 7 hours 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 hours 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.
gjvc 6 hours ago [-]
until the next one
rid 6 hours 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.
startpage_com 7 hours ago [-]
So long KDE. Xlibre for life.
jccx70 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 7 hours 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 7 hours 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?
ahartmetz 7 hours 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.
josephcsible 2 hours ago [-]
They're similar in that they're both new things that are worse than what they're meant to replace.
vkazanov 7 hours 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.
tuna74 4 hours ago [-]
More and more Free SW will depend on Systemd (like next gen flatpak). Make something better or adapt.
okanat 57 minutes 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/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
[1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec
[2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/
Honestly everything just worked, but using it made me so nauseous. There was some latency somewhere, never figured it out. Running Cinnamon on X11 now. I did read some suggestions to improve latency but I have PTSD so it's going to take a while before I try Wayland again.
I use it on a touchscreen and the on-screen-keyboard crashes several times a day.
I would not say it's fully ready.
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....
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)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
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...
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
Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
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.
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.
User behaviour is the only _real_ thing, it happens. Everything else is in your head. If people in the real world use PiP, then it should happen. The programming model has to bend and change to support it. It simply does not matter if the window manager does something or the window does something.
Sure, there is always the security argument wayland folks fall back to. But what ever is the problem with making a one-time permission popup? "Google Chrome wants to open in PiP: allow | allow once.". Just expose the existing PiP code in the window manager as an API guarded with an `if` that apps can call. It's not even that much real work, just pure bikeshedding and architecture astronauting.
How the heck can the window manager do it?
I cannot comprehend the way wayland folks think... quote from the xdg-pip discussion:
> To not make PiP windows effectively "always on top" and "on every workspace" dialogs - a terrible and sadly by applications used concept on X11 - PiP windows must be input-only, i.e. not receive keyboard, pointer and touch input
Like what the heck even? That is how pip windows are expected to work? And of course you want inputs on them? e.g to mute/unmute on a video call? Like these are use cases used daily by people. And its "terrible".
What are you talking about? It's very convenient when I watch video while I do some work or entertaining thing on other web page or app. It's fine if you don't want to use it but many people do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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:
but performance is rather abysmal.I guess in a few years I'll need to patch it and carry my patches forever. Yay progress!
I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.
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
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.
The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.
A quick search (in which I found no evidence of heated controversy) suggests to me that it's the first one.
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/
I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
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.
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.
fulfill vs. fulfil
judgment vs. judgement
disk vs. disc (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes)
hiccup vs. hiccough
diarrhea vs. diarrhoea
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.
And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.
But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.
Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.
They have their own custom compositor for handheld-mode, named gamescope. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-fil... XWayland based.
what about emulation / virtual machines?
Here is a short setup guide on how to get it working rather nicely: https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/
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.
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.
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.
Security conscious doesn't mean not getting involved with the community and helping useful projects.
>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%.
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.
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.
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
>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.
/s (maybe?)
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).
What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
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.
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.
Modern KDE is nothing like that, and i cannot see how this is a bad thing.