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?

edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:

  • remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.

  • nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.

  • applications in general felt sluggish

  • it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.

  • lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.

  • screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.

  • application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.

here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.

so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    6·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    18 hours ago

    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.

  • Czele@lemmy.world
    182·
    3 days ago

    You can just stay with the last plasma version that supports x11 as long as it doesnt start to bit rot. Btw, try wayland and see if YOUR workflow works

  • normonator@lemmy.ml
    91·
    3 days ago

    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).

    • Corngood@lemmy.ml
      6·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
    21·
    2 days ago

    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?

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      6·
      2 days ago

      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. Alma Linux probably falls on this camp.

      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.

    • swelter_spark@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
        1·
        2 days ago

        Have you used a different machine? None of your issues are what I experience(on both x11 and waland). My issues on x11 are to do with general lags and unreliable sleep/wake. It’s weird how there’s no consistency, everyone seems to have a different set of issues. If even the issues are different, I wonder how the devs can even fix it.

  • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
    899·
    3 days ago

    There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work

    People complaining about Wayland always like to say that, but usually don’t give any specific examples.

    If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn’t be actively working to switch.

    For what it’s worth, since a few years Wayland works better on my PC than X11 ever did, and with more features.

      • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Ubuntu, which is all-in on Wayland, does not wake up from sleep with our nvidia 3060. We have to reset the machine. So, no, it’s not an edge case, we have a very, very popular Asus motherboard (the one everyone recommended on youtube 3 years ago), and still nothing. Even with newer versions of the driver, newer versions of ubuntu, same problem occurs.

    • dadarobot@lemmy.ml
      8·
      3 days ago

      i use x11 termux with xreal glasses for my travel rig. as far as i know, there is no wayland support for termux.

      also when i use steam link from wayland it is very buggy. i tried again a couple months ago and had the same issue.

      are these niche use cases? absolutely. but i have 2 different niche use cases that exclude using wayland. its a shame if ill have to quit using gnome (i know this thread is about kde) over this.

        • dadarobot@lemmy.ml
          3·
          2 days ago

          it can except when im away from home. dont get me wrong, i use wayland on a few other computers. im not hating on wayland, i just find i have to keep using x and its frustrating and sad to see it being phased out.

    • non_burglar@lemmy.world
      117·
      3 days ago

      and with more features.

      Look, if you’re gonna tell x11 folks to provide examples of how Wayland is not meeting their needs, you need to meet the same bar and give a few examples of what these features are.

      This is honestly what is holding me back from going all in on wayland… I don’t see any benefit.

      • ozymandias117@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        3 days ago

        Fractional scaling w/ HiDPI displays, especially when the monitors are different resolutions, works so much better in Wayland than X11

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
        133·
        2 days ago

        Xorg fans will not accept that people like Wayland better because it is a better experience: higher performance and less jank. But that is the main reason and the reason that 80 percent of new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and will never switch. It does not matter if you believe it.

        And of course the “killer feature” of Wayland is that it runs Wayland apps. And Wayland-only desktop environments and compositors. This will matter more and more every day. I could live without foot and COSMIC but already the fact that I cannot use Niri on Xorg is all I need to know to be Wayland exclusive.

        But if you need an itemized list:

        • HDR
        • VRR
        • Multi-monitor fractional scaling
        • Tear-free
        • isolated I/O
        • multi-touch
        • kinetic scrolling
        • security in general
        • and probably more

        Waypipe and WPRS are better than the X11 equivalents.

        Oh, and inevitability.

        • non_burglar@lemmy.world
          101·
          2 days ago

          I appreciate your response.

          I am happy that keyboard and other I/o are being treated as separate from a security perspective.

          Xorg fans

          I am not as impressed by this comment snippet.

          I am not a “fan” of xorg, and you should absolutely stop looking at it this way. This isn’t a matter of having a favourite car manufacturer. I am not commenting to convince everyone that xorg is “better”.

          I simply use xorg. I have work to do, I use Linux to do it. My most stable and predictable configuration is using xfce, it just stays out of the way. I don’t care about ricing. I don’t GAF about GPU accelerated terminal emulators, especially when they bonk trying to connect to Solaris tty. I don’t care about HDR. If you do care about these things, that’s great, I’m not trying to diminish that.

          I have been using Linux for almost 30 years, professionally for almost 25. I have been through Mir. I have somehow made it through alsa transition to pulseaudio, which sucked. I have been through Unity, the ffmpeg debacle, systemd, ndis wrappers, netplan, etc. Some of these new tooling options are better than previous ones, some aren’t. They effectively get the job done, and that’s the bottom line.

          Never in my Linux experience have I seen such a sudden push to not only move everyone to new tooling, but to cast everyone using the old tools as somehow “refusing to move on”, especially in the last 2 or 3 years.

          There will come a time when you will see your current tooling will be left behind and you’ll be in my situation. Have some grace about it.

          And stop calling me an xorg “fan”.

          • LeFantome@programming.dev
            47·
            2 days ago

            Um.

            First, I am not trying to recruit you to Wayland. Do what you want. I am responding to your demand to explain what is better about it and your implication that the answer is “nothing”.

            Apparently you like Xorg. You like it enough that you see nothing better about Wayland. Given that, getting bent out of shape about the word “fan” appearing in my response is a bit excessive. Protest too much? Christ.

            And I did not even apply that term to you specifically. I just answered your bloody question. A question that was grumpy to start with. Grace you say?

            Finally, I have been using Linux since well before 1.0 when I had to spend all night on a Sun workstation downloading floppy images. And half the next day guessing mode lines for my monitor to make XFree86 work and fixing build scrips for whatever I was trying to run on it. I moved straight from OS/2 to Linux though I installed BSD/386 before that. I own both SGI and Sun (Solaris era) hardware.

            My preferred Linux distro does not use Glibc, GCC, GNU utils, or systemd.

            I doubt if there are many Linux technologies you have encountered that I have not. So I am not sure what point you think you are making.

            That said, it sounds like you used Ubuntu a whole lot more than I did. I better walk around these egg shells before I ask if you liked it.

      • forbiddenlake@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        3 days ago

        One benefit is it’s the future and my DE is going to drop X soon.

        Another is it’s more secure. Not just any window can read the clipboard or the keys you press. Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog whenever I hit them.

        Am I doing a good job convincing you? Anyway, I switched to Plasma Wayland and it was fine for me, with a few tweaks needed.

        • non_burglar@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 days ago

          it’s the future

          No doubt about that. It’s been “the future” for more than a decade. But even 5 years ago, Wayland was a complete dumpster fire if you strayed outside average use. So yeah, I’ve heard this before.

          Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog

          I understand that this is a real sticking point with some use cases, I hope this is resolved soon. I’m definitely fuzzy on the workings of portals, compositors, input, etc.

          Am I doing a good job convincing you?

          This is the overwhelming response to my questions about Wayland, and it’s weird. Wayland isn’t a fancy new car I need to use to stay relevant. I work in terminals and a browser, Xfce is fine.

          As I mentioned in another response, I am not trying to use the newest coolest thing, I work every day in Linux and I need my setup to be stable and predictable.

          And no one needs to convince me, when xfce is finally discontinued or unusable, I’ll have to find a similar Wayland alternative. Nothing compels me to switch yet.

          I am not trying to suggest that the old way is better, we have needed to move on from x11 years ago.

        • northernscrub@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          clipboard…

          This just sounds bothersome. A clipboard should really be machine-wide, that’s the purpose of it. Although I can understand the reticence there, what with password managers. I would argue that, to achieve that sort of security, there should be a separate, “secure” clipboard that only enrolled applications can access - and enrollment should be left up to the user, not the application developer.

      • neclimdul@lemmy.world
        22·
        2 days ago

        For me it’s been such a night and day experience it’s hard to imagine needing to explain why Wayland has been better. But I’ll try.

        The big thing that got me to switch was actual multi-monitor support. X has a bunch of hacks that “work” but it’s a mess and constantly broke for me. I’d just randomly log in and it was broken and I’d spend a day in xrand a x11 conf files re-building it from scratch for no apparent reason. Wayland multi-monitor has just worked for years now. It’s also real mutlidisplay support and really quite good.

        Ive seen complaints about Nvidia but even with them dragging their heels I’ve had a better experience with their drivers on Wayland. Probably tied again to multi monitor bit it’s just been smoother and I notice if I accidentally log in to an X session even on a single monitor setup because things are clunky and features missing.

        Anecdotally DEs feel like they start faster and work smoother. I saw fewer crashes after switching as well. The crashing might be better these days then but I don’t see a reason to test it.

        For the sake transparency, it’s not perfect. Compatibility really has been great and I struggle to tell what’s not native. But I mean this is Linux desktop and there are challenges regardless of your choices.

        I enjoyed guake terminal. It’s a bit troublesome to make work well.

        The one other thing that’s been troublesome is some screen capture stuff. Honestly the screen sharing in Wayland lovely and so much better when it work.

        But some programs do their own thing and want full desktop control and that’s a struggle. For example moonlight/sunshine require what seems to be some extra tinkering. Similarly screen collaboration apps that try to do the full control thing tend to not work well or at all.

        • non_burglar@lemmy.world
          3·
          2 days ago

          Thanks for the response!

          it’s hard to imagine needing to explain why Wayland has been better

          I don’t really understand what you mean here, sounds like you’re describing a vibe, but that’s valid.

          I have a multi-monitor setup with xfce and while it’s nothing to write home about, it works. Of course, I don’t need HDR. I guess my use case isn’t very demanding that way.

          I have a wayland/gnome tablet because touchscreen, and I don’t see an appreciable difference in startup time, bit I have no empirical data on this.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      1314·
      3 days ago

      If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn’t be actively working to switch.

      I’m laughing in Systemd.

  • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
    518·
    3 days ago

    As someone who likes X11, Wayland works fine. To say it has so many things wrong is a self report. People like you make shit up about Wayland because you had some unrelated issue years ago. Just give a rest.

    • ExtremeUnicorn@feddit.org
      1210·
      3 days ago
      • Try using software with a lower resolution on a 4K display (e.g. laptop) without it displaying as a small 1:1 pixel box for ants
      • Try typing uppercase letters on a mobile device over KDEConnect on Wayland
      • Try remapping any key on your keyboard to print a different character on another layer
      • Try using an older Nvidia card that doesn’t get proprietary drivers on a system that wouldn’t need them

      Yeah, we’re just inventing shit all the time…

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    27·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • wer2@lemmy.zip
      31·
      3 days ago

      Well… Unless those blocking bugs relate to getting new Wayland protocols approved.

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
        61·
        2 days ago

        you don’t need approval to make a protocol, make an implementation and just use it yourself

  • mub@lemmy.ml
    295·
    3 days ago

    Wayland development continues to push forward. Currently it works better than X11 in 95% or setups, and it won’t be long before it covers 99.5%. X11 is legacy now, and Wayland works perfectly for the vast majority of users and is only improving. The time to move on is coming.

    For legacy use cases there will be an alternative X11 DE you can use for a long time yet.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      6·
      2 days ago

      There are few Wayland only apps today. But as the percentage of Linux desktop users on Wayland goes over 80 percent, that will change.

      And today, GUI toolkits and desktop environments have to limit features to those that will work in both environments. But not for long.

      My guess is that it will be totally impractical to use an X11 only desktop 3 years from now. 5 for sure. In fact, I bet few people will even have Xwayland installed 5 years from now. To run what? Xfig? Netscape?

      But certainly it will still be possible to run an X server. Xorg itself will still probably run fine. It already uses KMS and DRI from the kernel and those may not change much. And I am sure at least a few zealots will still be pushing XLibre a decade from now. And Wayback will almost certainly let you run an X11 desktop for many, many years to come for those “legacy use cases” you talk about. Like running CDE for a couple of hours.

      Probably the most interesting development has been Phoenix. They have floated the idea of having an X11 first environment (eg. using an X11 window manager) that can run Wayland apps too. If that actually happens, I am sure it will find some fans. If you have spent 15 years fine-tuning your FVWM or Xmonad config, you won’t want to give it up.

      It will be interesting to see where the BSD world goes with all of this. I think FreeBSD will go Wayland. But NetBSD and OpenBSD could be x11 holdouts. But the Wayland-only app problem will impact everyone. Time will tell.

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    192·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • northernscrub@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      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 /multimon

      This 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-keyboard allows 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.

  • gr3q@lemmy.ml
    111·
    3 days ago

    None of the x11 sessions in any DE were as smooth video output-wise as the Wayland sessions I tried, especially with multiple monitors, they always had various problems and stutter.

    That is why I switched to Wayland in the end.

  • jtzl@lemmy.zip
    113·
    3 days ago

    In fairness, x11 is a bit of a dumpster fire and has been as long as I’ve used Linux (since 2003).

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    6·
    2 days ago

    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.