cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39342270
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
The people who are most upset by this use LTS Debian and won’t even see the current version of Plasma until 2050
The KDE bug tracker now:
Apparently, this is hardly hyperbole. For example: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377162
Talk about arrogance. In the window paradigm, only a few desktops ever REQUIRED a similar look and feel for all windows. Apple was the worst offender for that. I suggest that if Edmundson wants a similar look and feel, he should go get himself a Mac and stop mucking up KDE.
From a quick look at the proposed patch - and obviously without having the full picture - it’s true that it would add some complexity. But it’s code for the sake of people’s convenience, not the other way around, right? IMHO, as long as:
- shading is off by default,
- users get a clear message about limitations and SSD/CSD complications before enabling it,
- the implementation doesn’t introduce impossible-to-maintain logic and limits some weird edge cases like resizing a shaded window, then it’s worth doing.
So there is no shading on KDE Wayland? This feature works in Labwc. Death by thousand papercuts…
I suppose not. Not yet.
I know people are particular about WMs, but having to minimize a window vs keeping the window decoration in place seems like a… very minor distinction.
Is the use case rearranging a ton of windows? Something like that?
“For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session”
So happy to read this as there is always somebody still claiming that “Wayland does not work” and “nobody wants to switch to Wayland” just because they have not.
Also great to see that the plan is for Wayland on FreeBSD as well so the Open Source desktops can stay aligned. GNOME on FreeBSD is more problematic, not because of Wayland but because of Systemd.
The problem isn’t really with Wayland not working though, it’s with other software not being caught up to work fully with wayland.
For example, in X, I can have my single screen windows work laptop display to my multi-monitor linux machine with remmina and be able to interact with the laptop as if it had multiple monitors.
Remmina cannot do this with Wayland as far as I have been able to determine.
Clearly not the fault of Wayland, but also kind of a pain in the ass that there are issues like this since some other maintainers/devs haven’t implemented what is required in their software yet.
Wayland dragging Linux nerds kicking and screaming into the 21st century
I do like Wayland but it still has some issues that are annoying:
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When using remote input solutions (e.g InputLeap) you have to approve the input capture, and you need a mouse and keyboard connected to the PC to do that, making it kind of pointless.
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Remote desktop also requires the same thing, like, what if I don’t have a mouse & keyboard attached? What if it is a PC you are accessing from another country? You can’t just fly back to approve the remote desktop request.
This needs to get fixed ASAP in my opinion, since people do need these tools and sometimes you can’t connect a mouse & kb to the PC to just approve the request.
InputLeap is the only thing that keeps me on X at the moment. Especially since I need it between a Linux host and a Windows client. It just doesn’t work if I use Plasma with Wayland unfortunately and honestly, the github page of InputLeap is everything but helpful.
Have you tried out Deskflow?
InputLeap is effectively abandoned and the maintainer has taken over Deskflow which has better Wayland support
No, I haven’t, but will check it out, thanks!
I didn’t know InputLeap is also abandoned. Heck, I moved to it from Barrier for the same reason :P
Hah yep, I started with Barrier too.
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Honestly for the best. X11 was great for what it was, but Wayland is the future. XWayland covers X11 apps that haven’t been ported yet.
Now I just wish Cinnamon would hurry up and move to fully default Wayland.
It may be the future, but it’s unusable for me.
I have a high dpi screen. Upscaling does not perfectly work for me in every program, but simply setting it to Full HD does work and looks fine.
However, when I set it to the lower resolution in Wayland, I have 50% of the display active with black bars all around.
So far, there seems to be no fix for this?
Same thing happens if you start older, lower resolution fullscreen apps (retro games and such).
Doesn’t work for me either. Wayland broke my volume keys, and my left ctrl and caps lock keys. Also makes jellyfin go black.
X11 just works…
Damn. I guess it’s finally goodbye window shade or goodbye Plasma. I really wish they’d figured out a solution.
I get it though. The edge cases will never be fixed until devs know what they are, and GNOME proved this is an effective way to find out.
I don’t even know what window shading is…. What is it?
It looks like it’s still being discussed:
The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:
allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.
It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.
It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.
And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.
As soon as I saw this i knew I had to go to the phoronix comments and bask in the shit flinging
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/1594957
For anyone curious
“KDE: We hate Unix.”
KDE:
“The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Xorg is a monolith with essentially one implementation. Wayland is a modular system with almost every component available from multiple sources.
Saying adopting Wayland means you “hate UNIX” is one of the least thoughtful arguments I can imagine.
If X11 is so good why is there no X12?
X11 is already perfect as it is. Everything left was fixed in the X11Rx releases.
One of the great aspects of Open Source is that you can continue to use any software you like for as long as you want. Enjoy Xorg (or your other favourite X11 server).
Of course, a majority of Xorg devs disagreed with you which is why they started Wayland to begin with. And a majority of desktop Linux users disagree with you now as three quarters of them have switched to Wayland.
Wayland offers a lot that X11 does not at this point. So, nobody is coming back. But if you are happy with X, stick with it.
You are going to lose access to a lot of apps though. There are very few Wayland only apps now but there are going to be many more in the coming years. And when toolkits like GTK5 go Wayland only, you may lose a some you already use.
But if you are happy with X, stick with it.
There is no Wayland on some of the systems I use.
Cool. Me too. And?
Despite all its shortcomings, I do believe Wayland is the future. Sooner or later, all the funky decorative quirks will be some relics of the past.
Maybe someday, they will be added back, and we’ll once again have that jelly window effect, but at the moment, people actually depend on this thing to do some work, even more true with the Windows exodus.
I’d rather that they focus at the risk of being dull rather than fumbling on this chance.
Yes, I know that popularity isn’t everything, but considering how big they (and GNOME) are, they can really make The Year of Linux Desktop™.
Wobbly windows is back already, as is The Cube.
God dammit, everytime I have to use wayland I find something that I need to use which doesn’t work.
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11 and not pretend just showing a desktop is all it needs to do?
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11
Unfortunately there’s always devs that refuse to change so long as their setup still works, even if there’s significantly better alternatives. The only option for dealing with them is to rip off the bandaid. Either they’ll put in the work to keep up or they’ll fall into obscurity
You’re so right:
- $thing isn’t perfectly complete so I won’t switch over my project
- but without your project, $thing can’t be perfectly complete
- idc lol
Do you have some examples? Most things I (and others) do are in the category “showing a desktop”, multiple desktops with different resolution / scaling / refresh rate, maybe opening a virtual monitor using krfb.
Wayland has been a complete game changer for me regarding performance and reliability (as soon as it hit a certain stability lol).
Yeah I second this. I’ve been on wayland for a few years now and while my needs are pretty standard I also regularly need slightly-off-the-beaten-path features. Not everything used to always work, but in the last, I want to say 18 months, I never found my needs lacking.
Multiple monitors work, adaptive sync works, mic / webcam works, screen / window sharing works, remote desktop and wayland forwarding works, etc.
That’s not to say everything is guaranteed to work all the time, but I am surprised to see people saying that even today they always find something fundamental that is broken when they attempt to switch.
