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> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

by mkl 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
I'm using it right now on Nvidia. It 'works' for most Wayland/Nvidia things, but there are still a few things to note. The Good: - No weird xWayland flickering like GNOME - Desktop transitions never drop a frame, even with 1:1 trackpad gestures on my Magic Trackpad - The kwin implementation seems to be less picky/buggy than Mutter? Might just be my hardware config, but Wayland/Nvidia/GNOME would crash constantly for a number of reasons. It all came down to random gnome-shell segfaults that I couldn't debug. The Bad: - Compositing/alpha effects are somewhat broken (on GTK and Qt) - Sometimes a panel will stop responding or fail to render (or both) - krunner seems entirely broken Overall, I'd say it's running pretty well, and is probably better than GNOME for Nvidia users. Their work is cut out for them, and the Wayland-specific bugfixes are starting to roll in on a weekly basis. You'll probably have an even better experience if you aren't using Nvidia hardware.
- shmerl 4y ago
  I'd say for smooth desktop experience, Nvidia is a bad option in general (at least yet). They only very recently started caring about addressing Wayland support and a lot of things are rough becasue of that. Plus it will be a long time before their kernel driver is upstreamed, and a lot of the above depends on that. So I strongly recommend AMD for good modern Linux desktop experience.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I agree, but that doesn't make it any less valuable of a metric. Nvidia cards are extremely widespread, reporting the performance on Nvidia hardware does a good job of representing what a lot of people will experience. Furthermore, Nvidia made inroads for Wayland support years ago, GNOME just refused to adopt it. Nvidia's terms were always that Wayland implimentations could adopt EGLstreams whenever they wanted, and that GBM would not be considered an acceptable alternative until it was faster. Their so-called hostility towards the Linux desktop mostly amounts to not contributing to GNOME and making their drivers proprietary for so long. In that sense, they're about as evil as webkit contributors who don't fix x86-linux bugs.
    - shmerl 4y ago
      That whole GBM debacle was simply their masking of a deeper problem. They can't interoperate with the kernel properly because their driver module is not GPL compliant. And proper Wayland support relies on a lot of kernel (DRM) functionality. They have to do convoluted dance workarounds to address the above. Basically, Nvidia will never work really well on Wayland until their kernel driver is upstreamed. This year they finally decided to open source their kernel module. But it's still some road for them to get to upstreaming.
    - customkitchen 4y ago
      >GNOME just refused to adopt it No idea where you heard that information but it is extremely incorrect. See here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Mainline-EGLStream https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Mainline-EGLStrea... https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-EGLStreams-Mutt https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-EGLStreams-Mutt
    - bobajeff 4y ago
      >webkit contributors who don't fix x86-linux bugs. Webkit on Linux is in a very sad state. Currently can't watch videos on YouTube on Twitch. Not sure why.
shmerl 4y ago
I'm using it currently, including for gaming (AMD GPU). It works very well (at least for me) since may be a few months ago. Waiting for Wine to add native Wayland support.
wooque 4y ago
it runs better than GNOME that is for sure. You can't adjust scroll speed in GNOME. Bunch of applications are without titlebars, like Electron apps or MPV, because they refused to support kind of server (or compositor) side decorations. Some apps don't have proper icons (because they don't set properly app_id, but KDE works around that). They are also some weird GNOME specific glitches I didn't encountered in KDE or Sway (like Slack crashing when you try to bring it to foreground). Only problem I have with KDE is that it re-arranges windows when it comes back from sleep.
- shmerl 4y ago
  > Some apps don't have proper icons (because they don't set properly app_id, but KDE works around that). How exactly? I experienced such issue in KDE with Firefox for instance (since I'm using a beta version) and had to create a couple of custom .desktop files to address it.
blinkingled 4y ago
Most of my desktops run KDE on Wayland - it runs pretty well, especially latest version. All Intel or AMD GPUs - no nVidia though so can't talk about that part - however I have heard it is very usable. X11 apps like VLC run with fuzzy fonts though - Plasma 5.26 is going to address that to some extent. Then I would have no reason to run anything X11. VSCode needs electron switches to use Wayland but works fine after you do that. Firefox on Arch at least needed MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 but works really well after you do that.
tmtvl 4y ago
I switch between KDE Wayland and Awesome, my main pain point with Wayland specifically would be that my preferred video player (SMPlayer) has issues showing the video on top of its viewing area. Unfortunately KWin kept the silly Xorg "screens are views of part of a display" convention so multiscreen workspace switching remains the same. I had really hoped to be able to switch workspaces on any screen independently.

> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

by mkl 4y ago

> KDE, I have heard mixed things about, but can’t speak to. Does anyone here use KDE on Wayland currently? How well does it run? What are the pain points?

smoldesu 4y ago

I'm using it right now on Nvidia. It 'works' for most Wayland/Nvidia things, but there are still a few things to note. The Good: - No weird xWayland flickering like GNOME - Desktop transitions never drop a frame, even with 1:1 trackpad gestures on my Magic Trackpad - The kwin implementation seems to be less picky/buggy than Mutter? Might just be my hardware config, but Wayland/Nvidia/GNOME would crash constantly for a number of reasons. It all came down to random gnome-shell segfaults that I couldn't debug. The Bad: - Compositing/alpha effects are somewhat broken (on GTK and Qt) - Sometimes a panel will stop responding or fail to render (or both) - krunner seems entirely broken Overall, I'd say it's running pretty well, and is probably better than GNOME for Nvidia users. Their work is cut out for them, and the Wayland-specific bugfixes are starting to roll in on a weekly basis. You'll probably have an even better experience if you aren't using Nvidia hardware.

shmerl 4y ago
I'd say for smooth desktop experience, Nvidia is a bad option in general (at least yet). They only very recently started caring about addressing Wayland support and a lot of things are rough becasue of that. Plus it will be a long time before their kernel driver is upstreamed, and a lot of the above depends on that. So I strongly recommend AMD for good modern Linux desktop experience.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I agree, but that doesn't make it any less valuable of a metric. Nvidia cards are extremely widespread, reporting the performance on Nvidia hardware does a good job of representing what a lot of people will experience. Furthermore, Nvidia made inroads for Wayland support years ago, GNOME just refused to adopt it. Nvidia's terms were always that Wayland implimentations could adopt EGLstreams whenever they wanted, and that GBM would not be considered an acceptable alternative until it was faster. Their so-called hostility towards the Linux desktop mostly amounts to not contributing to GNOME and making their drivers proprietary for so long. In that sense, they're about as evil as webkit contributors who don't fix x86-linux bugs.
  - shmerl 4y ago
    That whole GBM debacle was simply their masking of a deeper problem. They can't interoperate with the kernel properly because their driver module is not GPL compliant. And proper Wayland support relies on a lot of kernel (DRM) functionality. They have to do convoluted dance workarounds to address the above. Basically, Nvidia will never work really well on Wayland until their kernel driver is upstreamed. This year they finally decided to open source their kernel module. But it's still some road for them to get to upstreaming.
  - customkitchen 4y ago
    >GNOME just refused to adopt it No idea where you heard that information but it is extremely incorrect. See here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Mainline-EGLStream https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Mainline-EGLStrea... https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-EGLStreams-Mutt https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-EGLStreams-Mutt
  - bobajeff 4y ago
    >webkit contributors who don't fix x86-linux bugs. Webkit on Linux is in a very sad state. Currently can't watch videos on YouTube on Twitch. Not sure why.

shmerl 4y ago

I'm using it currently, including for gaming (AMD GPU). It works very well (at least for me) since may be a few months ago. Waiting for Wine to add native Wayland support.

wooque 4y ago

it runs better than GNOME that is for sure. You can't adjust scroll speed in GNOME. Bunch of applications are without titlebars, like Electron apps or MPV, because they refused to support kind of server (or compositor) side decorations. Some apps don't have proper icons (because they don't set properly app_id, but KDE works around that). They are also some weird GNOME specific glitches I didn't encountered in KDE or Sway (like Slack crashing when you try to bring it to foreground). Only problem I have with KDE is that it re-arranges windows when it comes back from sleep.

shmerl 4y ago
> Some apps don't have proper icons (because they don't set properly app_id, but KDE works around that). How exactly? I experienced such issue in KDE with Firefox for instance (since I'm using a beta version) and had to create a couple of custom .desktop files to address it.

blinkingled 4y ago

Most of my desktops run KDE on Wayland - it runs pretty well, especially latest version. All Intel or AMD GPUs - no nVidia though so can't talk about that part - however I have heard it is very usable. X11 apps like VLC run with fuzzy fonts though - Plasma 5.26 is going to address that to some extent. Then I would have no reason to run anything X11. VSCode needs electron switches to use Wayland but works fine after you do that. Firefox on Arch at least needed MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 but works really well after you do that.

tmtvl 4y ago

I switch between KDE Wayland and Awesome, my main pain point with Wayland specifically would be that my preferred video player (SMPlayer) has issues showing the video on top of its viewing area. Unfortunately KWin kept the silly Xorg "screens are views of part of a display" convention so multiscreen workspace switching remains the same. I had really hoped to be able to switch workspaces on any screen independently.