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KDE Plasma 6.0 Is Enabling Wayland by Default

172 points by istotex 3y ago

creesch 3y ago
For more background in general I recommend the blog of one of the main developers, for this wayland news specifically this article: https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayland-by-default-de-framed-breeze-hdr-games-rectangle-screen-recording/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayla... This article from september goes into wayland (and KDE) much deeper and is worth a read: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-thing/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...
- schmorptron 3y ago
  The pointieststick blog is great in general, even though I don't use KDE I enjoy reading the posts that they post on there!
MarcusE1W 3y ago
I use KDE for a year now with Wayland. Works absolutely fine for me. My requirements are probably simple, just a laptop but it works.
- espadrine 3y ago
  The one major missing Wayland support in KDE is the font viewer, from what I can tell.
- imiric 3y ago
  I'm surprised whenever I hear Wayland works flawlessly for someone, since I've tried using it on the NixOS unstable channel for a few releases now, and there are a few major bugs that make it unusable for me. A show stopping one is that the bottom panel is stuck in the middle of the screen, with no way to move it down that I could find, and clicks register in completely different parts of the screen. It's difficult to explain. I noticed this starts happening after I start an Xorg session for the first time, which for some reason always switches back to the default after an upgrade. If someone knows what bug this is and how to fix it, I'd appreciate it. Then there are other minor issues like the cursor being tiny when hovering over a Firefox window, which I guess uses Xwayland(?). The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland, and I need to switch to an entirely different app ecosystem, is insane to me. I'm willing to make the jump if it offered a truly better experience than X, but I've yet to see that.
  - tux3 3y ago
    Firefox supports wayland, IIRC it wants an env var and some about:config flags Some of the other bug might be nix-specific? On debian sid with KDE I haven't seen those, at least
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Using an unstable channel and being surprised at bugs is kind of your own making... I also use Wayland + KDE full time and have not experienced any of the issues you described.
    - Cu3PO42 3y ago
      I run KDE on NixOS unstable as well and have also not experienced any of the issues the grandparent is describing.
    - imiric 3y ago
      NixOS unstable is more of a rolling release than an equivalent unstable version on other distros. I've also reproduced these issues on Void Linux, and on 3 separate machines. So it's not a hardware or distro specific issue, nor particularly rare.
  - miloignis 3y ago
    I recommend swapping your nix package to firefox-wayland -I've been using it for quite a while and it's been great. For me, it's been a huge improvement over X - thr lack of screen tearing when srolling and playing videos is huge. If an app uses one of the normal GUI toolkits, they don't normally have to do anything crazy to support wayland, so I'd be suprised if you need to swap to a whole new ecosystem (and there's always XWayland for those that do).
    - imiric 3y ago
      Thanks, I'll try that, but the thing is that I haven't experienced screen tearing on X for many years now, on Intel, AMD or Nvidia cards, and even on high refresh rate displays (90/120hz). Sometimes when plugging in a second monitor I need to force full-screen composition with Nvidia cards to get rid of tearing, but I can always set this permanently in a config file, I just haven't gotten around to it. I really haven't had major gripes with X for many years. It mostly just works, and is rock solid. Long gone are the days when you had to manually craft the perfect config file depending on your setup. It also works great with multiple monitors, though I think there are still some color management issues, which don't particularly bother me, and lack of HDR, obviously. Plus the client/server architecture is super useful, to this day. IME Wayland feels like a usability regression, forcing me to change many of the programs I use, and it has critical issues, which seemingly only affect me...
mvelbaum 3y ago
KDE is pretty feature-rich, but it is just ugly. Look at the poor use of spacing/margins, the ugly black & white icons, the ugly font, the square edges, and just the overall look & feel. It needs a major face-lift. I dislike the attempts to dumb down GNOME but KDE being ugly makes it really hard to switch to.
- creesch 3y ago
  I am not really sure how your comment is a reaction to mine? Having said that, opinions are opinions. I much prefer KDEs UI/UX choices over those made by Gnome and have no problem with the general look and feel of the interface.
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  I don’t care as long as something is capable of solving issues, but for those who have the needs to have pretty DE, kde has a lot of custom themes and customisability, otherwise its just a boring old guy complaining at the sky, the linux world is better off without those kind of people
- brnt 3y ago
  Excellent spacing: no useless wide margins. Stylish icons that can blend in with various themes, which are clear and easily distinguishable. Font: most distro's actually default to Noto, not KDEs own. But you know what: this you can change, KDE didn't remove any and all options for customisation after all. You can pry Plasma out my cold, dead hands. Gnome, Macos, and Windows: now that's amateur hour.
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    To be honest, there are many places in the "refreshed" Breeze look'n'feel and the Kirigami suite of apps in general that could really use some margins. It doesn't need a lot of padding, just a pixel here and a pixel there - not to make it less dense, but to make it look cleaner and consistent. To my eye, screenshots from the blog post look worse in this regard than Plasma 5.
    - 3y ago
roenxi 3y ago
> - Plasma's start time is up to a few seconds faster. On the one hand, this is impressive. On the other, this is a vague indictment of modern software. Plasma logs you in, draws a background and the taskbar thing across the screen. There shouldn't be seconds involved in that to shave. This must be a recurring feature, every few years someone goes through and fixes up load times.
- theHamsta 3y ago
  They mentioned that the culprit for those additional load times was loading all the search backend for their application launcher which they deferred to the moment when there was actually the first search query (still shouldn't take multiple seconds)
  - Topfi 3y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. Opinions will differ, of course and I cannot say whether the time required is justified or calls for optimizations, but personally, I view that moving this to the first search query is less elegant than having it happen during the initial start, when users are more accustomed to waiting a bit longer. With the new setup, the initial query will be less seamless than future ones at a time when the user is actually trying to accomplish something, leading to a degraded experience as far as I am concerned. But, as per usual, distros will make differing choices in this regard, and we shall see what ends up being shipped as the default in most cases.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I’m surprised they wouldn’t go for “kick off it off early in the process but allow the desktop to load without it” instead.
  - j1elo 3y ago
    I'm surprised they didn't go to a more clever solution such as "start loading it as soon as the most core components have already loaded, and CPU usage falls below 30% during 3 to 5 consecutive seconds". That'd seem to me like a sweet spot between what was before (making the whole system startup slower), and what you mention will be now (probably making the first search to load noticeably slower).
adamkf 3y ago
I've been using Wayland KDE on my gaming machine recently, it somehow made my cursor movement stutter. Switching to KDE X11 or Gnome Wayland solved the issue. I hope they address this kind of thing prior to making it a default.
- ta988 3y ago
  Is it a Nvidia? They are notoriously buggy.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    I've been using Wayland + KDE (currently Plasma 5.27.8) for a very long time now on my machine with an Nvidia GPU (first a 1080TI, then a 4090). There are annoying bugs, but they're not show stoppers. I'm not someone who whines about problems like these, especially because I'm at the forefront of the Linux desktop, on a known-bad combination, so there are bound to be bugs :P For example, a persistent bug that hasn't gone away in all this time is flaky wake from sleep. Sometimes, one of my monitors breaks in such a way that it drops down to 640x480 res and can't be changed back unless I do a list of different rituals. Another bug is that KDE's "Night Color" feature doesn't work, and whenever it turns on it completely freezes the display every few minutes (although unfreezing it is just a matter of pressing the Meta key, so it's not a big deal). I keep sleep and Night Color on, even though they're broken in the hopes that I'll one day wake up to an update that fixed them. I'm 99% sure those are Nvidia driver bugs, and Nvidia has been working to improve their Wayland support recently (for example, there's an upcoming Night Light fix that I'm excited for: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/gnome-night-light-nvidia-support https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/gnome-night-light-nvidia...). Being able to follow progress like this is fun for me. I'm sure there are some other issues that I'm not remembering, but overall the desktop is completely 100% usable and reliable (for both working and gaming). My only other machine is a laptop, and that too is running KDE+Wayland (though no Nvidia). I have not switched back to X11 once in the months (year?) since I switched to Wayland, and have not missed anything. EDIT: also, I should mention that I'm on Fedora Kinoite. I feel like a lot of problems people have with KDE/Wayland/Nvidia comes down to bad configuration somewhere. If you're on a similar machine, I recommend you try switching to Kinoite since it's designed to just work out of the box, and is pretty much impossible to break.
IshKebab 3y ago
Does screen capture actually work reliably yet? I hope they leave X11 as an option until it does.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Working pretty well for me on Debian 12 with an RX 6600
- chmod775 3y ago
  For me it has been working flawlessly on manjaro's out-of-the-box wayland setup for a year.
- wasmitnetzen 3y ago
  Has been working for me on Kubuntu both on my Intel Iris Xe GPU on my laptop and my RX 6700XT on my desktop for a while now, probably since 22.10.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Conscat 3y ago
  It does not in the general case. For KDE, it works for some programs, but not all of the common ones including Discord.
  - patrakov 3y ago
    There is a project to fix this. https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/ https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/ https://invent.kde.org/system/xwaylandvideobridge https://invent.kde.org/system/xwaylandvideobridge
  - vetinari 3y ago
    It does work for programs that use pipewire portal. It doesn't work those, that call XGetImage on X11 root window and think, that they will get away with it.
- 3y ago
The_Colonel 3y ago
The default in KDE doesn't matter much, as opposed to what default will the distros set.
- dralley 3y ago
  Most distros have been defaulting to Wayland with GNOME for years at this point. I wouldn't hold your breath for them to wait around on Xorg for KDE despite upstream now switching.
smallerfish 3y ago
It's been kind of buried, but KDE has the first steps of tiling mode built into it now, in addition to the default screen edge tiling (on KDE 5.27.8 on up). Meta + T to enable tile editor. Shift + window drag to move a window into a tile. Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.
- senectus1 3y ago
  Oh wow.. I've been using KDE for a few months and didn't know that! thanks!
- shawnz 3y ago
  I'm glad to see a tiling window manager that makes effective use of the mouse, I think it is an underappreciated input device for that use case
  - jchw 3y ago
    SwayWM at least enables some use of mouse for editing the layout: Meta+left drag to re-arrange/group/ungroup/etc. tiles, for example, and of course, Meta+right drag to resize as in i3wm. To me, even just having the Meta+left drag option seems like a significant step up.
- ollien 3y ago
  I really wanted to try plasma with i3 but the big problem I ran into was that different monitors can't have independent workspaces, which was a deal breaker :(
- bee_rider 3y ago
  More tiling managers is always great! The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever. But at least new people will be able to give it a try. I’m not sure how much work is involved in replacing the window manager inside a desktop environment. It would be nice to just drop sway into kde. Dunno if that is possible though.
dinckelman 3y ago
I've been using Wayland as default since 5.22 came out, and don't really have any desire to go back
spandextwins 3y ago
HDR is key. Finally!
- imiric 3y ago
  This is huge, but only for games(?). I'm looking forward to video support as well. HDR is a major missing feature in Linux, which makes it not ideal for HTPC usage.
oh_nice_marmot 3y ago
Anyone tried KRDP yet? I am very interested to know if they managed to do a good job. One of the main reasons I went back to Gnome was the out of box support for RDP.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  works, but now opens another window for RDP session
gbtw 3y ago
Any recommendations for KM software that works with wayland (like barrier / synergy)? Thats been holding me back so far.
- sintax 3y ago
  There's a new fork of barrier called input leap (not to be confused with the leap motion), https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap with work on getting Wayland support in shape. Not sure how far the support is atm, but the gnome 45 release notes mentioned "Wayland support for Input Leap" (https://release.gnome.org/45/ https://release.gnome.org/45/) Wayland tracker issue, https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/109 https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/109
coherence73 3y ago
Wayland has a few glitches, but in general it's good to use. For example, it doesn't have an API to get current cursor position (which breaks keepassxc's browser popup, goldendict's query popup), an API (which most compositor implements) to get current window state, which makes me unable to find an alternative of autokey (kwin script can do this, though, but it lacks the ability to execute arbitary commands..). On the other hand, I don't see a killing feature that drives people switch to wayland.. (HDR can be one, but I don't use it) I mean, yeah X11 is old and unmaintained, but it WORKS.
- miloignis 3y ago
  Lack of screentearing is the killer app for me. The only GUI programs I run are Firefox, a terminal (foot or wezterm), and video games, so everything works and works better (I dont want screentearing for any of those 3) for me under Wayland.
  - reidrac 3y ago
    I just run Compton as compositor and the tearing is gone, which makes hard to move to Wayland and having to solve issues that I currently don't have. I used it first with XFCE and later with i3.
- chlorion 3y ago
  The lack of screen tearing is a big feature to me, but sometimes people get x11 to work without this being a problem. The other feature for me is security. Sandboxes can access the wayland socket and run GUI stuff, without the ability to read the entire screen or run commands that effect outside of the sandbox. The wayland socket is a unix socket, exists as a regular file. Gating access to the socket works like any other file. X11 has some interesting issues here. It creates an "abstract socket". These exists as files on the file system, but they are not regular files. An interesting exmaple: A sandbox that starts with a fresh root and bind mounts in only what is required. Even when you don't bind the socket into the sandbox, the sandbox can still access it! There are ways to prevent sandboxes from accessing the x11 socket, but this is definitely not what I would have expected! With wayland, if the socket is not bind'ed into the sandbox, it can't be accessed, it behaves as expected! This might not seem that important, but these features bring Linux desktop out of the 1900s with regards to security. Software like flatpak would not be able to effectively sandbox GUIs at all without wayland, a feature other platforms have supported for at least a decade or more! The Linux desktop isn't making great use of this and related technology yet, on the standard distro, by default, applications can read your GPG keys and other important data, or even delete it. Wayland is a step towards fixing this!
lxe 3y ago
Wayland doesn't fractionally scale chrome, discord, vscode, spotify, beeper, and other appimage and non-native applications. So even if KDE enables it by default, most users will have to switch back to X.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Isn't that more of an Electron problem than a Wayland problem? (honest question, no snark intended. It looks like those are all electron based apps)
  - vetinari 3y ago
    Not even electron problem; maintainers of these apps problem. Chrome and Electron do support wayland nowadays. Just some app authors don't care.
- brobinson 3y ago
  >Wayland doesn't fractionally scale chrome, chromium, chromium, chromium, chromium, and other appimage and non-native applications. The absolute state of desktop applications in 2023. Everything is a web browser. God help us all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dheera 3y ago
  Also, Chinese input breaks in Chrome on Wayland and they still haven't fixed this bug after 2+ years. Also, Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland. So I'm still stuck with Xorg.
  - k0k0 3y ago
    I have had no issues with Chinese IME (either ibus or fcitx5) using GTK4, iow using the --gtk-version=4 chrome flag.
  - 3y ago
vlovich123 3y ago
I enabled wayland recently and there’s been a lot of annoyances to the point that I wonder why I bother considering X11 works without these issues. For example: * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta) * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers) * I thought it was an acceleration thing, but even with HW acceleration fixed Chrome has a bug where the mouse pointer leaves behind white speckling when mousing over on a dark background. VSCode doesn’t have this issue. None of these issues appear in X and this is from someone who thought Wayland is the right way to go (eg you didn’t see this kind of story on Mac when they switched to HW accelerated compositing).
- npteljes 3y ago
  Another regression is that KeePassX/C AutoType doesn't work with Wayland, so now instead of a simple CTRL+V in KeePassXC, I have to separately copy and paste the user and the pass. I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
- jwells89 3y ago
  Maybe Firefox needing flags is a per-distro thing? I’ll have to check and make sure but I think Firefox works with Waylad sessions out of the box on my Fedora laptop. That’s using an Intel iGPU instead of an Nvidia GPU though so maybe that’s also a factor.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I think that's right. To make it work on Nvidia you need to go through extra hoops in a bunch of ways (turning on config flags, installing alternative HW decoding libraries etc). Part of this story is definitely Nvidia & Wayland teams being at ends with each other for some reason so anyone on Intel & AMD GPUs probably don't see a lot of this which is kind of surprising because 10 years ago Nvidia was the only one with well behaving drivers on Linux.
lyu07282 3y ago
last I checked nvidia on wayland was all kinds of broken, especially with multiple displays, can't rotate a display either. So I assume that has all been fixed then? (j/k)
wetpaws 3y ago
[dead]
throwaway914 3y ago
GNOME vs KDE race to HDR, VRR, and Wayland-only. :-) I am here for this.
AzzyHN 3y ago
Fractional scaling is ugly with XWayland apps, which yes isn't a Wayland issue per se but...
- ColonelPhantom 3y ago
  KDE doesn't have this problem, actually. At least it's not uglier than X11, since by default (since 5.27 or so) it uses X11's DPI scaling for Xwayland apps by default. You can change that under Display settings if it doesn't work for your apps and you need to revert to ugly blurry upscaling like GNOME and sway do.
dopeboy 3y ago
I think I'll wait for another cycle or two before moving to Wayland. Seems like there's a long tail of small issues that need polishing. The zoom screenshare one scared me off a long time ago.
LAC-Tech 3y ago
I really like KDE. I feel like it's what the windows DE wants to be when it grows up. Everything is configurable and it's usually fairly obvious how to do so. Coming from a long time 'minimalist' linux users, my biggest issue with it is that there's no ~/.config/kde that you can just copy between machines and get set up the way you like it. It's spread out all over the show.
e-brake 3y ago
This is great. Running Wayland has only been getting better. Hoping this transition to default will get the attention of developers at Zoom, and they can get screensharing to work in their native app without resorting to browser mode or some virtual camera hack. My biggest gripe for sure.

172 points by istotex 3y ago

For more background in general I recommend the blog of one of the main developers, for this wayland news specifically this article: https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayland-by-default-de-framed-breeze-hdr-games-rectangle-screen-recording/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayla... This article from september goes into wayland (and KDE) much deeper and is worth a read: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-thing/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...

schmorptron 3y ago
The pointieststick blog is great in general, even though I don't use KDE I enjoy reading the posts that they post on there!

MarcusE1W 3y ago

I use KDE for a year now with Wayland. Works absolutely fine for me. My requirements are probably simple, just a laptop but it works.

espadrine 3y ago
The one major missing Wayland support in KDE is the font viewer, from what I can tell.
imiric 3y ago
I'm surprised whenever I hear Wayland works flawlessly for someone, since I've tried using it on the NixOS unstable channel for a few releases now, and there are a few major bugs that make it unusable for me. A show stopping one is that the bottom panel is stuck in the middle of the screen, with no way to move it down that I could find, and clicks register in completely different parts of the screen. It's difficult to explain. I noticed this starts happening after I start an Xorg session for the first time, which for some reason always switches back to the default after an upgrade. If someone knows what bug this is and how to fix it, I'd appreciate it. Then there are other minor issues like the cursor being tiny when hovering over a Firefox window, which I guess uses Xwayland(?). The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland, and I need to switch to an entirely different app ecosystem, is insane to me. I'm willing to make the jump if it offered a truly better experience than X, but I've yet to see that.
- tux3 3y ago
  Firefox supports wayland, IIRC it wants an env var and some about:config flags Some of the other bug might be nix-specific? On debian sid with KDE I haven't seen those, at least
- Alupis 3y ago
  Using an unstable channel and being surprised at bugs is kind of your own making... I also use Wayland + KDE full time and have not experienced any of the issues you described.
  - Cu3PO42 3y ago
    I run KDE on NixOS unstable as well and have also not experienced any of the issues the grandparent is describing.
  - imiric 3y ago
    NixOS unstable is more of a rolling release than an equivalent unstable version on other distros. I've also reproduced these issues on Void Linux, and on 3 separate machines. So it's not a hardware or distro specific issue, nor particularly rare.
- miloignis 3y ago
  I recommend swapping your nix package to firefox-wayland -I've been using it for quite a while and it's been great. For me, it's been a huge improvement over X - thr lack of screen tearing when srolling and playing videos is huge. If an app uses one of the normal GUI toolkits, they don't normally have to do anything crazy to support wayland, so I'd be suprised if you need to swap to a whole new ecosystem (and there's always XWayland for those that do).
  - imiric 3y ago
    Thanks, I'll try that, but the thing is that I haven't experienced screen tearing on X for many years now, on Intel, AMD or Nvidia cards, and even on high refresh rate displays (90/120hz). Sometimes when plugging in a second monitor I need to force full-screen composition with Nvidia cards to get rid of tearing, but I can always set this permanently in a config file, I just haven't gotten around to it. I really haven't had major gripes with X for many years. It mostly just works, and is rock solid. Long gone are the days when you had to manually craft the perfect config file depending on your setup. It also works great with multiple monitors, though I think there are still some color management issues, which don't particularly bother me, and lack of HDR, obviously. Plus the client/server architecture is super useful, to this day. IME Wayland feels like a usability regression, forcing me to change many of the programs I use, and it has critical issues, which seemingly only affect me...

mvelbaum 3y ago

KDE is pretty feature-rich, but it is just ugly. Look at the poor use of spacing/margins, the ugly black & white icons, the ugly font, the square edges, and just the overall look & feel. It needs a major face-lift. I dislike the attempts to dumb down GNOME but KDE being ugly makes it really hard to switch to.

creesch 3y ago
I am not really sure how your comment is a reaction to mine? Having said that, opinions are opinions. I much prefer KDEs UI/UX choices over those made by Gnome and have no problem with the general look and feel of the interface.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
I don’t care as long as something is capable of solving issues, but for those who have the needs to have pretty DE, kde has a lot of custom themes and customisability, otherwise its just a boring old guy complaining at the sky, the linux world is better off without those kind of people
brnt 3y ago
Excellent spacing: no useless wide margins. Stylish icons that can blend in with various themes, which are clear and easily distinguishable. Font: most distro's actually default to Noto, not KDEs own. But you know what: this you can change, KDE didn't remove any and all options for customisation after all. You can pry Plasma out my cold, dead hands. Gnome, Macos, and Windows: now that's amateur hour.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  To be honest, there are many places in the "refreshed" Breeze look'n'feel and the Kirigami suite of apps in general that could really use some margins. It doesn't need a lot of padding, just a pixel here and a pixel there - not to make it less dense, but to make it look cleaner and consistent. To my eye, screenshots from the blog post look worse in this regard than Plasma 5.
  - 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago

> - Plasma's start time is up to a few seconds faster. On the one hand, this is impressive. On the other, this is a vague indictment of modern software. Plasma logs you in, draws a background and the taskbar thing across the screen. There shouldn't be seconds involved in that to shave. This must be a recurring feature, every few years someone goes through and fixes up load times.

theHamsta 3y ago
They mentioned that the culprit for those additional load times was loading all the search backend for their application launcher which they deferred to the moment when there was actually the first search query (still shouldn't take multiple seconds)
- Topfi 3y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Opinions will differ, of course and I cannot say whether the time required is justified or calls for optimizations, but personally, I view that moving this to the first search query is less elegant than having it happen during the initial start, when users are more accustomed to waiting a bit longer. With the new setup, the initial query will be less seamless than future ones at a time when the user is actually trying to accomplish something, leading to a degraded experience as far as I am concerned. But, as per usual, distros will make differing choices in this regard, and we shall see what ends up being shipped as the default in most cases.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I’m surprised they wouldn’t go for “kick off it off early in the process but allow the desktop to load without it” instead.
- j1elo 3y ago
  I'm surprised they didn't go to a more clever solution such as "start loading it as soon as the most core components have already loaded, and CPU usage falls below 30% during 3 to 5 consecutive seconds". That'd seem to me like a sweet spot between what was before (making the whole system startup slower), and what you mention will be now (probably making the first search to load noticeably slower).

adamkf 3y ago

I've been using Wayland KDE on my gaming machine recently, it somehow made my cursor movement stutter. Switching to KDE X11 or Gnome Wayland solved the issue. I hope they address this kind of thing prior to making it a default.

ta988 3y ago
Is it a Nvidia? They are notoriously buggy.
- bogwog 3y ago
  I've been using Wayland + KDE (currently Plasma 5.27.8) for a very long time now on my machine with an Nvidia GPU (first a 1080TI, then a 4090). There are annoying bugs, but they're not show stoppers. I'm not someone who whines about problems like these, especially because I'm at the forefront of the Linux desktop, on a known-bad combination, so there are bound to be bugs :P For example, a persistent bug that hasn't gone away in all this time is flaky wake from sleep. Sometimes, one of my monitors breaks in such a way that it drops down to 640x480 res and can't be changed back unless I do a list of different rituals. Another bug is that KDE's "Night Color" feature doesn't work, and whenever it turns on it completely freezes the display every few minutes (although unfreezing it is just a matter of pressing the Meta key, so it's not a big deal). I keep sleep and Night Color on, even though they're broken in the hopes that I'll one day wake up to an update that fixed them. I'm 99% sure those are Nvidia driver bugs, and Nvidia has been working to improve their Wayland support recently (for example, there's an upcoming Night Light fix that I'm excited for: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/gnome-night-light-nvidia-support https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/gnome-night-light-nvidia...). Being able to follow progress like this is fun for me. I'm sure there are some other issues that I'm not remembering, but overall the desktop is completely 100% usable and reliable (for both working and gaming). My only other machine is a laptop, and that too is running KDE+Wayland (though no Nvidia). I have not switched back to X11 once in the months (year?) since I switched to Wayland, and have not missed anything. EDIT: also, I should mention that I'm on Fedora Kinoite. I feel like a lot of problems people have with KDE/Wayland/Nvidia comes down to bad configuration somewhere. If you're on a similar machine, I recommend you try switching to Kinoite since it's designed to just work out of the box, and is pretty much impossible to break.

IshKebab 3y ago

Does screen capture actually work reliably yet? I hope they leave X11 as an option until it does.

whalesalad 3y ago
Working pretty well for me on Debian 12 with an RX 6600
chmod775 3y ago
For me it has been working flawlessly on manjaro's out-of-the-box wayland setup for a year.
wasmitnetzen 3y ago
Has been working for me on Kubuntu both on my Intel Iris Xe GPU on my laptop and my RX 6700XT on my desktop for a while now, probably since 22.10.
deleted 3y ago
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Conscat 3y ago
It does not in the general case. For KDE, it works for some programs, but not all of the common ones including Discord.
- patrakov 3y ago
  There is a project to fix this. https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/ https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/ https://invent.kde.org/system/xwaylandvideobridge https://invent.kde.org/system/xwaylandvideobridge
- vetinari 3y ago
  It does work for programs that use pipewire portal. It doesn't work those, that call XGetImage on X11 root window and think, that they will get away with it.
3y ago

The_Colonel 3y ago

The default in KDE doesn't matter much, as opposed to what default will the distros set.

dralley 3y ago
Most distros have been defaulting to Wayland with GNOME for years at this point. I wouldn't hold your breath for them to wait around on Xorg for KDE despite upstream now switching.

smallerfish 3y ago

It's been kind of buried, but KDE has the first steps of tiling mode built into it now, in addition to the default screen edge tiling (on KDE 5.27.8 on up). Meta + T to enable tile editor. Shift + window drag to move a window into a tile. Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.

senectus1 3y ago
Oh wow.. I've been using KDE for a few months and didn't know that! thanks!
shawnz 3y ago
I'm glad to see a tiling window manager that makes effective use of the mouse, I think it is an underappreciated input device for that use case
- jchw 3y ago
  SwayWM at least enables some use of mouse for editing the layout: Meta+left drag to re-arrange/group/ungroup/etc. tiles, for example, and of course, Meta+right drag to resize as in i3wm. To me, even just having the Meta+left drag option seems like a significant step up.
ollien 3y ago
I really wanted to try plasma with i3 but the big problem I ran into was that different monitors can't have independent workspaces, which was a deal breaker :(
bee_rider 3y ago
More tiling managers is always great! The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever. But at least new people will be able to give it a try. I’m not sure how much work is involved in replacing the window manager inside a desktop environment. It would be nice to just drop sway into kde. Dunno if that is possible though.

dinckelman 3y ago

I've been using Wayland as default since 5.22 came out, and don't really have any desire to go back

spandextwins 3y ago

HDR is key. Finally!

imiric 3y ago
This is huge, but only for games(?). I'm looking forward to video support as well. HDR is a major missing feature in Linux, which makes it not ideal for HTPC usage.

oh_nice_marmot 3y ago

Anyone tried KRDP yet? I am very interested to know if they managed to do a good job. One of the main reasons I went back to Gnome was the out of box support for RDP.

Zardoz84 3y ago
works, but now opens another window for RDP session

gbtw 3y ago

Any recommendations for KM software that works with wayland (like barrier / synergy)? Thats been holding me back so far.

sintax 3y ago
There's a new fork of barrier called input leap (not to be confused with the leap motion), https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap with work on getting Wayland support in shape. Not sure how far the support is atm, but the gnome 45 release notes mentioned "Wayland support for Input Leap" (https://release.gnome.org/45/ https://release.gnome.org/45/) Wayland tracker issue, https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/109 https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/109

coherence73 3y ago

Wayland has a few glitches, but in general it's good to use. For example, it doesn't have an API to get current cursor position (which breaks keepassxc's browser popup, goldendict's query popup), an API (which most compositor implements) to get current window state, which makes me unable to find an alternative of autokey (kwin script can do this, though, but it lacks the ability to execute arbitary commands..). On the other hand, I don't see a killing feature that drives people switch to wayland.. (HDR can be one, but I don't use it) I mean, yeah X11 is old and unmaintained, but it WORKS.

miloignis 3y ago
Lack of screentearing is the killer app for me. The only GUI programs I run are Firefox, a terminal (foot or wezterm), and video games, so everything works and works better (I dont want screentearing for any of those 3) for me under Wayland.
- reidrac 3y ago
  I just run Compton as compositor and the tearing is gone, which makes hard to move to Wayland and having to solve issues that I currently don't have. I used it first with XFCE and later with i3.
chlorion 3y ago
The lack of screen tearing is a big feature to me, but sometimes people get x11 to work without this being a problem. The other feature for me is security. Sandboxes can access the wayland socket and run GUI stuff, without the ability to read the entire screen or run commands that effect outside of the sandbox. The wayland socket is a unix socket, exists as a regular file. Gating access to the socket works like any other file. X11 has some interesting issues here. It creates an "abstract socket". These exists as files on the file system, but they are not regular files. An interesting exmaple: A sandbox that starts with a fresh root and bind mounts in only what is required. Even when you don't bind the socket into the sandbox, the sandbox can still access it! There are ways to prevent sandboxes from accessing the x11 socket, but this is definitely not what I would have expected! With wayland, if the socket is not bind'ed into the sandbox, it can't be accessed, it behaves as expected! This might not seem that important, but these features bring Linux desktop out of the 1900s with regards to security. Software like flatpak would not be able to effectively sandbox GUIs at all without wayland, a feature other platforms have supported for at least a decade or more! The Linux desktop isn't making great use of this and related technology yet, on the standard distro, by default, applications can read your GPG keys and other important data, or even delete it. Wayland is a step towards fixing this!

lxe 3y ago

Wayland doesn't fractionally scale chrome, discord, vscode, spotify, beeper, and other appimage and non-native applications. So even if KDE enables it by default, most users will have to switch back to X.

bloopernova 3y ago
Isn't that more of an Electron problem than a Wayland problem? (honest question, no snark intended. It looks like those are all electron based apps)
- vetinari 3y ago
  Not even electron problem; maintainers of these apps problem. Chrome and Electron do support wayland nowadays. Just some app authors don't care.
brobinson 3y ago
>Wayland doesn't fractionally scale chrome, chromium, chromium, chromium, chromium, and other appimage and non-native applications. The absolute state of desktop applications in 2023. Everything is a web browser. God help us all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dheera 3y ago
Also, Chinese input breaks in Chrome on Wayland and they still haven't fixed this bug after 2+ years. Also, Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland. So I'm still stuck with Xorg.
- k0k0 3y ago
  I have had no issues with Chinese IME (either ibus or fcitx5) using GTK4, iow using the --gtk-version=4 chrome flag.
- 3y ago

vlovich123 3y ago

I enabled wayland recently and there’s been a lot of annoyances to the point that I wonder why I bother considering X11 works without these issues. For example: * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta) * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers) * I thought it was an acceleration thing, but even with HW acceleration fixed Chrome has a bug where the mouse pointer leaves behind white speckling when mousing over on a dark background. VSCode doesn’t have this issue. None of these issues appear in X and this is from someone who thought Wayland is the right way to go (eg you didn’t see this kind of story on Mac when they switched to HW accelerated compositing).

npteljes 3y ago
Another regression is that KeePassX/C AutoType doesn't work with Wayland, so now instead of a simple CTRL+V in KeePassXC, I have to separately copy and paste the user and the pass. I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
jwells89 3y ago
Maybe Firefox needing flags is a per-distro thing? I’ll have to check and make sure but I think Firefox works with Waylad sessions out of the box on my Fedora laptop. That’s using an Intel iGPU instead of an Nvidia GPU though so maybe that’s also a factor.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I think that's right. To make it work on Nvidia you need to go through extra hoops in a bunch of ways (turning on config flags, installing alternative HW decoding libraries etc). Part of this story is definitely Nvidia & Wayland teams being at ends with each other for some reason so anyone on Intel & AMD GPUs probably don't see a lot of this which is kind of surprising because 10 years ago Nvidia was the only one with well behaving drivers on Linux.

lyu07282 3y ago

last I checked nvidia on wayland was all kinds of broken, especially with multiple displays, can't rotate a display either. So I assume that has all been fixed then? (j/k)

wetpaws 3y ago

[dead]

throwaway914 3y ago

GNOME vs KDE race to HDR, VRR, and Wayland-only. :-) I am here for this.

AzzyHN 3y ago

Fractional scaling is ugly with XWayland apps, which yes isn't a Wayland issue per se but...

ColonelPhantom 3y ago
KDE doesn't have this problem, actually. At least it's not uglier than X11, since by default (since 5.27 or so) it uses X11's DPI scaling for Xwayland apps by default. You can change that under Display settings if it doesn't work for your apps and you need to revert to ugly blurry upscaling like GNOME and sway do.

dopeboy 3y ago

I think I'll wait for another cycle or two before moving to Wayland. Seems like there's a long tail of small issues that need polishing. The zoom screenshare one scared me off a long time ago.

LAC-Tech 3y ago

I really like KDE. I feel like it's what the windows DE wants to be when it grows up. Everything is configurable and it's usually fairly obvious how to do so. Coming from a long time 'minimalist' linux users, my biggest issue with it is that there's no ~/.config/kde that you can just copy between machines and get set up the way you like it. It's spread out all over the show.

e-brake 3y ago

This is great. Running Wayland has only been getting better. Hoping this transition to default will get the attention of developers at Zoom, and they can get screensharing to work in their native app without resorting to browser mode or some virtual camera hack. My biggest gripe for sure.