5 ms·

I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz. Until it hard crashed my ma

by elcritch 11mo ago

I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz. Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.

kronicum2025 11mo ago
KDE on Linux is the way. Extremely Stable.
- dmit 11mo ago
  Plasma is KDE. What are you trying to say? Edit: oh, I guess swapping FreeBSD for Linux? Yeah nah, I don't know GP, but I suspect this isn't a reason for them to switch OS just to solve this.
  - elcritch 11mo ago
    And KDE on X11 on FreeBSD seems pretty stable so far. Feels super snappy so far.
    - wkat4242 11mo ago
      It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
      - elcritch 11mo ago
        > What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. This! I didn't realize how much I wanted this. FreeBSD release base packages are stable but all the regular packages are super up to date. Plasma looks very updated and stable. I've tried rolling distros like Opensuse Tumble and Manjaro but eventually if you don't update them regularly you get a huge change and often many things change/break. Had your bluetooth speakers working finally? Now that's gone! On the other hand stable releases in linux distros also seem to fail. Didn't update your random Ubuntu server in the corner of the office for the last year? Well now the apt links are broken and down for the release so you can't update the current release so you can upgrade. > I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course. It's nice, many of the same basics I learned on freebsd 6 years ago all still magically work. ifconfig works even with ipv6. You learn two files and you can do most anything. I'm definitely gonna consider Freebsd for embedded devices if I can as well. You dint need buildroot or yocto as it's already part of the BSDs.
      - dmit 11mo ago
        > You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.05"; nixpkgs-unstable.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable" :)
        wkat4242 11mo ago
        I said 'most' :) and it goes for most of the mainstream distros. I wouldn't consider nix that, due to the complex configuration. As a corporate admin I do like declarative management at work but for home no. Even though FreeBSD has some aspects of it (you can turn stuff on and off in rc.conf)
o11c 11mo ago
Yes, Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop; unlike other Wayland complaints, this one fundamentally will never be fixed. This is unlike X11, where it was very common to recover from the inevitable single-component crashes.
- elcritch 11mo ago
  Ouch I didn’t know that.
  - redeeman 11mo ago
    its not true though, when a wayland compositor dies, the clients can simply reconnect once the compositor has started again. this is already implemented in KDE and Qt, and KDE contributed patches to GTK/Gnome(which they havenot merged yet i think). A crash of the wayland compositor does NOT mean a crash of your entire session, in fact it is more resilient than X11 in this way
- jtgeibel 11mo ago
  On the Qt side, it looks like Qt clients are able to survive a compositor crash since Qt 6.6. I haven't personally tried this, as I don't recall experiencing any kwin crashes in the last few years. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart As I understand it, in Wayland all the necessary state lives client side, so a client is free to wait around and connect to a new compositor. The compositor might not place the windows exactly where they were before, but there is nothing architecturally that forces clients to crash if the compositor crashes.
- ac29 11mo ago
  > Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop A single crash of what? I have used a Wayland only system for a long time and application-level crashes certainly don't bring down other applications much less the whole desktop.
  - 11mo ago

kronicum2025 11mo ago

KDE on Linux is the way. Extremely Stable.

dmit 11mo ago
Plasma is KDE. What are you trying to say? Edit: oh, I guess swapping FreeBSD for Linux? Yeah nah, I don't know GP, but I suspect this isn't a reason for them to switch OS just to solve this.
- elcritch 11mo ago
  And KDE on X11 on FreeBSD seems pretty stable so far. Feels super snappy so far.
  - wkat4242 11mo ago
    It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
    - elcritch 11mo ago
      > What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. This! I didn't realize how much I wanted this. FreeBSD release base packages are stable but all the regular packages are super up to date. Plasma looks very updated and stable. I've tried rolling distros like Opensuse Tumble and Manjaro but eventually if you don't update them regularly you get a huge change and often many things change/break. Had your bluetooth speakers working finally? Now that's gone! On the other hand stable releases in linux distros also seem to fail. Didn't update your random Ubuntu server in the corner of the office for the last year? Well now the apt links are broken and down for the release so you can't update the current release so you can upgrade. > I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course. It's nice, many of the same basics I learned on freebsd 6 years ago all still magically work. ifconfig works even with ipv6. You learn two files and you can do most anything. I'm definitely gonna consider Freebsd for embedded devices if I can as well. You dint need buildroot or yocto as it's already part of the BSDs.
    - dmit 11mo ago
      > You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.05"; nixpkgs-unstable.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable" :)
      - wkat4242 11mo ago
        I said 'most' :) and it goes for most of the mainstream distros. I wouldn't consider nix that, due to the complex configuration. As a corporate admin I do like declarative management at work but for home no. Even though FreeBSD has some aspects of it (you can turn stuff on and off in rc.conf)

o11c 11mo ago

Yes, Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop; unlike other Wayland complaints, this one fundamentally will never be fixed. This is unlike X11, where it was very common to recover from the inevitable single-component crashes.

elcritch 11mo ago
Ouch I didn’t know that.
- redeeman 11mo ago
  its not true though, when a wayland compositor dies, the clients can simply reconnect once the compositor has started again. this is already implemented in KDE and Qt, and KDE contributed patches to GTK/Gnome(which they havenot merged yet i think). A crash of the wayland compositor does NOT mean a crash of your entire session, in fact it is more resilient than X11 in this way
jtgeibel 11mo ago
On the Qt side, it looks like Qt clients are able to survive a compositor crash since Qt 6.6. I haven't personally tried this, as I don't recall experiencing any kwin crashes in the last few years. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart As I understand it, in Wayland all the necessary state lives client side, so a client is free to wait around and connect to a new compositor. The compositor might not place the windows exactly where they were before, but there is nothing architecturally that forces clients to crash if the compositor crashes.
ac29 11mo ago
> Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop A single crash of what? I have used a Wayland only system for a long time and application-level crashes certainly don't bring down other applications much less the whole desktop.
- 11mo ago