10 ms·

Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

238 points by jandeboevrie 4mo ago

ndiddy 4mo ago
I think the KDE developers in particular have done a great job of pushing Wayland forward and getting features that people want and need added as new protocols. KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11, and by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland so I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage. > Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma. I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
- igor47 4mo ago
  Yeah agreed. I switched to kde from gnome a few months back, and it's amazing how much better it's been in a thousand little ways.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    I mean… gnome has always been worse quality than KDE. I'd say even when the awful KDE4 came out was still better than Gnome3
- bityard 4mo ago
  When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years. Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine. Good job, KDE team.
  - ahartmetz 4mo ago
    I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.
    - httpsterio 4mo ago
      my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps. in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
      - c-hendricks 4mo ago
        Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?
        httpsterio 4mo ago
        yep and I've also tried disabling the compositior in KDE, which marginally helps but not enough.
      - d3Xt3r 4mo ago
        If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS. [1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec [2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/
        account42 4mo ago
- shevy-java 4mo ago
  > KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11 Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less? > by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared? > I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage Why is this contradicting what others report then? > I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here. David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :) Though, I am hardly the first with that either: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like? Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from last year: https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell....
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    > Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. That is because people who don't have a problem don't think about this and so don't comment. Many wayland users don't know. I think I switched this machine I'm using now to wayland a while ago but I don't remember, and maybe it switched back in an update and I didn't notice (which is the point, I know I switched at some point and I couldn't tell the difference - which is how it should be)
  - Zardoz84 4mo ago
    Perhaps the Wayland code path does not have to do thousands of workarounds with an ancient API made thinking on remote graphical terminals.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  > I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage. I use it on a touchscreen and the on-screen-keyboard crashes several times a day. I would not say it's fully ready.
feverzsj 4mo ago
How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?
- ijustlovemath 4mo ago
  Probably with Special Window Settings (right click top bar of your mpv window)
- krs_ 4mo ago
  qimgv uses libmpv for video playback support for example. I'm guessing that's not what you mean, but I'm struggling to think of how one might "embed" one application inside of another on xorg.
  - feverzsj 4mo ago
    x11 supports foreign window embedding. You can embed window from other application into your own window. That's why lots of mpv/vlc based players/editors don't work probably on wayland. The only way to achieve this on wayland is writing a custom compositor for the foreign window.
    - l72 4mo ago
      I worked at a company that had a powerful legacy software that was meant to be configured once and run full screen. At some point it needed a custom interface and the ability to reconfigure itself on the fly. Adding in a GUI was not a reasonable option. We ended up writing a GUI (in gtk) then using Xembed to embed the other process and communicate via a Unix socket. What would have been a major rewrite (and likely a port to a different language) ended up being a few a days project and worked beautifully. It really showed me how powerful X11 really was.
  - magicalhippo 4mo ago
    On Windows it's trivial, just reparent[1] the main window of the subprocess to a window in your process. Technically you should clear a couple of window flags as well, but that's trivial too. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-setparent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...
calvinmorrison 4mo ago
Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity. Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
- pmdr 4mo ago
  KDE 3.5.x really was peak desktop at the time, especially when all the K* apps were working as intended. As a Windows user discovering Slackware 10.2 back 2005, I was really blown away. KDE 4 just didn't feel the same.
  - calvinmorrison 4mo ago
    One thing in watching the 30 years of KDE talk is the DE-emphasis on apps. The whole thing got to big so it went from SC4 or whaetver into different strains. Modularized, etc. About then serious desktop apps seemed to have died off too I guess one cares less about DE's when my DE is a front for a terminal and a VM (my browser). It's sad to see sidelining of KOffice, Konqueror (of course still exists), Amarok and other great apps. A desktop environemnt is not just a WM + Panel + Decorations. KDE3.5x has is own... well everything tied together.
- therealrootuser 4mo ago
  Sorry to be dense. What does this have to do with Red Hat?
  - calvinmorrison 4mo ago
    redhat, the NWO funders of many projects under the guise of freedom
startpage_com 4mo ago
So long KDE. Xlibre for life.
shevy-java 4mo ago
Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11. Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.
- segbrk 4mo ago
  Funny, my impression of KDE in the 3 and 4 eras was “Wow, this is shiny and sleek— oh, and it crashed. Nevermind.” Nowadays there is nothing I would recommend more to the average user who just wants something normal that works. It just works. What you’re saying just sounds like a pointlessly personal and ideological attack. Against a piece of software. Why?
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  I don't really like Systemd neither - but Wayland and Systemd are pretty much opposites of each other. Systemd does (too) many things, many of them badly. Wayland does well what it does, but it (still!) does too little. Wayland is adding features and is pretty close to doing "everything necessary". Systemd keeps accreting worse replacements for existing services.
  - josephcsible 4mo ago
    They're similar in that they're both new things that are worse than what they're meant to replace.
    - chlorion 4mo ago
      They are actually both much better than the things they replace, but a bunch of whiner babies can't stand the thought of anything changing and will claw and scream while being dragged into the future.
      - ahartmetz 4mo ago
senfiaj 4mo ago
What's sad is that after many years Wayland still lacks several things/features that X11 has/allows. Some of them are intentionally not implemented because of security paranoia. For example, Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top. If I had a lot of time I could list how Wayland breaks many applications. Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
- laszlokorte 4mo ago
  I know nothing about the detailed technical differences between X11 and Wayland but with Hyprland for me the PIP is working as expected so I assume its not just a Wayland issue but specific to the window manager you are using? Maybe somebody else can explain?
  - tambre 4mo ago
    Gnome has a "Always on Top" toggle for each window. I imagine there's a protocol for an application to set it by default but the OP's window manager might not implement it or there might be an incompatibility.
    - Zardoz84 4mo ago
      Plasma/KDE always had it.
    - blendergeek 4mo ago
      But users do not want to have to toggle that for every PiP video they watch. Its why I am still on X11
      - babypuncher 4mo ago
        I can't speak for Gnome, but KDE makes it pretty easy to create rules that apply automatically to any new window that meets whatever arbitrary criteria you set.
calvinmorrison 4mo ago
"We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. " What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
- account42 4mo ago
  You will install the update and you will like it (or be banned).
mug1 4mo ago
I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  Crash reports are only mentioned as confirmation of other statistics, and in any case, the vast majority of crashes have nothing to do with the window system used.
  - account42 4mo ago
    The other "stats" being "all my buddies use Wayland".
    - akimbostrawman 4mo ago
      Instead of rage baiting you could have just read the blog post to figure out its opt in telemetry, crash reports (most of which won't be x11/Wayland related) is being used as an additional metric to confirm that trend.
- MBCook 4mo ago
  How do you get that? They showed the statistics based on their telemetry tools and said they match crash data. Not that it was 100% from crashes. Also the fact they can tell which one is in use does not mean that’s the reason it crashed. It could be crashes due to bad network handling or file corruption or something that has nothing to do with the GUI.
- tosti 4mo ago
  Linux users are more likely not to opt-in and actively opt-out of spyware, telemetry, or whatever you want to call it. The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to privacy cincious people. There was a study that backs up this claim, but I'm not google. OTOH, xfce is doing fine.
alyandon 4mo ago
I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11. I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.
- exe34 4mo ago
  Thank goodness I never jumped back on the KDE bandwagon once KDE4 stopped sucking donkey balls. I just went with xmonad and the few apps I actually use.
- moritzruth 4mo ago
  When was the last time you tried? What compositor?
  - alyandon 4mo ago
    I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system. What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides? Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.
    - Zardoz84 4mo ago
      Just works out of the box without problems in Debian 13. The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.
      - LtWorf 4mo ago
        Out of the box for you, doesn't necessarily mean it does for everyone else.
    - MegaDeKay 4mo ago
      They've made major strides in the last two years. Give the next LTS a shot and I think you'll agree.
skeledrew 4mo ago
I've been using Kubuntu for the past 12 years without any X-related issue, and have and am actively working on stuff that requires it. I guess it's time to switch to another DE.
- exe34 4mo ago
  try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!
  - zubspace 4mo ago
    Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....
    - exe34 4mo ago
      nmtui
      - zubspace 4mo ago
        Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :) And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable. But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line. Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
        exe34 4mo ago
        I have jgmenu mapped to F4 but I never remember to use it. I usually just CMD+P and type what I need. I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.
MBCook 4mo ago
> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations [sic], and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma. I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
- fishgoesblub 4mo ago
  They're still trying to figure that one out themselves.
  - MBCook 4mo ago
    I’m not surprised they’re not nailed down. But I’d appreciate seeing a “we’re looking at X or Y or if Z is now possible” kind of thing. The maintenance and performance stuff is good, but it’s not exactly end user stuff. Yeah you benefit but it’s less obvious. I don’t follow this stuff closely so personally I have no idea what kind of Wayland only features could exist that couldn’t before.
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    One nice feature is trackpad gestures. x11's trackpad gestures are awful, but on Wayland you can have the 1:1 multitouch that everyone loves.
- Tade0 4mo ago
  HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.
  - krs_ 4mo ago
    That already works with Plasma Wayland. It's still a bit finicky to make it work with things running in XWayland (Windows games primarily) but it's getting better.
  - ChocolateGod 4mo ago
    I wouldn't say its "plain impossible" with X11, but its significantly easier on Wayland because its a far simpler design that aligns better with the graphics hardware, we're sending surfaces (or pointers to them) with metadata to the compositor, not drawing APIs.
janice1999 4mo ago
A huge thank you to the KDE team. Plasma is good (finally) on Wayland for me (AMD graphics, single hi-dpi screen). I finally switched over from GNOME and I am happy with the experience.
superkuh 4mo ago
This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support. I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.
- creesch 4mo ago
  > There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago. I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time. Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes. There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each. I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.
- novafunc 4mo ago
  > here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight
bluGill 4mo ago
The only downside is several of the *BSDs don't have wayland. Not all the world is linux and sometimes that is a good thing to encourage.
- ChocolateGod 4mo ago
  There's nothing about Wayland that ties it to Linux. Wayland compositors tend to require a few features exposed by the graphics drivers (e.g. DRM) but there's nothing stopping the BSDS adding these (iirc FreeBSD already does).
- dark-star 4mo ago
  at least FreeBSD does already have Wayland. It has a few more hiccups and rough edges than on Linux (at least from my PoV on running it on an older laptop) but otherwise it works fine. Here is a short setup guide on how to get it working rather nicely: https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/ https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/
- qweqwe14 4mo ago
  You wouldn't pick BSDs for a desktop anyway, assuming you want a working system and don't want to use Windows/macOS. Now the concept of a "working system" can be a bit hard to grasp for some people, so let me put it this way: There are vastly more things that normal people do on their computer that work on Linux than on BSDs.
jccx70 4mo ago
[dead]
suby 4mo ago
I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution. The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland. I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work. For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem. I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.
- nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
  I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE. Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant. My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life. Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now. I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?
rid 4mo ago
My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily. KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable. I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.
gjvc 4mo ago
until the next one
bjoli 4mo ago
Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.
- SuperNinKenDo 4mo ago
  Same. Given that no Wayland compositors implement it, or anything like it, and from some of my surface level reading about how compositors work, I get the impression Wayland is particularly ill-suited for this feature. I don't understand enough to understand exactly why, or why a new Wayland "protocol" would be required, though that seemed to be the answer. I hate not having this feature, it makes me feel trapped in an entire desktop paradigm I don't desire to be locked into.
mvdtnz 4mo ago
I can't be the only long time Linux use who still has no real idea what X11 or Wayland are. Except that sometimes software won't work properly with one or the other and I need to paste some arcane command to fix it.
- mixmastamyk 4mo ago
  It's what puts graphics on the screen. If you are not interested in hacking or developing it, there's not much else to know except X11 is deprecated and Wayland is not finished, leading to this suboptimal situation.
  - HDBaseT 4mo ago
    Yep and Xwayland is an X server that runs under Wayland and provides compatibility for native X11 applications, which don't natively run under Wayland.
  - l72 4mo ago
    I think it is amazing that Linux has reached such an audience that the knowledge of what windowing or desktop system being used is unknown. But at the same time it makes me a little sad. Part of the draw of Linux was being able to understand what was under the hood and how to bend it to your will. I’m hope the community doesn’t lose sight of that in trying to gain new users. People often talk about the year of Linux or what success is, and in my opinion, Linux had achieved success by 1996. Trying to pull a casual user from windows or Mac OS is a worthy goal, but that shouldn’t be the end all be all metric.
brooke2k 4mo ago
in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.
- Eduard 4mo ago
  can you give examples of games not working? what about emulation / virtual machines?
- doublepg23 4mo ago
  I was under the impression that the Steam Deck runs under KDE Wayland? I wasn't aware of it having video game support challenges due to Wayland.
  - mhitza 4mo ago
    SteamOS recently shipped KDE with Wayland by default (for desktop mode). They have their own custom compositor for handheld-mode, named gamescope. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-fil... XWayland based.
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  I can't say I've run into issues running games under XWayland, but I have only been using the Wayland session for a couple of weeks now. The blocker for me was Discord (you wouldn't get messages on your phone if you were afk because the idle detection didn't work in Wayland), but the devs there seem to have finally fixed it.
- dark-star 4mo ago
  funny you say that, given that the SteamDeck (the largest/most popular Linux-based gaming console) runs on KDE on Wayland.....
- elxr 4mo ago
  Can you give examples?
NoboruWataya 4mo ago
Slight tangent but has anyone moved from AwesomeWM to a Wayland-based tiling WM? Interested to hear what people chose. I tried Sway for a bit and while it's not bad by any means it's a bit too unlike what I'm used to. SomeWM is an attempt at "porting" AwesomeWM to Wayland and looks very promising but not quite there yet (I couldn't get Vicious widgets working and not sure if supporting them is even a goal). I'm still on AwesomeWM for now because I have no real reason to incur the pain of switching, but still curious to know what path others are taking.
- Elv13 4mo ago
  (one of AwesomeWM core dev here) Vicious is getting quite old. We put tons of effort in AwesomeWM to be perfectly backward compatible all the way back to the 3.5.0 API (ok, 4.0 had documented breaking changes, but still had compat code to minimize the porting work), like bug-compatible level using a **ton of `if` in the code. I really can't blame any effort to implement wayland to nuke that compat code mess when it blocks them. The older Vicious most people use is also using blocking code in the main thread, it it locks the entire WM when its calling a shell command. AwesomeWM had async APIs for that kind of stuff for a decade now. IMHO, using some LLM call to port the widget to use the declarative widget API, which AFAIK SomeWM supports, is probably worth it for performance alone, even if you keep using AwesomeWM.
  - NoboruWataya 4mo ago
    Yes, when looking into it I realised how dated Vicious is these days. It goes to show how long I've been using AwesomeWM I guess because I think it was the shiny new(ish) thing when I first started using it. It doesn't seem like the functionality I want would be that difficult to replicate without it (famous last words) so I may just do that. Thanks for all your work on AwesomeWM - whether I keep using it or not it has been a great experience!
- JNRowe 4mo ago
  I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base. If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling. ¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river https://codeberg.org/river/river Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.
Postosuchus 4mo ago
As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of. In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.
- outofpaper 4mo ago
  Time to fork and move on...
- doublepg23 4mo ago
  > a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means They started doing that in early 2024 with the release of KDE 6.0 by enabling KDE Wayland by default. The Wayland-only change won't happen til 6.8 which will be an early 2027 release. 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... > And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed. Yes, that's the current step they'll be at with 6.8.
  - Postosuchus 4mo ago
    I was not aware of that and literally read into this particular article. Thanks for clarifying!
- wizzledonker 4mo ago
  That is quite literally exactly what they have done
- 4mo ago
oofbaroomf 4mo ago
Wayland is great and I generally prefer it, but it's worth keeping X around for KDE Plasma I think. Things like remote desktop are nicer on X, X is much easier to use on Android compared to Wayland, etc.
pseudalopex 4mo ago
Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues[1] No ability to save and restore positions of native Wayland windows Real-fake-session-restored apps don't remember which virtual desktop their windows were on No full-screen aspect ratio correction "Spare Layouts" feature not implemented "Per-application Keyboard Layout" does not work No way to change the gamma or manually adjust the colors without generating or finding an appropriate ICC profile Can't switch between multiple touch strip modes No headless RDP Opening files using command-line binaries in Konsole doesn't raise existing windows Global Menu is not supported for non-Qt apps Some apps' non-maximizable windows are broken with placement policy set as maximized [1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...
- Saris 4mo ago
  Also recently discovered KeepassXC can't do auto-type on Wayland for some reason. It seems to have a massive amount of limitations.
  - genpfault 4mo ago
    > KeepassXC can't do auto-type on Wayland https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 Though it looks like there's a recent PR for that: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/13359 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/13359
- The_President 4mo ago
  The Bluetooth integration needs work - missing features such as "never connect automatically." Default lock screen experience still has a needless delay of 5 seconds when entering a wrong (even blank wrong) password, even on the first attempt. +1 on the gamma controls
  - mariusor 4mo ago
    That sounds like tarpitting, or perhaps timing attacks protection, rather than anything wrong in the password check pipeline.
aidenn0 4mo ago
Anyone on the most recent LTS Kernel (6.18) with an older nvidia GPU will not have a good experience on Wayland. I have two machines with Pascal GPUs and: - The nvidia binary driver is shit with Wayland - The nvidia OSS driver does not support Pascal GPUs. - Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly. You can get a stable system either by using the latest kernel+nouveau or: MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=kms_swrast but performance is rather abysmal.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  My touchpad still works like shit on libinput (which is the only input method available on wayland). I guess in a few years I'll need to patch it and carry my patches forever. Yay progress!
  - aidenn0 4mo ago
    Taking a wild guess that this may or may not help you: https://github.com/kekekeks/waynaptics https://github.com/kekekeks/waynaptics
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      Cool, seems useful. I should try it and package it for debian if it works.
    - account42 4mo ago
      > This particular model is used because it has hacks in libinput codebase to enable smooth scrolling with wheel. Yet another glowing endorsement for libinput.
self_awareness 4mo ago
RIP Linux Desktop
- dark-star 4mo ago
  Time to switch to Windows! yay! Where all of this stuff just works: HDR, remote desktop, gaming, Picture-in-Picture, ... all the stuff that Wayland devs are too stupid to get done correctly /s (maybe?)
  - self_awareness 4mo ago
    Eh, IDK. Maybe? After 20 years of using Linux I'm looking on Windows more and more. Linux Gaming is now better than ever, and ideological Linux dev community torpedoes it hard with Wayland. I mean who Linux wants to be anyway? An OS for bleeding edge hardware? I think we have Windows for that. Because Wayland doesn't even work correctly on average-aged hardware. Greybeards have created Linux, and cool new generation will shut it down (on Desktop).
  - tosti 4mo ago
    You forgot accessibility.
- shmerl 4mo ago
  + Long live Linux Desktop!
  - self_awareness 4mo ago
    You mean: "Deskop Long + live Linux", because Wayland devs decided that's it's the best way to order the words you want to use
HiPhish 4mo ago
I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo. The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell. [1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/ https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/
- tmtvl 4mo ago
  Have you tried LXQt? It made things easy for me when Plasma 6 broke a KWin script I was using to improve the multihead experience.
  - falsaberN1 4mo ago
    I use LXQt with virtual machines, is it good for using on bare metal too?
    - tmtvl 4mo ago
      I only used it on bare metal, worked fine.
drnick1 4mo ago
Sadly, recent GNOME versions introduced a hard dependency on systemd and can no longer be used on systemd-free distros. This is the kind of problem that the anti-systemd people had in mind back then when debates about systemd raged.
- lionkor 4mo ago
  I'm sorry, but are we still going on about this? I love a good debate as much as the next guy, but being able to just have one interface (systemd's) for all services and having a more-or-less consistent language really helps. At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.
  - qweqwe14 4mo ago
    It's Linux bro, we absolutely need to have 500 different options for every single thing. Doesn't matter if every option sucks, diversity is above everything! /s There are some truly special people among Linux users that think diversity in init systems/libc implementations/etc is a good thing for a general-purpose desktop. They don't understand that people just want stuff to work, and developers don't want to support more than 1 init system (or other trivial thing) for their package. Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that.
    - drnick1 4mo ago
      > Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that. The vast majority of "server" distributions now use systemd as well.
  - account42 4mo ago
    You could also just use one system (Windows) for everything if you wanted. Some of us decided to use Linux because we want things to work how we want and not how some bigshot decides they should work.
melodyogonna 4mo ago
I installed Arch on my old Mac few months ago, alongside Xorg and i3, they were what I was used to before I switched to Mac about 6 years ago. Back then Wayland was a mess, so I never even bothered to check it out this time. However, few days ago my non-technical girlfriend wanted to use my laptop, I couldn't see her using i3 so I decided to install Plasma, a proper desktop environment. Lo and behold I couldn't launch it. After searching I found out I needed plasma-x11-session as the default plasma install now included just a Wayland session. I found this a bit surprising, so I did further digging and discovered a huge chunk of Linux desktop community have basically migrated to Wayland since the last time I was here. Very surprising I must say. So I decided to try Wayland again; I installed Sway and was pleasantly surprised. My screen resolution was automatically calibrated, operations seemed to run more smoothly, my laptop's fan kicked in less frequently (don't know why), and I didn't need a compositor package to fix screen tear (bye Picom). But all these weren't the reasons I decided to stick with Wayland. You see, in x11 I've been having a persistent problem: playing videos from certain websites, notably Twitter, introduces noticeable flickers. I tried everything to get rid of this: media drivers, verifying GPU acceleration, calibrating refresh rates, nothing worked. When I installed Sway I decided to see if this issue got magically fixed, and lo! It was. Wayland has come a long way since I last tried it. Now that I mentioned it, I have just remembered I need to figure out a way to share screens on Google meets, at the moment I seem to be limited to sharing just the Chrome window.
- strobe 4mo ago
  I recently had opposite experience - I been using NixOS with X11+i3 for about 2 years and never had any significant issues beside some troubles with one Nvidia driver version, even most Steam games worked for me without any issues. But out of curiosity decided to give try Wayland+Sway. First Sway remind me that Nvidia GPU completely unsupported and probably wont work at all, but in really fix for that just to use some 'unsupported' flag to launch it. After that I found that displays fractional scaling only can multiply original resolution to bigger size so is no way I will able to set up my 3 different displays in way I would like. Then I found that Zoom app can't share display even if everything for that is provided and it thinks that sharing actually happen (it can share if used thought web-browser and it also some workaround with virtual camera thought kernel module and OBS). After that I found that Barrier app (that I been used to share cursor/keyboard between desktop&laptop) while has support for wayland it can't work with Sway yet and is no any real alternative. For now I can deal with that stuff but it looks like more I use wayland more issues I see so not sure that I will able stick with it long term. oh now I also has flickers with discord app
notepad0x90 4mo ago
dumb question, with LLMs being so prolific now, why is this sort of a thing.. a thing? Why not us an agent to maintain code people use, but humans don't have time to keep up with? or at least, are agents being used in FOSS software widely for such ends, at least to reduce the burden and cheapen the cost of delivering quality FOSS experience?
- poulpy123 4mo ago
  Lol
unethical_ban 4mo ago
It seems to me like such a drastic change in the underlying system (removing support of one of two major display platforms) would mandate a major version change. Complete removal of X11 should be an event to trigger KDE 7.0.
- 4thguy 4mo ago
  I agree. IMO this is a breaking change. It seems like some (many?) accessibility tools don't work on Wayland, so this breaks users' workflow if they need those tools
- account42 4mo ago
  KDE 4.0 has already shown that KDE developers have a very different understanding of version numbers compared to users.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
justinclift 4mo ago
> Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland Wonder how representative of the real end user population this is?
- ceayo 4mo ago
  I think most people who even know the difference between x11 and Wayland are much more privacy conscious then those who don’t. 0% of people going out of their way to jump through all the hoops to get plasma working on x11 would ever opt in to such metrics.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    The hoops: "select Xorg in the login manager" Dude…
  - justinclift 4mo ago
    Nah, don't think so. When I setup my main dev desktop (a Debian variant) a few months ago it defaulted to X11 and getting Wayland to work on it was a pain in the butt. That being said, on a different box with an older gen Nvidia card (3070) it defaulted to Wayland and just worked out of the box. So, bit of a mixed bag. ;)
edumucelli 4mo ago
Been using Linux as sole OS for 25 years now. I will stick to X11 no problems, I am sure it will be just fine for my usage. When we thought Gnome 2 was gone, MATE fork appeared, X11 will be there for a long time. I am also going through the struggle of porting a software I maintain (github.com/edumucelli/docking) to Wayland and it is awful: "this compositor do this part, that one does that part, no compositor does this :shrug".
- toenail 4mo ago
  I have a feeling xorg will still be there, when devs have moved on from wayland to the next new thing.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    I'm still thinking wayland will be like pulseaudio. Going from "the future" to "the past" without ever being "the present". I went from ALSA to pipewire. I tried pulseaudio but it never worked decently.
Yamboho 4mo ago
Great! Now fix screenshot
Yamboho 4mo ago
That's great progress! Now fix screenshoting
- account42 4mo ago
  Also automation - and not just limited to use cases that the compositor developers can think of.
- TiredOfLife 4mo ago
  I run CachyOS that defaults to wayland. I just pressed Prt Scr button and took a screenshot.
shevy-java 4mo ago
By the way - David refused to publish the source for the image he showed, aka "nobody uses x11 anymore". This reminds me of the systemd folks - they also don't allow for discussions yet alone cite anything related to their claims. They just claim. If the earth is flat, they don't need evidence. Their word must be enough. It is this image: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/graph-1024x683.png http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/... David claims "internal metrics", but he also does not explain how those metrics were gained, is there bias in how they were gained, which time span and so forth. I am not saying he is fabricating the graph, though this could be the case too. What I am asking for is to show (ALL of) the data and explain the graph and data. Otherwise this is simple propaganda, with a pre-set goal to cover-my-ass (aka explain why KDE devs try to eradicate all xorg users). By the way, next step, as you guys may know: systemd-only. Both David and Nate also announced this before. I wonder if there are financial kickbacks.
ceayo 4mo ago
Gah I’m switching to TMUX.
LaGrange 4mo ago
It's so funny reading about how the problem with Wayland is that you have many, often incomplete, implementations while being old enough to remember the time when X11 was actually popular (and thus had many, often incomplete, implementations).
anaisbetts 4mo ago
No headless RDP solution is pretty unforgiveable in 2026 - right now I use Nomachine and indeed it requires X11. Why wouldn't Wayland have a solution for this? It is not a niche usecase. It is like, a headline, completely mainstream use-case.
- aniou 4mo ago
  Blind spot that comes from incompetence and arrogance. See https://lwn.net/Articles/553415/ https://lwn.net/Articles/553415/ for example and remember famous words of Daniel Stone that brought the need for remote work to - merely - launch xeyes. Thus, that particular comment (https://lwn.net/Articles/555124/ https://lwn.net/Articles/555124/) was prophetic: "With that sort of attitude, I have no confidence that remote Wayland will ever work properly. Clearly Daniel just has a laptop and does all his work on it, and damn everyone who uses more than one machine for anything."
  - redeeman 4mo ago
    this take is ridiculous, of course remote wayland will work, there are still some things missing, which are gonna come shortly in KDE atleast.
milliams 4mo ago
The main blocker I have for moving is the poor session management. On X11 for decades I've been able to log out of my KDE session and when I log in again, all my Konsole windows re-open with the tabs open in the same folders, Dolphin opens with all the tabs open to the same locations etc. I think they recently added support at the KWin level for reopening windows to the right desktops etc but as far as each individual apps, it seems to be up to them individually to get this working again. I would have thought that at least for the KDE apps, they could just have a compatibility layer from the X11 session management to make it work but it doesn't seem there yet.
- akimbostrawman 4mo ago
  >it seems to be up to them individually to get this working again Just like on x11 for the overwhelming majority of applications it's implemented in and handled by the applications framework like GTK, QT, electron, ...
trashface 4mo ago
Maybe its better under KDE but on gnome/wayland, VSCode can't even remember its window position and size or even which display it should be on - at least for me. Reminds of the bad old days of windows 3.1. I have a shell script to reset it now. But I have to use wayland because I've got nvidia and the force composition vsync hack is just too slow to game with reliably.
jackyard86 4mo ago
I prefer software rendering, I don't use compositor, and I never will. In software rendering, CPU only updates screen when changes are detected. And the change completes as fast as the computer can. So that's minimal latency + minimal resource consumed. If you're on a compositor, the 3D accelerator in your computer has to update the screen 60 times every second. It's even worse when you have a higher refresh rate display. And compositors update the buffer as soon as the previous buffer is pushed after the v-sync signal, and then it just waits until the next signal comes in. So there comes the terrible input delay. As a result, it comsumes more power and has higher latency. So in conclusion, fuck Wayland, and I'm going with xfce without compositor.
lousken 4mo ago
I hope Debian 14 will have the last x11 version such that users that need it will be able to use it for another 5 years

238 points by jandeboevrie 4mo ago

I think the KDE developers in particular have done a great job of pushing Wayland forward and getting features that people want and need added as new protocols. KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11, and by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland so I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage. > Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma. I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.

igor47 4mo ago
Yeah agreed. I switched to kde from gnome a few months back, and it's amazing how much better it's been in a thousand little ways.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  I mean… gnome has always been worse quality than KDE. I'd say even when the awful KDE4 came out was still better than Gnome3
bityard 4mo ago
When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years. Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine. Good job, KDE team.
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.
  - httpsterio 4mo ago
    my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps. in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
    - c-hendricks 4mo ago
      Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?
      - httpsterio 4mo ago
        yep and I've also tried disabling the compositior in KDE, which marginally helps but not enough.
    - d3Xt3r 4mo ago
      If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS. [1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec [2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/
      - account42 4mo ago
shevy-java 4mo ago
> KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11 Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less? > by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared? > I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage Why is this contradicting what others report then? > I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here. David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :) Though, I am hardly the first with that either: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like? Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from last year: https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell....
- bluGill 4mo ago
  > Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. That is because people who don't have a problem don't think about this and so don't comment. Many wayland users don't know. I think I switched this machine I'm using now to wayland a while ago but I don't remember, and maybe it switched back in an update and I didn't notice (which is the point, I know I switched at some point and I couldn't tell the difference - which is how it should be)
- Zardoz84 4mo ago
  Perhaps the Wayland code path does not have to do thousands of workarounds with an ancient API made thinking on remote graphical terminals.
LtWorf 4mo ago
> I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage. I use it on a touchscreen and the on-screen-keyboard crashes several times a day. I would not say it's fully ready.

feverzsj 4mo ago

How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?

ijustlovemath 4mo ago
Probably with Special Window Settings (right click top bar of your mpv window)
krs_ 4mo ago
qimgv uses libmpv for video playback support for example. I'm guessing that's not what you mean, but I'm struggling to think of how one might "embed" one application inside of another on xorg.
- feverzsj 4mo ago
  x11 supports foreign window embedding. You can embed window from other application into your own window. That's why lots of mpv/vlc based players/editors don't work probably on wayland. The only way to achieve this on wayland is writing a custom compositor for the foreign window.
  - l72 4mo ago
    I worked at a company that had a powerful legacy software that was meant to be configured once and run full screen. At some point it needed a custom interface and the ability to reconfigure itself on the fly. Adding in a GUI was not a reasonable option. We ended up writing a GUI (in gtk) then using Xembed to embed the other process and communicate via a Unix socket. What would have been a major rewrite (and likely a port to a different language) ended up being a few a days project and worked beautifully. It really showed me how powerful X11 really was.
- magicalhippo 4mo ago
  On Windows it's trivial, just reparent[1] the main window of the subprocess to a window in your process. Technically you should clear a couple of window flags as well, but that's trivial too. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-setparent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...

calvinmorrison 4mo ago

Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity. Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.

pmdr 4mo ago
KDE 3.5.x really was peak desktop at the time, especially when all the K* apps were working as intended. As a Windows user discovering Slackware 10.2 back 2005, I was really blown away. KDE 4 just didn't feel the same.
- calvinmorrison 4mo ago
  One thing in watching the 30 years of KDE talk is the DE-emphasis on apps. The whole thing got to big so it went from SC4 or whaetver into different strains. Modularized, etc. About then serious desktop apps seemed to have died off too I guess one cares less about DE's when my DE is a front for a terminal and a VM (my browser). It's sad to see sidelining of KOffice, Konqueror (of course still exists), Amarok and other great apps. A desktop environemnt is not just a WM + Panel + Decorations. KDE3.5x has is own... well everything tied together.
therealrootuser 4mo ago
Sorry to be dense. What does this have to do with Red Hat?
- calvinmorrison 4mo ago
  redhat, the NWO funders of many projects under the guise of freedom

startpage_com 4mo ago

So long KDE. Xlibre for life.

shevy-java 4mo ago

Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11. Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.

segbrk 4mo ago
Funny, my impression of KDE in the 3 and 4 eras was “Wow, this is shiny and sleek— oh, and it crashed. Nevermind.” Nowadays there is nothing I would recommend more to the average user who just wants something normal that works. It just works. What you’re saying just sounds like a pointlessly personal and ideological attack. Against a piece of software. Why?
ahartmetz 4mo ago
I don't really like Systemd neither - but Wayland and Systemd are pretty much opposites of each other. Systemd does (too) many things, many of them badly. Wayland does well what it does, but it (still!) does too little. Wayland is adding features and is pretty close to doing "everything necessary". Systemd keeps accreting worse replacements for existing services.
- josephcsible 4mo ago
  They're similar in that they're both new things that are worse than what they're meant to replace.
  - chlorion 4mo ago
    They are actually both much better than the things they replace, but a bunch of whiner babies can't stand the thought of anything changing and will claw and scream while being dragged into the future.
    - ahartmetz 4mo ago

senfiaj 4mo ago

What's sad is that after many years Wayland still lacks several things/features that X11 has/allows. Some of them are intentionally not implemented because of security paranoia. For example, Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top. If I had a lot of time I could list how Wayland breaks many applications. Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.

laszlokorte 4mo ago
I know nothing about the detailed technical differences between X11 and Wayland but with Hyprland for me the PIP is working as expected so I assume its not just a Wayland issue but specific to the window manager you are using? Maybe somebody else can explain?
- tambre 4mo ago
  Gnome has a "Always on Top" toggle for each window. I imagine there's a protocol for an application to set it by default but the OP's window manager might not implement it or there might be an incompatibility.
  - Zardoz84 4mo ago
    Plasma/KDE always had it.
  - blendergeek 4mo ago
    But users do not want to have to toggle that for every PiP video they watch. Its why I am still on X11
    - babypuncher 4mo ago
      I can't speak for Gnome, but KDE makes it pretty easy to create rules that apply automatically to any new window that meets whatever arbitrary criteria you set.

calvinmorrison 4mo ago

"We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. " What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?

account42 4mo ago
You will install the update and you will like it (or be banned).

mug1 4mo ago

I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps

ahartmetz 4mo ago
Crash reports are only mentioned as confirmation of other statistics, and in any case, the vast majority of crashes have nothing to do with the window system used.
- account42 4mo ago
  The other "stats" being "all my buddies use Wayland".
  - akimbostrawman 4mo ago
    Instead of rage baiting you could have just read the blog post to figure out its opt in telemetry, crash reports (most of which won't be x11/Wayland related) is being used as an additional metric to confirm that trend.
MBCook 4mo ago
How do you get that? They showed the statistics based on their telemetry tools and said they match crash data. Not that it was 100% from crashes. Also the fact they can tell which one is in use does not mean that’s the reason it crashed. It could be crashes due to bad network handling or file corruption or something that has nothing to do with the GUI.
tosti 4mo ago
Linux users are more likely not to opt-in and actively opt-out of spyware, telemetry, or whatever you want to call it. The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to privacy cincious people. There was a study that backs up this claim, but I'm not google. OTOH, xfce is doing fine.

alyandon 4mo ago

I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11. I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.

exe34 4mo ago
Thank goodness I never jumped back on the KDE bandwagon once KDE4 stopped sucking donkey balls. I just went with xmonad and the few apps I actually use.
moritzruth 4mo ago
When was the last time you tried? What compositor?
- alyandon 4mo ago
  I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system. What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides? Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.
  - Zardoz84 4mo ago
    Just works out of the box without problems in Debian 13. The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      Out of the box for you, doesn't necessarily mean it does for everyone else.
  - MegaDeKay 4mo ago
    They've made major strides in the last two years. Give the next LTS a shot and I think you'll agree.

skeledrew 4mo ago

I've been using Kubuntu for the past 12 years without any X-related issue, and have and am actively working on stuff that requires it. I guess it's time to switch to another DE.

exe34 4mo ago
try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!
- zubspace 4mo ago
  Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....
  - exe34 4mo ago
    nmtui
    - zubspace 4mo ago
      Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :) And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable. But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line. Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
      - exe34 4mo ago
        I have jgmenu mapped to F4 but I never remember to use it. I usually just CMD+P and type what I need. I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.

MBCook 4mo ago

> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations [sic], and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma. I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.

fishgoesblub 4mo ago
They're still trying to figure that one out themselves.
- MBCook 4mo ago
  I’m not surprised they’re not nailed down. But I’d appreciate seeing a “we’re looking at X or Y or if Z is now possible” kind of thing. The maintenance and performance stuff is good, but it’s not exactly end user stuff. Yeah you benefit but it’s less obvious. I don’t follow this stuff closely so personally I have no idea what kind of Wayland only features could exist that couldn’t before.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  One nice feature is trackpad gestures. x11's trackpad gestures are awful, but on Wayland you can have the 1:1 multitouch that everyone loves.
Tade0 4mo ago
HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.
- krs_ 4mo ago
  That already works with Plasma Wayland. It's still a bit finicky to make it work with things running in XWayland (Windows games primarily) but it's getting better.
- ChocolateGod 4mo ago
  I wouldn't say its "plain impossible" with X11, but its significantly easier on Wayland because its a far simpler design that aligns better with the graphics hardware, we're sending surfaces (or pointers to them) with metadata to the compositor, not drawing APIs.

janice1999 4mo ago

A huge thank you to the KDE team. Plasma is good (finally) on Wayland for me (AMD graphics, single hi-dpi screen). I finally switched over from GNOME and I am happy with the experience.

superkuh 4mo ago

This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support. I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.

creesch 4mo ago
> There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago. I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time. Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes. There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each. I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.
novafunc 4mo ago
> here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight

bluGill 4mo ago

The only downside is several of the *BSDs don't have wayland. Not all the world is linux and sometimes that is a good thing to encourage.

ChocolateGod 4mo ago
There's nothing about Wayland that ties it to Linux. Wayland compositors tend to require a few features exposed by the graphics drivers (e.g. DRM) but there's nothing stopping the BSDS adding these (iirc FreeBSD already does).
dark-star 4mo ago
at least FreeBSD does already have Wayland. It has a few more hiccups and rough edges than on Linux (at least from my PoV on running it on an older laptop) but otherwise it works fine. Here is a short setup guide on how to get it working rather nicely: https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/ https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/
qweqwe14 4mo ago
You wouldn't pick BSDs for a desktop anyway, assuming you want a working system and don't want to use Windows/macOS. Now the concept of a "working system" can be a bit hard to grasp for some people, so let me put it this way: There are vastly more things that normal people do on their computer that work on Linux than on BSDs.

jccx70 4mo ago

[dead]

suby 4mo ago

I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution. The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland. I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work. For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem. I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.

nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE. Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant. My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life. Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now. I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?

rid 4mo ago

My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily. KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable. I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.

gjvc 4mo ago

until the next one

bjoli 4mo ago

Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.

SuperNinKenDo 4mo ago
Same. Given that no Wayland compositors implement it, or anything like it, and from some of my surface level reading about how compositors work, I get the impression Wayland is particularly ill-suited for this feature. I don't understand enough to understand exactly why, or why a new Wayland "protocol" would be required, though that seemed to be the answer. I hate not having this feature, it makes me feel trapped in an entire desktop paradigm I don't desire to be locked into.

mvdtnz 4mo ago

I can't be the only long time Linux use who still has no real idea what X11 or Wayland are. Except that sometimes software won't work properly with one or the other and I need to paste some arcane command to fix it.

mixmastamyk 4mo ago
It's what puts graphics on the screen. If you are not interested in hacking or developing it, there's not much else to know except X11 is deprecated and Wayland is not finished, leading to this suboptimal situation.
- HDBaseT 4mo ago
  Yep and Xwayland is an X server that runs under Wayland and provides compatibility for native X11 applications, which don't natively run under Wayland.
- l72 4mo ago
  I think it is amazing that Linux has reached such an audience that the knowledge of what windowing or desktop system being used is unknown. But at the same time it makes me a little sad. Part of the draw of Linux was being able to understand what was under the hood and how to bend it to your will. I’m hope the community doesn’t lose sight of that in trying to gain new users. People often talk about the year of Linux or what success is, and in my opinion, Linux had achieved success by 1996. Trying to pull a casual user from windows or Mac OS is a worthy goal, but that shouldn’t be the end all be all metric.

brooke2k 4mo ago

in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.

Eduard 4mo ago
can you give examples of games not working? what about emulation / virtual machines?
doublepg23 4mo ago
I was under the impression that the Steam Deck runs under KDE Wayland? I wasn't aware of it having video game support challenges due to Wayland.
- mhitza 4mo ago
  SteamOS recently shipped KDE with Wayland by default (for desktop mode). They have their own custom compositor for handheld-mode, named gamescope. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-fil... XWayland based.
bigstrat2003 4mo ago
I can't say I've run into issues running games under XWayland, but I have only been using the Wayland session for a couple of weeks now. The blocker for me was Discord (you wouldn't get messages on your phone if you were afk because the idle detection didn't work in Wayland), but the devs there seem to have finally fixed it.
dark-star 4mo ago
funny you say that, given that the SteamDeck (the largest/most popular Linux-based gaming console) runs on KDE on Wayland.....
elxr 4mo ago
Can you give examples?

NoboruWataya 4mo ago

Slight tangent but has anyone moved from AwesomeWM to a Wayland-based tiling WM? Interested to hear what people chose. I tried Sway for a bit and while it's not bad by any means it's a bit too unlike what I'm used to. SomeWM is an attempt at "porting" AwesomeWM to Wayland and looks very promising but not quite there yet (I couldn't get Vicious widgets working and not sure if supporting them is even a goal). I'm still on AwesomeWM for now because I have no real reason to incur the pain of switching, but still curious to know what path others are taking.

Elv13 4mo ago
(one of AwesomeWM core dev here) Vicious is getting quite old. We put tons of effort in AwesomeWM to be perfectly backward compatible all the way back to the 3.5.0 API (ok, 4.0 had documented breaking changes, but still had compat code to minimize the porting work), like bug-compatible level using a **ton of `if` in the code. I really can't blame any effort to implement wayland to nuke that compat code mess when it blocks them. The older Vicious most people use is also using blocking code in the main thread, it it locks the entire WM when its calling a shell command. AwesomeWM had async APIs for that kind of stuff for a decade now. IMHO, using some LLM call to port the widget to use the declarative widget API, which AFAIK SomeWM supports, is probably worth it for performance alone, even if you keep using AwesomeWM.
- NoboruWataya 4mo ago
  Yes, when looking into it I realised how dated Vicious is these days. It goes to show how long I've been using AwesomeWM I guess because I think it was the shiny new(ish) thing when I first started using it. It doesn't seem like the functionality I want would be that difficult to replicate without it (famous last words) so I may just do that. Thanks for all your work on AwesomeWM - whether I keep using it or not it has been a great experience!
JNRowe 4mo ago
I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base. If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling. ¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river https://codeberg.org/river/river Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.

Postosuchus 4mo ago

As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of. In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.

outofpaper 4mo ago
Time to fork and move on...
doublepg23 4mo ago
> a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means They started doing that in early 2024 with the release of KDE 6.0 by enabling KDE Wayland by default. The Wayland-only change won't happen til 6.8 which will be an early 2027 release. 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... > And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed. Yes, that's the current step they'll be at with 6.8.
- Postosuchus 4mo ago
  I was not aware of that and literally read into this particular article. Thanks for clarifying!
wizzledonker 4mo ago
That is quite literally exactly what they have done
4mo ago

oofbaroomf 4mo ago

Wayland is great and I generally prefer it, but it's worth keeping X around for KDE Plasma I think. Things like remote desktop are nicer on X, X is much easier to use on Android compared to Wayland, etc.

pseudalopex 4mo ago

Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues[1] No ability to save and restore positions of native Wayland windows Real-fake-session-restored apps don't remember which virtual desktop their windows were on No full-screen aspect ratio correction "Spare Layouts" feature not implemented "Per-application Keyboard Layout" does not work No way to change the gamma or manually adjust the colors without generating or finding an appropriate ICC profile Can't switch between multiple touch strip modes No headless RDP Opening files using command-line binaries in Konsole doesn't raise existing windows Global Menu is not supported for non-Qt apps Some apps' non-maximizable windows are broken with placement policy set as maximized [1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...

Saris 4mo ago
Also recently discovered KeepassXC can't do auto-type on Wayland for some reason. It seems to have a massive amount of limitations.
- genpfault 4mo ago
  > KeepassXC can't do auto-type on Wayland https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 Though it looks like there's a recent PR for that: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/13359 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/13359
The_President 4mo ago
The Bluetooth integration needs work - missing features such as "never connect automatically." Default lock screen experience still has a needless delay of 5 seconds when entering a wrong (even blank wrong) password, even on the first attempt. +1 on the gamma controls
- mariusor 4mo ago
  That sounds like tarpitting, or perhaps timing attacks protection, rather than anything wrong in the password check pipeline.

aidenn0 4mo ago

Anyone on the most recent LTS Kernel (6.18) with an older nvidia GPU will not have a good experience on Wayland. I have two machines with Pascal GPUs and: - The nvidia binary driver is shit with Wayland - The nvidia OSS driver does not support Pascal GPUs. - Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly. You can get a stable system either by using the latest kernel+nouveau or: MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=kms_swrast but performance is rather abysmal.

LtWorf 4mo ago
My touchpad still works like shit on libinput (which is the only input method available on wayland). I guess in a few years I'll need to patch it and carry my patches forever. Yay progress!
- aidenn0 4mo ago
  Taking a wild guess that this may or may not help you: https://github.com/kekekeks/waynaptics https://github.com/kekekeks/waynaptics
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    Cool, seems useful. I should try it and package it for debian if it works.
  - account42 4mo ago
    > This particular model is used because it has hacks in libinput codebase to enable smooth scrolling with wheel. Yet another glowing endorsement for libinput.

self_awareness 4mo ago

RIP Linux Desktop

dark-star 4mo ago
Time to switch to Windows! yay! Where all of this stuff just works: HDR, remote desktop, gaming, Picture-in-Picture, ... all the stuff that Wayland devs are too stupid to get done correctly /s (maybe?)
- self_awareness 4mo ago
  Eh, IDK. Maybe? After 20 years of using Linux I'm looking on Windows more and more. Linux Gaming is now better than ever, and ideological Linux dev community torpedoes it hard with Wayland. I mean who Linux wants to be anyway? An OS for bleeding edge hardware? I think we have Windows for that. Because Wayland doesn't even work correctly on average-aged hardware. Greybeards have created Linux, and cool new generation will shut it down (on Desktop).
- tosti 4mo ago
  You forgot accessibility.
shmerl 4mo ago
+ Long live Linux Desktop!
- self_awareness 4mo ago
  You mean: "Deskop Long + live Linux", because Wayland devs decided that's it's the best way to order the words you want to use

HiPhish 4mo ago

I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo. The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell. [1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/ https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/

tmtvl 4mo ago
Have you tried LXQt? It made things easy for me when Plasma 6 broke a KWin script I was using to improve the multihead experience.
- falsaberN1 4mo ago
  I use LXQt with virtual machines, is it good for using on bare metal too?
  - tmtvl 4mo ago
    I only used it on bare metal, worked fine.

drnick1 4mo ago

Sadly, recent GNOME versions introduced a hard dependency on systemd and can no longer be used on systemd-free distros. This is the kind of problem that the anti-systemd people had in mind back then when debates about systemd raged.

lionkor 4mo ago
I'm sorry, but are we still going on about this? I love a good debate as much as the next guy, but being able to just have one interface (systemd's) for all services and having a more-or-less consistent language really helps. At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.
- qweqwe14 4mo ago
  It's Linux bro, we absolutely need to have 500 different options for every single thing. Doesn't matter if every option sucks, diversity is above everything! /s There are some truly special people among Linux users that think diversity in init systems/libc implementations/etc is a good thing for a general-purpose desktop. They don't understand that people just want stuff to work, and developers don't want to support more than 1 init system (or other trivial thing) for their package. Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that.
  - drnick1 4mo ago
    > Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that. The vast majority of "server" distributions now use systemd as well.
- account42 4mo ago
  You could also just use one system (Windows) for everything if you wanted. Some of us decided to use Linux because we want things to work how we want and not how some bigshot decides they should work.

melodyogonna 4mo ago

I installed Arch on my old Mac few months ago, alongside Xorg and i3, they were what I was used to before I switched to Mac about 6 years ago. Back then Wayland was a mess, so I never even bothered to check it out this time. However, few days ago my non-technical girlfriend wanted to use my laptop, I couldn't see her using i3 so I decided to install Plasma, a proper desktop environment. Lo and behold I couldn't launch it. After searching I found out I needed plasma-x11-session as the default plasma install now included just a Wayland session. I found this a bit surprising, so I did further digging and discovered a huge chunk of Linux desktop community have basically migrated to Wayland since the last time I was here. Very surprising I must say. So I decided to try Wayland again; I installed Sway and was pleasantly surprised. My screen resolution was automatically calibrated, operations seemed to run more smoothly, my laptop's fan kicked in less frequently (don't know why), and I didn't need a compositor package to fix screen tear (bye Picom). But all these weren't the reasons I decided to stick with Wayland. You see, in x11 I've been having a persistent problem: playing videos from certain websites, notably Twitter, introduces noticeable flickers. I tried everything to get rid of this: media drivers, verifying GPU acceleration, calibrating refresh rates, nothing worked. When I installed Sway I decided to see if this issue got magically fixed, and lo! It was. Wayland has come a long way since I last tried it. Now that I mentioned it, I have just remembered I need to figure out a way to share screens on Google meets, at the moment I seem to be limited to sharing just the Chrome window.

strobe 4mo ago
I recently had opposite experience - I been using NixOS with X11+i3 for about 2 years and never had any significant issues beside some troubles with one Nvidia driver version, even most Steam games worked for me without any issues. But out of curiosity decided to give try Wayland+Sway. First Sway remind me that Nvidia GPU completely unsupported and probably wont work at all, but in really fix for that just to use some 'unsupported' flag to launch it. After that I found that displays fractional scaling only can multiply original resolution to bigger size so is no way I will able to set up my 3 different displays in way I would like. Then I found that Zoom app can't share display even if everything for that is provided and it thinks that sharing actually happen (it can share if used thought web-browser and it also some workaround with virtual camera thought kernel module and OBS). After that I found that Barrier app (that I been used to share cursor/keyboard between desktop&laptop) while has support for wayland it can't work with Sway yet and is no any real alternative. For now I can deal with that stuff but it looks like more I use wayland more issues I see so not sure that I will able stick with it long term. oh now I also has flickers with discord app

notepad0x90 4mo ago

dumb question, with LLMs being so prolific now, why is this sort of a thing.. a thing? Why not us an agent to maintain code people use, but humans don't have time to keep up with? or at least, are agents being used in FOSS software widely for such ends, at least to reduce the burden and cheapen the cost of delivering quality FOSS experience?

poulpy123 4mo ago
Lol

unethical_ban 4mo ago

It seems to me like such a drastic change in the underlying system (removing support of one of two major display platforms) would mandate a major version change. Complete removal of X11 should be an event to trigger KDE 7.0.

4thguy 4mo ago
I agree. IMO this is a breaking change. It seems like some (many?) accessibility tools don't work on Wayland, so this breaks users' workflow if they need those tools
account42 4mo ago
KDE 4.0 has already shown that KDE developers have a very different understanding of version numbers compared to users.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

justinclift 4mo ago

> Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland Wonder how representative of the real end user population this is?

ceayo 4mo ago
I think most people who even know the difference between x11 and Wayland are much more privacy conscious then those who don’t. 0% of people going out of their way to jump through all the hoops to get plasma working on x11 would ever opt in to such metrics.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  The hoops: "select Xorg in the login manager" Dude…
- justinclift 4mo ago
  Nah, don't think so. When I setup my main dev desktop (a Debian variant) a few months ago it defaulted to X11 and getting Wayland to work on it was a pain in the butt. That being said, on a different box with an older gen Nvidia card (3070) it defaulted to Wayland and just worked out of the box. So, bit of a mixed bag. ;)

edumucelli 4mo ago

Been using Linux as sole OS for 25 years now. I will stick to X11 no problems, I am sure it will be just fine for my usage. When we thought Gnome 2 was gone, MATE fork appeared, X11 will be there for a long time. I am also going through the struggle of porting a software I maintain (github.com/edumucelli/docking) to Wayland and it is awful: "this compositor do this part, that one does that part, no compositor does this :shrug".

toenail 4mo ago
I have a feeling xorg will still be there, when devs have moved on from wayland to the next new thing.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  I'm still thinking wayland will be like pulseaudio. Going from "the future" to "the past" without ever being "the present". I went from ALSA to pipewire. I tried pulseaudio but it never worked decently.

Yamboho 4mo ago

Great! Now fix screenshot

Yamboho 4mo ago

That's great progress! Now fix screenshoting

account42 4mo ago
Also automation - and not just limited to use cases that the compositor developers can think of.
TiredOfLife 4mo ago
I run CachyOS that defaults to wayland. I just pressed Prt Scr button and took a screenshot.

shevy-java 4mo ago

By the way - David refused to publish the source for the image he showed, aka "nobody uses x11 anymore". This reminds me of the systemd folks - they also don't allow for discussions yet alone cite anything related to their claims. They just claim. If the earth is flat, they don't need evidence. Their word must be enough. It is this image: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/graph-1024x683.png http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/... David claims "internal metrics", but he also does not explain how those metrics were gained, is there bias in how they were gained, which time span and so forth. I am not saying he is fabricating the graph, though this could be the case too. What I am asking for is to show (ALL of) the data and explain the graph and data. Otherwise this is simple propaganda, with a pre-set goal to cover-my-ass (aka explain why KDE devs try to eradicate all xorg users). By the way, next step, as you guys may know: systemd-only. Both David and Nate also announced this before. I wonder if there are financial kickbacks.

ceayo 4mo ago

Gah I’m switching to TMUX.

LaGrange 4mo ago

It's so funny reading about how the problem with Wayland is that you have many, often incomplete, implementations while being old enough to remember the time when X11 was actually popular (and thus had many, often incomplete, implementations).

anaisbetts 4mo ago

No headless RDP solution is pretty unforgiveable in 2026 - right now I use Nomachine and indeed it requires X11. Why wouldn't Wayland have a solution for this? It is not a niche usecase. It is like, a headline, completely mainstream use-case.

aniou 4mo ago
Blind spot that comes from incompetence and arrogance. See https://lwn.net/Articles/553415/ https://lwn.net/Articles/553415/ for example and remember famous words of Daniel Stone that brought the need for remote work to - merely - launch xeyes. Thus, that particular comment (https://lwn.net/Articles/555124/ https://lwn.net/Articles/555124/) was prophetic: "With that sort of attitude, I have no confidence that remote Wayland will ever work properly. Clearly Daniel just has a laptop and does all his work on it, and damn everyone who uses more than one machine for anything."
- redeeman 4mo ago
  this take is ridiculous, of course remote wayland will work, there are still some things missing, which are gonna come shortly in KDE atleast.

milliams 4mo ago

The main blocker I have for moving is the poor session management. On X11 for decades I've been able to log out of my KDE session and when I log in again, all my Konsole windows re-open with the tabs open in the same folders, Dolphin opens with all the tabs open to the same locations etc. I think they recently added support at the KWin level for reopening windows to the right desktops etc but as far as each individual apps, it seems to be up to them individually to get this working again. I would have thought that at least for the KDE apps, they could just have a compatibility layer from the X11 session management to make it work but it doesn't seem there yet.

akimbostrawman 4mo ago
>it seems to be up to them individually to get this working again Just like on x11 for the overwhelming majority of applications it's implemented in and handled by the applications framework like GTK, QT, electron, ...

trashface 4mo ago

Maybe its better under KDE but on gnome/wayland, VSCode can't even remember its window position and size or even which display it should be on - at least for me. Reminds of the bad old days of windows 3.1. I have a shell script to reset it now. But I have to use wayland because I've got nvidia and the force composition vsync hack is just too slow to game with reliably.

jackyard86 4mo ago

I prefer software rendering, I don't use compositor, and I never will. In software rendering, CPU only updates screen when changes are detected. And the change completes as fast as the computer can. So that's minimal latency + minimal resource consumed. If you're on a compositor, the 3D accelerator in your computer has to update the screen 60 times every second. It's even worse when you have a higher refresh rate display. And compositors update the buffer as soon as the previous buffer is pushed after the v-sync signal, and then it just waits until the next signal comes in. So there comes the terrible input delay. As a result, it comsumes more power and has higher latency. So in conclusion, fuck Wayland, and I'm going with xfce without compositor.

lousken 4mo ago

I hope Debian 14 will have the last x11 version such that users that need it will be able to use it for another 5 years