4 ms·

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.

by 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
        With X11 you don't have to care about what wm/compositor you're using to choose a screen recorder.
      - httpsterio 4mo ago
        The 940mx on this laptop doesn't support hardware video encoding, so I'm basically forced to run everything on CPU. I do also stream so it's definitely a nice to have. I could run the game on the GPU and leave more CPU for the desktop and encoder, maybe I'd be able to record and play on Wayland that way, but there's some additional drawing latency if I run the game on the GPU, the frame buffer gets sent back to the CPU before it's drawn on the display anyways. As it's rhythm games I mainly play (ITGmania, Stepmania fork), the additional latency for getting the picture out on the display it's not really working out great for me.
- fhars 4mo ago
  On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.
  - craftkiller 4mo ago
    What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
    - chlorion 4mo ago
      Probably didn't even bother to diagnose the issue. It's hard to tell if it was even wayland related without logs and some digging. But lets just blindly blame wayland cause new thing bad!
      - duskdozer 4mo ago
        Log in using wayland -> no desktop. Log in using x11 -> desktop. Clearly it's "wayland related" even if whatever root cause it is is something you wouldn't consider directly attributable to it. Logging into a graphical session is something that has just worked out of the box each other install on whatever random hardware I've used for many years. How is that classified as some nitpicky "new thing bad" complaint?
        gf000 4mo ago
        Well, it's like new car doesn't start but you have forgotten to put fuel into it, and now blame the car. This is Linux desktop, like if you have never had a black screen before then I'm not sure what you expect. One culprit could actually be the home .config/.cache folders that have all kind of sh*t accumulated (like why do we still do it this way? It's horrible), so I usually rename them and try again to see if this is the problem behind the scenes.
        4mo ago
- pmontra 4mo ago
  For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.
  - ahartmetz 4mo ago
    KWin can do dimming in hardware or by messing with the colors - not sure how.
    - pmontra 4mo ago
      Messing with colors looks like gamma correction and dimming in hardware is the backlight control that does not work anymore on my laptop. I don't remember why gamma correction didn't work for me Wayland but I'll give it another try next year, maybe it got fixed by then. X11 is working perfectly well and it always did for me.
- hgoel 4mo ago
  I recently installed Kubuntu 26.XX on my desktop, was worried about having to use workarounds and giving up on fractional scaling to use it with my NVIDIA gpus (previously had to do this), but was also pretty surprised that it has been smooth sailing.
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.

by ndiddy 4mo ago

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
      With X11 you don't have to care about what wm/compositor you're using to choose a screen recorder.
    - httpsterio 4mo ago
      The 940mx on this laptop doesn't support hardware video encoding, so I'm basically forced to run everything on CPU. I do also stream so it's definitely a nice to have. I could run the game on the GPU and leave more CPU for the desktop and encoder, maybe I'd be able to record and play on Wayland that way, but there's some additional drawing latency if I run the game on the GPU, the frame buffer gets sent back to the CPU before it's drawn on the display anyways. As it's rhythm games I mainly play (ITGmania, Stepmania fork), the additional latency for getting the picture out on the display it's not really working out great for me.
fhars 4mo ago
On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.
- craftkiller 4mo ago
  What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
  - chlorion 4mo ago
    Probably didn't even bother to diagnose the issue. It's hard to tell if it was even wayland related without logs and some digging. But lets just blindly blame wayland cause new thing bad!
    - duskdozer 4mo ago
      Log in using wayland -> no desktop. Log in using x11 -> desktop. Clearly it's "wayland related" even if whatever root cause it is is something you wouldn't consider directly attributable to it. Logging into a graphical session is something that has just worked out of the box each other install on whatever random hardware I've used for many years. How is that classified as some nitpicky "new thing bad" complaint?
      - gf000 4mo ago
        Well, it's like new car doesn't start but you have forgotten to put fuel into it, and now blame the car. This is Linux desktop, like if you have never had a black screen before then I'm not sure what you expect. One culprit could actually be the home .config/.cache folders that have all kind of sh*t accumulated (like why do we still do it this way? It's horrible), so I usually rename them and try again to see if this is the problem behind the scenes.
        4mo ago
pmontra 4mo ago
For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  KWin can do dimming in hardware or by messing with the colors - not sure how.
  - pmontra 4mo ago
    Messing with colors looks like gamma correction and dimming in hardware is the backlight control that does not work anymore on my laptop. I don't remember why gamma correction didn't work for me Wayland but I'll give it another try next year, maybe it got fixed by then. X11 is working perfectly well and it always did for me.
hgoel 4mo ago
I recently installed Kubuntu 26.XX on my desktop, was worried about having to use workarounds and giving up on fractional scaling to use it with my NVIDIA gpus (previously had to do this), but was also pretty surprised that it has been smooth sailing.

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.