cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39342270
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
The people who are most upset by this use LTS Debian and won’t even see the current version of Plasma until 2050
I do like Wayland but it still has some issues that are annoying:
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When using remote input solutions (e.g InputLeap) you have to approve the input capture, and you need a mouse and keyboard connected to the PC to do that, making it kind of pointless.
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Remote desktop also requires the same thing, like, what if I don’t have a mouse & keyboard attached? What if it is a PC you are accessing from another country? You can’t just fly back to approve the remote desktop request.
This needs to get fixed ASAP in my opinion, since people do need these tools and sometimes you can’t connect a mouse & kb to the PC to just approve the request.
If your user is in the
inputgroup (set up in pretty much every distro), you can use uinput over netcat for forwrading devices (display server agnostic) without extra privileges. Same with thevideogroup. No idea if anyone used this in an actual software suite tho.
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XLibre
The only real problem I have with Wayland is not being able to find a reliable way to have unattended Remote Desktop in the same session as the local user. I can do most of my remote work over ssh but for some things I prefer a gui.
Wayland dragging Linux nerds kicking and screaming into the 21st century
I just want my AHK stuff to work again. They’re dragging us kicking and screeming into un-avoidable security that breaks software that noone is up for fixing.
As soon as I saw this i knew I had to go to the phoronix comments and bask in the shit flinging
Despite all its shortcomings, I do believe Wayland is the future. Sooner or later, all the funky decorative quirks will be some relics of the past.
Maybe someday, they will be added back, and we’ll once again have that jelly window effect, but at the moment, people actually depend on this thing to do some work, even more true with the Windows exodus.
I’d rather that they focus at the risk of being dull rather than fumbling on this chance.
Yes, I know that popularity isn’t everything, but considering how big they (and GNOME) are, they can really make The Year of Linux Desktop™.
Wobbly windows is back already, as is The Cube.
Hell yeah! Scratch that part about being dull and boring then!
yeah the wayland effects are way nicer than what was possible on x11.
Wayland should have been the HotNewShit© that the crazy people use, and everything learned from that experiment should have become the ACTUAL next thing everyone uses.
Pushing wayland like it is now was a bad idea.I would have loved to wait for it’s successor, but “use LTS old versions or eat shit” is apparently acceptable now.
Honestly for the best. X11 was great for what it was, but Wayland is the future. XWayland covers X11 apps that haven’t been ported yet.
Now I just wish Cinnamon would hurry up and move to fully default Wayland.
Who would have thought the people who code X11 thought it was dated.
It may be the future, but it’s unusable for me.
I have a high dpi screen. Upscaling does not perfectly work for me in every program, but simply setting it to Full HD does work and looks fine.
However, when I set it to the lower resolution in Wayland, I have 50% of the display active with black bars all around.
So far, there seems to be no fix for this?
Same thing happens if you start older, lower resolution fullscreen apps (retro games and such).
Which desktop are you using? The high dpi experience is desktop dependent until every one supports fractional scaling
I tried it on KDE (or rather, it forced me to after it simply updated to Wayland by default). I tried to set it up correctly, but it just didn’t quite work.
I also need no fractional scaling, but some software does not honor that anyway (e.g. VST interfaces).
Simply reducing the resolution is a simple fix, also easier on the GPU, but Wayland will not fill the screen and intead just shows the tiny original 1:1 image in the middle.
Are you sure that’s not a monitor setting?
Yes, it fills the screen the moment I select the X11 session. I even looked it up, Wayland just can’t do it.
The KDE bug tracker now:
Apparently, this is hardly hyperbole. For example: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377162
Talk about arrogance. In the window paradigm, only a few desktops ever REQUIRED a similar look and feel for all windows. Apple was the worst offender for that. I suggest that if Edmundson wants a similar look and feel, he should go get himself a Mac and stop mucking up KDE.
From a quick look at the proposed patch - and obviously without having the full picture - it’s true that it would add some complexity. But it’s code for the sake of people’s convenience, not the other way around, right? IMHO, as long as:
- shading is off by default,
- users get a clear message about limitations and SSD/CSD complications before enabling it,
- the implementation doesn’t introduce impossible-to-maintain logic and limits some weird edge cases like resizing a shaded window, then it’s worth doing.
So there is no shading on KDE Wayland? This feature works in Labwc. Death by thousand papercuts…
I suppose not. Not yet.
I know people are particular about WMs, but having to minimize a window vs keeping the window decoration in place seems like a… very minor distinction.
Is the use case rearranging a ton of windows? Something like that?
If I have to cross reference info from two windows I like to have one floating and always on top. In that case its nice being able to roll-up the window to see whats behind it. Minimizing would be similar but it feels more permanent than rolling up.
RE: use case
It’s really nice to be able to see the whole titles. A vertical panel cuts off most text, so you just have a bunch of icons when you minimize. if multiple windows are from the same app it’s confusing.
If you use a horizontal panel you have a bit more room, but a significant amount of text is still cut off, and the panel fills up quickly.
Even with as few as 6 windows open (lets say two browser and three file manager, and a terminal) minimizing is a mess. I find it better to just leave the window bar somewhere visible and shade it, since i can read all the text on my window at a glance. Combined with “keep above others”, you can get a really nice way to quickly refrence something infrequently while you do most of your work in another window.
A more typical workflow for me is 1-4 windows of a pdf reader, 1-3 file manager windows, 1 browser window, and 1 terminal window. It’s just easier to keep it all organized with window shading.
I find it much faster than a bunch of alt-tabbing, or playing hide and seek with the panel just to get a specific two PDF windows up side by side for a second
Oops, thanks.
“For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session”
So happy to read this as there is always somebody still claiming that “Wayland does not work” and “nobody wants to switch to Wayland” just because they have not.
Also great to see that the plan is for Wayland on FreeBSD as well so the Open Source desktops can stay aligned. GNOME on FreeBSD is more problematic, not because of Wayland but because of Systemd.
The problem isn’t really with Wayland not working though, it’s with other software not being caught up to work fully with wayland.
For example, in X, I can have my single screen windows work laptop display to my multi-monitor linux machine with remmina and be able to interact with the laptop as if it had multiple monitors.
Remmina cannot do this with Wayland as far as I have been able to determine.
Clearly not the fault of Wayland, but also kind of a pain in the ass that there are issues like this since some other maintainers/devs haven’t implemented what is required in their software yet.
lol read a few comments down.
It’s a very Linux thing.
People get very particular about their setups.
It’s understandable on some level: if you’re suddenly no longer part of the majority tribe you know you’ll get fewer bug fixes and so on.
So bullying and FUDing people into staying with your tribe could pay off.
What I don’t get is how they don’t realize that they’ve lost. PulseAudio (through PipeWire) is here to stay. Systemd is here to stay. Wayland is here to stay.
Maybe they just like being contrarian if they can’t win.
The main thing is that pipewire is a drop-in replacement because of how it works, wayland isnt
xwayland makes things a near drop in replacement for wayland and people still complain.
What made you think that that’s a relevant answer?
I specifically said PULSEAUDIO is here to stay, you know, as opposed to manually managing a trillion ALSA devices.
Then I mentioned PipeWire to placate the nitpickers who would point out that PulseAudio (the implementation) isn’t actually around anymore, only the device management paradigm.
And somehow you honed into that word, completely ignored everything around it, and said some stuff that sounds vaguely related to the topic at hand, yet has no actual meaning.
Why?
I still have almost no idea what PulseAudio and PipeWire even do, aside from them being two of five(!) different audio-related subsystems that any given sound problem might be related to. (The others being OSS, ALSA, and JACK, which I also don’t understand.)
OK, let’s see if I remember well:
OSS is obsolete.
ALSA is a basic primitive way to do play audio streams integrated into the kernel.
PA is an abstraction on top of ALSA that helps with network stuff, per-application volume control, …
JACK is an alternative to ALSA/PA for low latency professional use cases: you can plumb it yourself, connect inputs/outputs, …
PW is an efficient implementation of both PA and JACK, which is better than the original PA in latency.
Well shit. I would like this better if more things played nicely with wayland, as wayland itself seems pretty great. Remmina for example can’t do multi-monitor outside of x for example and this is breaking for me when i remote into my work computer.
I realize that this is the fault of remmina and not wayland. Any RDP client recommendations that work on wayland for this?
RDP has been my biggest gripe moving to wayland for my workstations at work. I’ve done a ton of looking and found nothing that actually replaces the extremely mature RDP environment that X has. For the life of me I cant get the built in KDE remote desktop to work.
In the meantime since everyone is just moving forward with wayland without much for remote desktop support I just use a virtual X session over xrdp.
I don’t think they’re removing XWayland. Just the X11 session option. You can still run legacy X11 apps in XWayland AFAIK.
I honestly don’t know a tonne about the topic. If you happen to know, what exactly is xwayland and how would I go about implementing it (on debian 13). Curious if it would have ramifications for my system for better or worse, might be interested in trying it out until other software can get caught up with wayland proper.
XWayland is the compatibility layer in Wayland to run X11 applications within Wayland. I’ve never had an issue with it on any application that still used X11 and it’s pre-installed, so you don’t have to do anything, if you’re running Wayland.
Ahh I see. Doesn’t quite solve all of my problems then, but at least it’s doing some heavy lifting already without me knowing. Thanks!
I’m curious… What problems are you referring to?
Primarily my aforementioned issue with Remmina not being able to span multiple monitors while running under wayland.
I think when I looked it up I saw the Remmina devs have been aware of this problem for a couple years now, but the problem is surprisingly difficult for them to fix for a few reasons I can’t recall at the moment.
Can you try running remmina in xwindow mode instead of wayland and see if that bandages the problem? I remember having that problem when I had two monitors, but it gave me an excuse to upgrade to an ultra wide so I didn’t troubleshoot it that much.
Try KRDC.
I did earlier and it bugged out for me for some reason and was unusable. Possibly a config problem, will try later on when I have a bit more time.
Damn. I guess it’s finally goodbye window shade or goodbye Plasma. I really wish they’d figured out a solution.
I get it though. The edge cases will never be fixed until devs know what they are, and GNOME proved this is an effective way to find out.
labwc has it :) I use it with XFCE, integration is pretty rough but will hopefully get there over time. No crashes so far!
I don’t even know what window shading is…. What is it?
It looks like it’s still being discussed:
The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:
allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.
It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.
It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.
And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.Thanks for the link! Heartening to know there are others that love this feature like i do
Wow!! What a news! :)
“KDE: We hate Unix.”
KDE:
“The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Xorg is a monolith with essentially one implementation. Wayland is a modular system with almost every component available from multiple sources.
Saying adopting Wayland means you “hate UNIX” is one of the least thoughtful arguments I can imagine.
If X11 is so good why is there no X12?
X11 is already perfect as it is. Everything left was fixed in the X11Rx releases.
One of the great aspects of Open Source is that you can continue to use any software you like for as long as you want. Enjoy Xorg (or your other favourite X11 server).
Of course, a majority of Xorg devs disagreed with you which is why they started Wayland to begin with. And a majority of desktop Linux users disagree with you now as three quarters of them have switched to Wayland.
Wayland offers a lot that X11 does not at this point. So, nobody is coming back. But if you are happy with X, stick with it.
You are going to lose access to a lot of apps though. There are very few Wayland only apps now but there are going to be many more in the coming years. And when toolkits like GTK5 go Wayland only, you may lose a some you already use.
But if you are happy with X, stick with it.
There is no Wayland on some of the systems I use.
Linux is not UNIX. And X isn’t part of POSIX.
Also, Wayland works on FreeBSD.
Linux is not UNIX. And X isn’t part of POSIX.
Please refrain from replying to things I haven’t said. None of your points invalidate mine.
So, you just decided to say “KDE: we hate Unix” for no reason whatsoever, because it has no relation to the OP at all?
It does have a relation. KDE worked just well on most Unices for decades. “Going all-in” on Wayland means that they’ll drop support for all operating systems except Linuces and FreeBSD. There are two explanations for that:
- They don’t care about (most of) Unix.
- They actively despise (most of) Unix.
I’m not quite sure where you’re misunderstanding me here. Care to elaborate?
I guess their mention that X isn’t part of POSIX very much applies, despite you being dismissive of it. This is an absurd take. Wayland can obviously be ported to whatever is still developed. It’s just software.
