As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.
Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?
edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:
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remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.
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nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.
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applications in general felt sluggish
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it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.
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lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.
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screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.
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application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.
here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.
so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.
I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.
Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.
I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.
I feel similarly, especially about remmina, though as I understand it, this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland, but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I’m quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).
It’s too bad because on Debian 13 here, wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren’t for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.
I would hope plasma’s decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.
Checkout the Wayback project on fdo
Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.
People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.
Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.
I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.
Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.
The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.
Pipewire and alsa are completely different things. Pipewire uses pulse/jack which then use alsa, or am I missing something?
I have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.
I imagine that some graphical environments will always support X11. I’d suggest you switch to one of those. If someone forked Plasma, it’d have far fewer eyes on it than something like i3. I assume XFCE will continue to support X11 for a while too since it’s only just working on Wayland support. Maybe some of the less common DEs like MATE are worth looking into?
I could see MATE going Wayland only before XFCE does. They are a “traditional” desktop but not committed to old tech in general. Their whole system has already been ported to Wayland when used with a compositor like Wayfire or LabWC. As a small project, they may not want to maintain both longer term.
Lots of MATE users on other UNIX systems though. Not just BSD but Solaris and such. So, who knows.
XFCE is building libraries to make supporting both longer term easier. So, they should support X11 for a long time. We will see what happens if GTK5 is Wayland only.
Trinity Desktop is probably stuck on X11.
And most X11 window managers will remain X11 window managers forever. The only reason Sway exists is because i3 is not moving. There is Wayland Maker instead of WimdowMsker and DWL instead of DWM. This list goes on. What non-DE x11 window manager is porting to Wayland? I cannot think of one.
But Plasma is not ditching X for a year or more. And many distros will ship the X version far longer. The freaking out seems more like a political statement than a pragmatic requirement at this point.
If Debian Forky ships Plasma with X11 support in 2027 (and I bet it does), the first version of Debian Stable to ship Wayland-only Plasma will be Debian 15 in 2029/2030. Many, maybe most, never-Waylanders will have migrated to Wayland by then.
Yeah. It looks like a lot of the BSDs might be the way to go if for whatever reason you want/need to stay on X11. I’ve been trying out OpenBSD on one of my machines, and following for quite a lot longer, and progress on Wayland support seems to be relatively slow over there.
As someone who likes X11, Wayland works fine. To say it has so many things wrong is a self report. People like you make shit up about Wayland because you had some unrelated issue years ago. Just give a rest.
Wayland development continues to push forward. Currently it works better than X11 in 95% or setups, and it won’t be long before it covers 99.5%. X11 is legacy now, and Wayland works perfectly for the vast majority of users and is only improving. The time to move on is coming.
For legacy use cases there will be an alternative X11 DE you can use for a long time yet.
There are few Wayland only apps today. But as the percentage of Linux desktop users on Wayland goes over 80 percent, that will change.
And today, GUI toolkits and desktop environments have to limit features to those that will work in both environments. But not for long.
My guess is that it will be totally impractical to use an X11 only desktop 3 years from now. 5 for sure. In fact, I bet few people will even have Xwayland installed 5 years from now. To run what? Xfig? Netscape?
But certainly it will still be possible to run an X server. Xorg itself will still probably run fine. It already uses KMS and DRI from the kernel and those may not change much. And I am sure at least a few zealots will still be pushing XLibre a decade from now. And Wayback will almost certainly let you run an X11 desktop for many, many years to come for those “legacy use cases” you talk about. Like running CDE for a couple of hours.
Probably the most interesting development has been Phoenix. They have floated the idea of having an X11 first environment (eg. using an X11 window manager) that can run Wayland apps too. If that actually happens, I am sure it will find some fans. If you have spent 15 years fine-tuning your FVWM or Xmonad config, you won’t want to give it up.
It will be interesting to see where the BSD world goes with all of this. I think FreeBSD will go Wayland. But NetBSD and OpenBSD could be x11 holdouts. But the Wayland-only app problem will impact everyone. Time will tell.
I switched from x to Wayland eaely/mid last year, prior to that there were quirks. But now: no screen tearing, no nvidia issues when using their driver, steam games play instead of black screen.
The bonus is security.
Personally, I’m quite happy with Plasma Wayland on multiple machines and distros. However, Plasma has already been forked to create Sonic DE: https://github.com/Sonic-DE/sonic-win No idea if this will gain any traction once Plasma drops X11. For now, the activity seems to focus on the readme file…
And quite a dishonest readme at that. All the “not natively supported” entries for things designed to work with XDG desktop portals are hilarious.
This is obviously more of a political statement than anything else. I would not expect much from it.
You can just stay with the last plasma version that supports x11 as long as it doesnt start to bit rot. Btw, try wayland and see if YOUR workflow works
None of the x11 sessions in any DE were as smooth video output-wise as the Wayland sessions I tried, especially with multiple monitors, they always had various problems and stutter.
That is why I switched to Wayland in the end.
KDE on Manjaro - The Wayland update caused issues with programs that I used and had depended on for years. I struggled to find suitable replacements or workarounds for the features I was comfortable with on X11.
I experienced random lockups and sound issues, displayport would reset now and again. I worked with these issues until I got fed up and reverted to X11 in the login screen after installing plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11. Everything works as it used to, for now.
This experience made me want to look for alternatives to KDE, I’m not ready for Wayland.
Incidentally, does Wayland have an alternative to X2GO apart from RDP?
Remote access is the one pain point. There is very little for RMM or remote software that works on wayland. KDE has that in the works already.
Everybody says Rustdesk but it is a bad joke regardless of wayland.
Personally I host a simplehelp server(paid) and it’s really good but wayland support is a no go so far.
Everything else has been categorically better and fixed a lot of issues for me that I used to have on X11 which I’ve used for like 15 years.
X11+Gnome until gnome 3 then KDE for me because I’m not using a damn tablet (or workspaces).
It obviously won’t work for everyone, but for remote access I’ve been very impressed with waypipe. I use it to pull windows from headless machines onto my main workstation, like X forwarding.
I’d like something for persistence, like wprs, but it’s not quite there yet.
There’s already Trinity.
Don’t know what their stance is on Wayland but it exists.
I will bet the full dollar that Trinity never gets ported to Wayland.
They would have to port it to a version of Qt that supports Wayland. If they were ever going to do that, they would have done it by now.
MATE (GNOME2) ported from GTK2 to GTK3 so most of MATE works on Wayland today. You can use all the bits with a different Wayland compositor. And I think they are making their own.
But Trinity maintains their own fork of Qt3. Bringing that up to Qt6 or adding Wayland to Qt3 would be a big project. I do not see either happening.
