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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • applications in general felt sluggish

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • mub@lemmy.ml
    141·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      3·
      21 hours ago

      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.