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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just accessibility software but really any customization. Like always the people making the decision to break compatibility and benefiting by being able to work on the cool new thing don't even pay a fraction of the pain inflicted by it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Technically, it is a goal, though perhaps an optimistic one.
I won't support vicious widgets in the 2.x releases, but I should definitely add support for it in the release/1.4 branch that follows AwesomeWM master/4.4. Not that I think vicious widgets are the best, but technically if it runs on AwesomeWM, I should support it in 1.4.
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.
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.
66 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] thread> 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.
Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
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.
Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
I use Wayland and it has a "stay on top" option for windows.
What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.
I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Technically, it is a goal, though perhaps an optimistic one.
I won't support vicious widgets in the 2.x releases, but I should definitely add support for it in the release/1.4 branch that follows AwesomeWM master/4.4. Not that I think vicious widgets are the best, but technically if it runs on AwesomeWM, I should support it in 1.4.
I created an issue (https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm/issues/599), even if you decide not to use SomeWM. Thanks for trying it out.
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.
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_I...