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.
I think the main thing holding Wayland back are older drivers which don’t work well with it and impact on things like games. Once its over that hump there isn’t much reason for maintainers to suffer two back ends any more.
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.
InputLeap is the only thing that keeps me on X at the moment. Especially since I need it between a Linux host and a Windows client. It just doesn’t work if I use Plasma with Wayland unfortunately and honestly, the github page of InputLeap is everything but helpful.
Have you tried out Deskflow?
InputLeap is effectively abandoned and the maintainer has taken over Deskflow which has better Wayland support
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Wayland dragging Linux nerds kicking and screaming into the 21st century
As soon as I saw this i knew I had to go to the phoronix comments and bask in the shit flinging
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).
I’ve had many similar issues with Wayland. Not thrilled that nearly everyone is throwing in the towel on X11 support.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
God dammit, everytime I have to use wayland I find something that I need to use which doesn’t work.
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11 and not pretend just showing a desktop is all it needs to do?
Do you have some examples? Most things I (and others) do are in the category “showing a desktop”, multiple desktops with different resolution / scaling / refresh rate, maybe opening a virtual monitor using krfb.
Wayland has been a complete game changer for me regarding performance and reliability (as soon as it hit a certain stability lol).
Yeah I second this. I’ve been on wayland for a few years now and while my needs are pretty standard I also regularly need slightly-off-the-beaten-path features. Not everything used to always work, but in the last, I want to say 18 months, I never found my needs lacking.
Multiple monitors work, adaptive sync works, mic / webcam works, screen / window sharing works, remote desktop and wayland forwarding works, etc.
That’s not to say everything is guaranteed to work all the time, but I am surprised to see people saying that even today they always find something fundamental that is broken when they attempt to switch.
Screen sharing is a great example. I used to have issues with it, but since about a year I’m able to share my screen in the MS teams PWA in Firefox and even the Discord flatpak without a hassle.
Yeah. In the first months, there were clipboard issues. Until 2 years or so ago for me, screen sharing wasn’t perfect.
I searched for or filed issues whenever I could, and there’s not a trace of a problem left.
I wonder if these people just complain on social media and give up immediately without informing anyone relevant and then feign surprise when shit’s not magically fixed later.
I use Talon voice. It’s software that let’s me use the pc still, due to write severe RSI.
However, Wayland doesn’t allow a lot of functionality that tools like this need.
Therefore, anyone who requires a tool similar to Talon, needs X11.
KDE is out.
Wayland compositors lack the APIs necessary for Talon and Wayland support is not planned.
Sucks that they just claim that and give up instead of trying to work together with Wayland compositors to make this happen.
I don’t understand why they would drop you like this.
Yup.
X11 forwarding which I use extensively - I realize there’s waypipe which is supposed to allow you to do this, but I’ve not had a chance to test this yet as there’s always something else.
Remote desktop woes - Feels like a total crapshoot with this one, on a box I was experimenting with the build in RDP seemed to work ok, but being able to connect to the actual working desktop vs. start up a separate session that isn’t connected to the running desktop doesn’t seem to be a thing. aka, I could use x11vnc to connect to the running desktop or regular VNC to get a separate X session which wasn’t attached to the monitor and didn’t interfere with the desktop. There’s probably a way to get this working but it seems this is all built into KDE or Gnome now instead of being separate functionality. Tell me if there’s something I’m missing here.
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
OBS window capture - Just had this happen to me, went to update my streaming box and it swapped to wayland with no X11 option anymore, Ubuntu has completely dropped support, not even “you can install it yourself”. So the pipewire window capture is woefully lacking in features, I’m not sure it had the ability for me to crop the captured window at all, which I need to capture a pixel perfect section of the window to line up the control pixels in the stream exactly. But even if that feature was hidden and I was missing it, when it tried to capture the window for the serializer it was utterly munged, smeared and stretched and total trash. Regular OS windows captured ok, but the serializer, which is a unity app, was unusable. A full restore of the out of date OS was required to get things working again.
Yeah, I realize I’m using all the most esoteric features in the world, but that’s what makes X11 so damned functional, yeah it’s crufty and old and has issues, but damn if it doesn’t do all the things.
Edit: I’m sure if you just need it to do normal desktop things it works great.
Edit2: One more thing while everyone is going to be looking at this post, is there a way for me to set the display I want a window to show up on? I don’t mean multiple monitors, I mean like I can be ssh’d into a box and set my display variable to DISPLAY=“:0.0” and anything I run from that session with a GUI will show up on the main desktop display on the monitor, and if I have additional X sessions I can set it to :1.0 or whatever to have the window pop up on that one, does wayland have anything analogous to this where I can control where my windows appear from sessions not attached to the display manager at all?
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
Barrier has been unmaintained for a while now. The two active forks are deskflow (upstream) and input-leap. Deskflow has limited supported for Wayland. It seems that they’re working on resolving the remaining issues: https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/discussions/7499
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll check out deskflow!
I’m not the OP, but tbh the only thing that doesn’t work for me is the apps that replace your input by the same thing in another layout.
For example, you have 2 keyboard layouts, type something and realize afterwards that you forgot to change the keyboard layout. You press the hotkey to trigger a script that removes your input, translates it into a different keyboard layout and pastes it back.
People who only use 1 keyboard layout don’t even think about this issue and usually don’t know such software exists.
I miss it a lot. There’s 1 script that works in wayland but it’s pretty buggy and it’s not in arch repos, so I don’t trust it too much. X11 had many options.
Orca slicer, bambu studio
To be clear: that’s their issue.
Those work fine in Wayland for me.
At least Orca Slicer works fine for me in Wayland.
Meanwhile, my OS switched to Wayland while updating at some point and I didn’t even notice.
Meanwhile, most Unices don’t even have Wayland.
“Most Unices” haven’t been relevant for a decade or more. At this point it’s really just Linux, OS X, Android (to the extent it counts as a Unix), and BSD as an also-ran. Obviously OS X and Android don’t care about Wayland or X11 to begin with, so all you’re really saying is that BSD is getting left behind.
Which isn’t true, at least one of them has Wayland support already, the rest is following suit.
My brother in arms, given Linux’s desktop market share (which is where KDE is used), Linux is the also-ran in your list. For the point I have made, however, market share is not really relevant. Unices don’t stop becoming Unix just because of how many people use them.
The point is, nobody gives a shit about Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc. anymore and your argument is stupid.
Every Unix or Unix-like OS that matters in 2025 is either switching from X11 to Wayland or never used X11 to begin with.
“Nobody”. I see. Please try to leave your bubble every now and then. There are quite a few people (including me) who still need those systems, and it is rather disappointing to see that they are left behind without a good reason.
I think if you have some use-case that Wayland doesn’t fulfill, it’s totally fine to just pin some version of Plasma and stick with it. Maybe even switch to Trinity. Chances are it will keep working for like a decade or more.
I still use kdenlive 18.08, because I know how to use that version, and it does what I need it to do perfectly well. They broke something I needed in 19.whatever (I don’t remember what it was anymore), so I just pinned it and kept using it ever since. Maybe one day I’ll try to figure out the latest version, but there’s no real incentive for me to do so.
Yeah, you are right. Just a massive pain to deal with as things continue to diverge and I’m forced to deal with maintaining more and more custom solutions just to maintain functionality.
I want wayland to get there, just not seeing it yet.
You can always switch to Slackware Linux.
The current release doesn’t even include a Wayland session yet (nor systemd).
And judging by the project’s history, the next major release is likely going to drop in 10+ years.
