Fedora 34 KDE Spin Planning Switch To Wayland

[gbcox]

Just tried it with plasma 5.18 and it definitely isn't ready. SDDM menu item that says (Wayland Wayland Wayland), applications which don't scroll properly, gigantic mouse pointer which comes and goes, missing menu icons in windows that are replaced by a generic Wayland symbol, copy and paste doesn't work... and that was just a quick 15 minute try out.

[Sunderland93]

Just tried it with plasma 5.18 and it definitely isn't ready. SDDM menu item that says (Wayland Wayland Wayland), applications which don't scroll properly, gigantic mouse pointer which comes and goes, missing menu icons in windows that are replaced by a generic Wayland symbol, copy and paste doesn't work... and that was just a quick 15 minute try out.

Plasma 5.18 is too old. In Plasma 5.19 all problems that you described is gone!

[Drol]

Will it support NVIDIA without xwayland acceleration and reverse prime?

[Steffo]

Can anyone confirm, that Plasma-Wayland works with proprietary NVIDIA drivers?

[ThanosApostolou]

I am seeing all these comments about how plasma wayland is working fine now, but in my case (archlinux plasma 5.19.5, gpu 7750hd with amdgpu driver) plasmashell crashes immediately after I login in Wayland session. I open terminal and do `plasmashell --replace` then it starts for a moment and crashes again after a few seconds. It was working "fine" (with all its bugs) in the first days of plasma 5.19 when I had tried it. I don't have time to debug it now but a completely non functional desktop is the worst thing that can happen to a user, because you don't even have menu to logout and login with X11 again if you don't know terminal usage (and don't know about krunner which was taking 2-3 minutes to appear after 'alt+F2' in my case). So definitely plasma wayland isn't ready, hopefully it will be for Fedora 34 (probably version 5.21 by then).

[Guest]

I did not have any major problems with Wayland on Nvidia on my desktop actually, only WM\DE specific bugs. But it is just unusable on notebook with PRIME - I could not basically offload anything. And that's on Manjaro. Maybe need to try Fedora since people are using GNOME on Wayland and maybe PRIME works there. So X11 for me now.

I was able to play Warhammer 2 on my AMD GPU, while running the display, desktop and a few other applications off the Intel iGPU (thanks to Feral providing a selection dropdown for Vulkan driver). It Just Worked(TM).

[Guest]

With each new release of Plasma I fire up the wayland session, for ages that didn't work at all due to a bug in SDDM if you rely on the previous session option rather than manually entering

I'll rolling with Gentoo here, so don't need to worry about distro time scales

GDM will actually launch Plasma Wayland and work fine with it. I ditched SDDM long ago, they clearly don't care about Wayland support, or heck SDDM itself.

[Guest]

I'm keen to try gaming on Wayland people say it manages vsync off and tearfree/VRR better than X11.. There are also some bugs or unreleased features though which seem to frustrate some. And theres the slight performance loss which seems to be the most important thing

Yeah, that's because the compositor now has full control, instead of having to interject with X server and request it to do things. That means proper control of window decoration, "perfect frames" and other good stuff. Also because the way Wayland is designed, the application just hands off frames to the compositor, and it can do this at whatever rate it desires, so that's why there are no more tearing problems and awkwardness.

It's also why VRR is something that the compositor has to work on, because it's the one talking to the display drivers and hardware. Applications using Wayland are already rendering at a variable refresh rate, so it's just that the compositor has to enable VRR on the display and then figure out how compositing windows will work in such a situation.

[Charlie68]

This is so outdated, Redhat, Canonical, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, SuSe etc, etc are all throwing thousands of dollars into developing linux.

Obviously I was not referring to the development of the kernel, among other things Microsoft works basically on what concerns the Azure platform. But an operating system is not just the kernel ... then if you want to compare Canonical to Microsoft oh well ... but even if you do you should know that Canonical doesn't care about the desktop, just like Red Hat or SUSE doesn't care, they certainly help in a consistent way because it suits them too, but they certainly don't invest what Microsoft invests in Windows. Business in Linux is certainly not the desktop!

[Mario Junior]

I wish the Fedora KDE the best of luck on this transition. I have been using Plasma + Wayland + Mesa on Arch for about two years. The experience has been one of stability improvements and functionality increases to the point where it now feels weird for me to use an X11 session. Which is very strange to say after a decade in Linux! Hopefully, upcoming techs like Pipewire will help solve a few of the missing functionality gaps.

My advice for using those considering Wayland with Plasma: 1) only use distributions with current or near current versions of Plasma (arch, manjaro, fedora, tumbleweed), 2) stick to using AMD or Intel GPUs with Mesa as the driver, 3) use wayland from a fresh boot (jumping back and forth between Wayland and X11 sessions can sometimes trigger issues with sddm). 4) Watch out on very old home directories that contain very old kde .config files 5) Enjoy super fluid window movement (very noticeable on a 144hz monitor)!

6- if you are a gamer, forget wayland and xwayland.