GNOME's Wayland Session Shows Potential For Better Battery Life Than With X.Org

[oiaohm]

Will be this issue fixed?

The switch backwards and forwards issues between wayland and X11 will be fixed at some point. Please note issues its not a single fault. Some of those faults are hardware combination dependant. So as people hit the issues and report them they are being progressively fixed.

The not there yet is that the are still new issues turning up and existing issues open that are being fixed. The rate if new issues causing this problem is decreasing with time. So moving in the right direction and will get there some time could be 6 months out could be a year or 2. This is just one of those things that we cannot 100 predict.

There are also known issue with SDDM doing stupid things as well. Those issue are also being worked on being fixed.

[Azrael5]

The switch backwards and forwards issues between wayland and X11 will be fixed at some point. Please note issues its not a single fault. Some of those faults are hardware combination dependant. So as people hit the issues and report them they are being progressively fixed.

The not there yet is that the are still new issues turning up and existing issues open that are being fixed. The rate if new issues causing this problem is decreasing with time. So moving in the right direction and will get there some time could be 6 months out could be a year or 2. This is just one of those things that we cannot 100 predict.

There are also known issue with SDDM doing stupid things as well. Those issue are also being worked on being fixed.

So, in order a user could apply Wayland session in PLASMA it has to enter in wayland session the first time assuming its hardware is compliant to wayland. If the user switches to X11 is still able to enter Wayland session again (always in PLASMA)?

As of Chrome and Firefox, how do these browsers switch to wayland and x11recognizing the two different graphical systems?
At this point two different operating systems of the same one, the first one based on Wayland and the other on X11 would not solve the switching problem? As example, Fedora based on Wayland and Fedora based on x11, Kde Neon based on wayland and Neon based on x11. Most of the limitations, in the transitional phase is due to the necessity to match non-wayland with wayland by xwayland. A clear separation could simplify the program development above all now that wayland operating systems seem to be ready.

[oiaohm]

So, in order a user could apply Wayland session in PLASMA it has to enter in wayland session the first time assuming its hardware is compliant to wayland. If the user switch to X11 is still able to enter Wayland session again (always in PLASMA)?

The answer is maybe at this stage and that is the problem. Issue here is X11 server has X11 drivers been the plasma running in X11 and plasma running as wayland has direct. So yes hardware can be X11 and Wayland compliant but switching backwards and forwards is not going to work due to the fact to the KDE X11 compositor/windows manager and KDE Wayland Compositor the details about the hardware are being presented differently.

Its really simple to forget X11 server provides a layer of abstraction from the hardware. Yes this layer of abstraction result information about the hardware not appearing the same. So plasma running wayland can record settings that match direct hardware but when applied on X11 abstraction does not work when you apply those settings due to abstraction and the reverse can be true as well the X11 abstraction can have you setting stuff ways to suite it that don't suit direct hardware.

As of Chrome and Firefox, how do these browsers switch to wayland and x11recognizing the two different graphical systems?

Userspace applications mostly don't have the same problem. They are normally not need all the details X11 compositor use or Wayland compositor use. This is like 99.9 percent of your desktop applications really not recording that much information about the platform they are on so more adapt to what they see the next time they start.

This is a problem that will be solved in time as people work out what settings that have to be marked as direct hardware or X11 only.

[reba]

Regarding switching between Wayland and X11 in conjunction with KDE Plasma:
I regulary switch between both, in the same uptime-cycle.

It is possible and with a bit of kill-ing it works reliably.
I disabled (and soon to remove) sddm as it gets in the way because it spawns an X11 server itself and does not (for me) provide anything worthwile:
I boot up to the console and run one of the two shell scripts to either start an X11 or a Wayland Plasma session.
Then I logout of this session, drop back to the console and log in into the other, if I want to.

The reason for this is I usually run the Wayland session but because of the Nvidia-dGPU in this laptop I have to switch to X11 to be able to use it (hope NVIDIA gets it support in a row in a timely manner), usually for gaming.
It is also possible to not enable the Nvidia dGPU and run the X11 session on the AMD iGPU.

In short: it is possible and I switch regulary between X11 Plasma and Wayland Plasma, sometimes often a day, without a reboot in between.
So it's more like three possible sessions:
- AMD Wayland Plasma (daily driver; this also spawns an XWayland in the background because kwin does so)
- AMD X11 Plasma (has its uses, for when needing an X11 session without needlessly enabling the NVIDIA dGPU which just burns Watts)
- NVIDIA X11 Plasma (when gaming so the X server is started on this GPU).