KDE On Wayland: "The Biggest Thing Needed Now Is Adoption By 3rd Party Apps"

[skierpage]

"Many 3rd-party apps are already Wayland-native"
Can someone name some of them? I'd like to try some real wayland native applications besides those benchmarks like glmark2

On KDE on Fedora 38: Firefox and Thunderbird (I don't know if they still need MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND), the GIMP beta flatpak, the Inkscape Flatpak, the LibreOffice Flatpak, KeepassXC, the PCSX2 emulator Flatpak, SpeedCrunch. vlc is still X11. This is based on running xeyes and seeing seeing which windows it tracks; xlsclients doesn't list most X11 applications any more under XWayland for some reason.

[lowflyer]

Despite all the shepards-pipe songs saying "Wayland is good and ready and better than X11" - It still doesn't work on MY system …

[mdedetrich]

Yeah and explains why Apple has like 2% market share even among developers' target.

These figures are like a decade old, lol. Its a lot higher now, its actually Windows thats losing out.

[Quackdoc]

You conveniently ignored my paragraph about wlroots in your response. It has already done a lot against fragmentation and will do even more in the future, as it's even considered as a future path for KWin to migrate to, aswell as a base for most of the DEs that still need to be ported to Wayland.

And then there's also dozens of (tiling-)WMs built on top of wlroots - all compatible with one another in the sense that they support most wl-protocols and interact with portals in the same way. In that sense, there's more code-sharing/less fragmentation than ever!

unless kwin, and gnome migrate to wlroots, it's a moot point, the fragmentation is already there, and that's discounting the up and comming smithay based compositors. and ofc you have weston too

[guglovich]

Reading through the discussion thread like this at this point with how mature Wayland is is rather comical.

Someone will try a Wayland session in GNOME, see that it does in fact work fine.

But then they try a Wayland session in KDE, see that it doesn't work. Conclusion? Wayland sucks! It's not ready! Woe is me the sky is falling!

But Wayland is working fine. KDE isn't done finishing its porting work.

And then they try a Wayland session in XFCE, see that it doesn't work. Conclusion? Wayland sucks! It's not ready! Woe is me the sky is falling!

But Wayland is working fine. XFCE isn't done finishing its porting work.

And then they try a Wayland session in Budgie, see that it doesn't work. Conclusion? Wayland sucks! It's not ready! Woe is me the sky is falling!

But Wayland is working fine. Budgie isn't done finishing its porting work.

Or, or user will try a Wayland session in GNOME, see that it does in fact work fine, but then try some old/oddball web browser or game (or other software etc.) that isn't properly supporting Wayland.

Conclusion? Wayland sucks! It's not ready! Woe is me the sky is falling!

Wayland has been mature for a very long time now, those users of Intel and newer AMD video cards can attest to this. Nvidia was a blocker for nearly a decade but even that now is coming to an end. Now its just the individual desktops, and even further toward the bottom, it's just individual applications.

The time has come to stop blaming Wayland because other software offerings haven't finished working through their technical debt. It's the desktop. It's that web browser. It's that office package. It's that game. It's not Wayland.

It hasn't been Wayland for a long time.

Wayland is so apparently simple and easy to understand that it takes everyone so long, well yeah. It's like giving a crooked SDK and manuals to developers and then blaming the latter.

[MadCatX]

If Wayland worked, would we still have this argument 15 years after its inception? If Wayland worked, would I even post anything here? If Wayland worked, why would a KDE developer write 4 pages of text ... convincing people to give it a try or port their applications to it?

Why are people not arguing about PipeWire? Or Vulkan? Or Glibc? Or ... Wine/DXVK? Or a ton of other things in Linux? Because they were designed and developed by sensible people.

i don't understand with what mind people argue against this facts

- Pipewire is a 100% drop-in replacement for Pulseaudio. No effort is needed to make the transition. Transiting from ALSA to Pulseaudio, now that was another story written in flamewars.
- Vulkan does not care about compatibility at all, nor does it have to.
- Glibc used to be at the core of many heated arguments, especially when it was maintained by Ulrich Drepper. In fact, birdie/avis/<***> used to quote a technically incompetent report how glibc is so bad that it leaks memory by design (no, it does not).
- Problems that Wine/DXVK have to solve have zero technical parallels with those of Wayland. Therefore, it does not work as an example here.

Don't worry, this is just birdie posting fake-news kind of arguments and you took the bait. It happened to the best of us.

[ultimA]

I think people forget that this slow switch to Wayland is not a command coming from a higher management level or the like. If Wayland is slowly taking over projects like Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, XFCE, and distros are switching over, then it is because those people actually working on desktop environments, compositors and user experiences think it is better than X.
OK, Wayland's protocols started out rough and it took over a decade to mature it. So what? In the meantime everybody had X to continue using. Wayland would not be taking over if people who actually have to develop against it it did not think it was technically superior and worth it, even if it means more work to them. Users complain, while the actual developers do the work out of their own free will.

"But it's not working as a complete X-replacement for me yet!"
Hmm, I guess there was a reason after all your software/distro did not enable it in the standard configuration. What a surprise.

The point is, of course it is not 100% ready yet. But it is in the last mile. Do you think a distro can allow itself for scaling not to work? Or allow itself for streaming and video conferences not to work? By the time Wayland becomes the standard configuration for everybody, dveelopers and distros will have figured these out. Until then, just use X.

[billyswong]

ultimA X.Org is warning everyone for their end of support in near future. What are the choices that small DE/WM projects have?
1. Implement support of Wayland
2. Take over the maintenance of X.Org by themselves
3. Close the DE/WM and announce the project is game over.

Their adoption of Wayland implies nothing in whether Wayland is "better than X".

[ultimA]

ultimA X.Org is warning everyone for their end of support in near future. What are the choices that small DE/WM projects have?
1. Implement support of Wayland
2. Take over the maintenance of X.Org by themselves
3. Close the DE/WM and announce the project is game over.

Their adoption of Wayland implies nothing in whether Wayland is "better than X".

But its adoption by the bigger players with enough resources does imply it is better. So should the whole desktop stack never migrate to a superior solution because some projects don't have the resources?

There is a 4. option that you did not list:
4. Migrate to Wayland in a longer timeframe they can manage with their limited resources (e.g. the same approach that XFCE is taking). It's not like X is going to magically stop working when Wayland becomes the standard. At most it will need a couple of one-liner patches from time to time to keep it working with newer compilers, maybe a security fix or two. Distros will probably do this work.

EDIT:
One more thing. If "X.Org is warning everyone for their end of support", then it is not Wayland killing off X, it is X killing itself. It is not like Wayland devs can force X devs to stop working on their own project. If X devs are giving up support, it means they themselves think X has been finally superseded.

[mSparks]

Very bad thing to say. Android on Chromeos has adopted wayland. So by your statement everyone should be using Wayland right....

Sounds like the ops problem is already solved then, there is plenty of chromeos 3rd party apps.