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

[phoronix]

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

Given the recent discussions stemming from Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6 and drop the KDE Plasma X11 session to focus solely on Wayland for the next-gen KDE desktop, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has written a lengthy blog post to outline the current state and his thoughts on KDE Wayland support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Wayland-Good-Shape

[kiffmet]

You heared that probono? It's time to "unsuck" AppImage - merge the damn pull request!

[Karmux]

When I want to turn off my monitor in Plasma 5 then I enter Wayland session since this is exactly the only thing Wayland session does on my AMD gaming PC. On the other hand it works flawlessly on my girlfriend's Intel laptop.

[awesz]

Wayland is certainly not a replacement for X11, neither is the former "dead" or anything of the sort. Desktop environment vendors aren't gods and don't get to decide whether something is obsolete just because their superiors say so, specially when the standard display protocol AND server for Unix-like systems (!) works well and will continue to be relevant in the foresseable future, be it in the hands of IBM/freedesktop.org or the actual community.

[avis]

It's nice to read this:

How is Wayland any better?

Wayland was conceived of by X developers who wanted to avoid repeating their own mistakes. In addition to a lot of technical differences, by being a minimal set of protocols and two extremely thin client and server libraries, all the heavy lifting was delegated to individual compositors, which became the window servers of their environments. A new feature added to one would not destabilize any other compositors. Compositors were also free to implement new features via private protocols outside of the standard ones that apps only targeting that compositor could use.

Wait, that sounds like it sucks

Wayland has not been without its problems, it’s true. Because it was invented by shell-shocked X developers, in my opinion it went too far in the other direction. Wayland’s minimal core protocols are lacking most of the features that non-trivial apps and desktops actually need to work–such as screen locking, screen sharing, cross-app window activation, non-integer scaling, and so on. Compositors all needed to come up with ways to do these things themselves. And that need for each compositor to implement everything itself fragments development efforts and disadvantages small teams without the expertise of heavy-hitting graphics developers. These are real problems and we shouldn’t sweep them under the rug.

Because on Phoronix, r/Linux and OSNews, Wayland fans are screaming with their ears shut that it's not an issue.

Why is the adoption taking so long?

The fact that Wayland’s minimal core protocol made it unable to fully replace the thing it aimed to replace was a bad architectural design decision on the part of its authors that crippled the prospect of its rapid adoption when it was released in 2008. We didn’t see the same problem with other newer projects like Systemd and PipeWire which were adopted much faster.
And unfortunately, shepherding new protocols through the approval process to fix this problem is a grueling political exercise. It demands empathy and compromise with people from other projects who approach the problem you’re trying to solve from a fundamentally different perspective. Someone may disagree that the problem is even worth solving. Bikeshedding derails the discussion and everyone gets demoralized and stops working on it. For a long time, the urgency of pushing through it was low because X wasn’t dead yet.
So it took over a 15 years and resulted in Wayland’s dirty laundry being aired in public for that whole time. And that sucks. But… we’re there now. Standard protocols now exist for just about everything anyone needs. The few remaining obvious omissions (like screen color calibration) are being actively worked on as a matter of priority.

“Are we there yet?”

Plasma and KDE apps work great on Wayland, especially in the upcoming Plasma 6 release. Like I said, there are still a few omissions, but those holes are being plugged very quickly these days.

And we still have omissions. Bravo. Wayland is a prime example of how not to design a desktop graphics API. And 10 years from now people will still be using "broken" "unsupported" Xorg because it was designed for people not for lofty ideas.

Everything about this post reeks of "We are done with Xorg but unfortunately we have to deal with this crap called Wayland". Maybe Wayland needs to be dropped and something desktopy has to be created again. Yes.

X11 needed to be redesigned, not dropped and replaced with something completely different which is alien to desktop.

[lostdistance]

I use Gentoo Linux and I am working towards a pure Wayland system. I have succeeded in removing the X11 server and most of the X11 libraries.

After an upgrade to Thunderbird 115, the main blocker to a pure Wayland system is now LibreOffice, which works without the X11 server but still has hard dependencies on a few X11 libraries (including libX11 itself).

[nadir]

You heared that probono? It's time to "unsuck" AppImage - merge the damn pull request!

I don't think that's possible. Wish that standard would die after having fought with it and after having heard Richard Brown's (OpenSuse) experience with it and their developers.

[Slartifartblast]

Typo : "KDE applicatioms"

[Volta]

Wayland is certainly not a replacement for X11, neither is the former "dead" or anything of the sort. Desktop environment vendors aren't gods and don't get to decide whether something is obsolete just because their superiors say so, specially when the standard display protocol AND server for Unix-like systems (!) works well and will continue to be relevant in the foresseable future, be it in the hands of IBM/freedesktop.org or the actual community.

Yeah, right. There are no Unix-like systems outside Linux (if we're not talking about 0,000001% market share), so you can say goodbye to flawed by design X11. The first thing I would get rid from my server is full of holes insecure crap called X11.

[Volta]

Everything about this post reeks of "We are done with Xorg but unfortunately we have to deal with this crap called Wayland". Maybe Wayland needs to be dropped and something desktopy has to be created again. Yes.

X11 needed to be redesigned, not dropped and replaced with something completely different which is alien to desktop.

An only crap here is Xorg and your comment. Nobody will redesign it, so keep dreaming. What needs to be redesigned are apps basing on broken by design, legacy xorg crap.