Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops

It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-2024-Highlights

[cen1]

I, for one, welcome our new Wayland overlords.

[xnor]

2013 they said Wayland support will be shipped in 2014, btw.
Ten years later it is usable. Desktop Linux in a nutshell.

[mikoskinen]

I've been trying to figure Wayland & KDE issue for the last couple of days, without any actual success. I have three Linux machines with each different distro: TuxedoOS, Kubuntu and Fedora. All latest versions, all up to date. And unfortunately, all with Nvidia gpu. One desktop, two laptops.

The problem: performance is really bad on external display. I think it's quite likely some vsync or adaptive sync related issue as in all the cases I'm getting the half or one third fps of the monitor's refresh rate. With 60Hz the fps is 30 and with 120Hz fps is 40. I'm doing the testing with Ufotest.

On laptop display I'm getting the full fps, so 240/160. The mouse smoothness difference is quite clear.

I would prefer Wayland on all these machines as the performance on the laptop display is good and the scaling support seems better than on x11.

If I switch to x11 the performance is as expected on the external display. Googling seems to indicate that the bad performance on external monitor with KDE & Wayland & Nvidia is a common issue. But I haven't found any solutions that help.

[Kjell]

I've been trying to figure Wayland & KDE issue for the last couple of days, without any actual success.

Try Arch Linux

My 10 years old is running KDE6/Wayland which I set up in less than 2 hours from pacstrap. Mind you, most of the time was spend ricing KDE's settings.

There's zero hiccups
It runs better than Windows 11

[avis]

2013 they said Wayland support will be shipped in 2014, btw.
Ten years later it is usable. Desktop Linux in a nutshell.

Usable in Gnome and KDE.

Fully functional (meaning implementing all the Wayland spec features)? Nowhere.

Outside Gnome and KDE? Barely usable (many geeks will claim otherwise but geeks are geeks).

BTW the infamous "Linux is not ready for the desktop" article has been updated for the last one time.

HNY and Merry Christmas to everyone concerned.

[ezst036]

I, for one, welcome our new Wayland overlords.

There are no new Wayland overlords.

It is all of the old X overlords in many cases. Everybody refuses to be a lead maintainer for Xserver.

[varikonniemi]

2013 they said Wayland support will be shipped in 2014, btw.
Ten years later it is usable. Desktop Linux in a nutshell.

they delivered on their promise. Wayland the core tech was delivered in 2014

wayland + desktop extensions were not done in a cathedral style but worked over in the community so all requirements could be met, and it took some time so all stakeholders could get their vote heard. I get you are a butboy for authoritarian working models but please realize not everyone likes to be a toy for a master.

[varikonniemi]

It took some work and patience, but it certainly was worth it, wayland is by far the cleanest, most advanced protocol available.

The biggest enemy of wayland was the x fanatics who did not want to believe that the time had come to move on. When on several platforms you could see a watt difference in energy use just from ditching x it should be obvious how much work was being done on modern hardware just to support something designed several decades ago for hardware that has not existed for decades.

[andyprough]

2013 they said Wayland support will be shipped in 2014, btw.
Ten years later it is usable. Desktop Linux in a nutshell.

It's 17 years in development now. Ten years is just the time since it was proclaimed to be on the precipice of universal adoption.

I tried wayland for about a month early in 2024, as I try wayland most years at some point. I used Gnome mostly, but also KDE for a bit. It was pleasant for the things that are implemented, but there were many things that had not been implemented, or were done so very poorly.

I've heard that screen sharing has been fixed since then, although I'll have to try it and see if screen sharing is as good as when using Xorg. The screen sharing that was implemented in early 2024 was greatly inferior and prone to disconnect and lock up the display. It ruined a couple of online meetings before I gave up and used the Gnome Xorg session for all online meetings.

Screen recording with sound was a complete disaster, including in the programs such as OBS and the dedicated wayland screen recorders which were proclaimed to work. I'm hoping that some progress has been made in that area.

Global hotkey setting by programs such as VLC were not possible, and were excluded as a possibility by fundamental wayland design decisions. I don't know if that has been implemented somehow or will ever be implemented. Without global hotkey setting, some of my work is just not possible.

Lastly, I am simply not a Gnome or KDE user, and that's never going to be of interest to me as a long-term solution. I'll try wayland again sometime in 2025 probably. Although not for a month in Gnome and KDE. I'm not likely to ever spend another entire month in Gnome or KDE again. Maybe I'll finally get around to trying Hyprland and dwl, those two would be of actual interest to me.