KWin On Wayland Without X11 Support Can Startup So Fast It Causes Problems

[Charlie68]

To me it's not funny, I'm using plasma5 (because I hate gnome 3) and it's much more sluggish than gnome 3. i.e. the main menu or especially the calendar which takes up to 3 seconds to show up when first clicked. It indeed seems that something not being slow is a problem for the kde project.

I think you have some problems, on my notebook that is not lightning (AMD Quad-core processor E2-3800 1.30 GHz) Leap 42.3-Plasma5 is very fast and I have no problems of slowness.

[Zan Lynx]

I don't think you can just port a window manager to Wayland. There are no window managers on Wayland so they have to write a compositor.

You can take a window manager and paste it together with libweston, the reference compositor.

[bregma]

You can take a window manager and paste it together with libweston, the reference compositor.

Really, it's just that simple? I'm amazed that so many very talented people have missed that.

[aufkrawall]

I think it's planned that this would be possible in future, but not in Weston's current state.

[waxhead]

Use Xfce, it works fine with the Pentium III&512MB Ram and up. With Xfce you can freely configure panels,the desktop and the Whisker menu that does not exist in KDE. My Debian testing Xfce installation uses 240MB ram after booting to the desktop. With Xfce you make your desktop to look the way you want.

Exactly! My DE of choice is XFCE. It simply gets out of your way and allows you to do what you want. People who think that the default XFCE layout is good really miss out. Once your take 5 minutes to configure the panels to something sane you have everything you will ever need from a desktop.

All I need to be comfortable is XFCE, Double Commander, SeaMonkey, DeaDBeeF, CodeBlocks and Debian of course. As others have pointed out already KDE has a obvious race condition that needs to be fixed. Speed should not make a program crash. It should make you smile.

[tajjada]

To me it's not funny, I'm using plasma5 (because I hate gnome 3) and it's much more sluggish than gnome 3. i.e. the main menu or especially the calendar which takes up to 3 seconds to show up when first clicked. It indeed seems that something not being slow is a problem for the kde project.

Go to System Settings -> KWin and make sure that the OpenGL backend is selected and not XRender. Yes, I am talking about Wayland, not X.

A friend of mine was setting up KDE on Wayland a few days ago. He had awful sluggishness and performance problems and even occasional glitches and crashes. We were trying to troubleshoot what was going on for some time. As he was looking through the settings control panels, he saw that the XRender KWin backend was selected by default for some reason. He tried changing it to the OpenGL 3 option and all the problems went away. This was on Mesa RadeonSI driver over AMDGPU (AMD R9 Nano).

Try that, see if it helps in your case.

[tajjada]

Regarding your comment that, "...hopefully by the end of 2018 we'll see most day-to-day use-cases supporting native Wayland quite well."

I work for a company that provides a large suite of CAE tools on both Linux and Windows (and Mac to a lesser extent). We use both Tk and Qt in various areas for our GUI.

Until Tcl/Tk supports Wayland, we'll be running under X. I suspect this will be for a long time.

And I suspect that even once Tcl/Tk provides a Wayland supporting back end, it will be another release or so before we get to remove all the X11 specific code we have.

Or you could start removing / cleaning up x11-specific code already ahead of time, as you go along, whenever possible.

If you are working on some part of the code and notice x11-specific things, maybe it would be a good idea to clean them up in preparation for the future (whenever it wouldn't require too much effort and there aren't other things that are much more important at the moment).

[tajjada]

You can take a window manager and paste it together with libweston, the reference compositor.

It is never quite that simple.

However, there are libraries that help. If not libweston, https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots is a library designed for exactly this purpose -- to handle all the details of a wayland compositor and let you develop "window managers" on top. It was developed for the `sway` i3-compatible wayland compositor. It replaces the now-obsolete/unmaintained wlc, which was made for a similar purpose. Other wayland compositors / "window managers" are also being ported over to it, such as way-cooler.

With wayland, you still need to handle quite a bit more things when writing a compositor, compared to a x11 window manager. This is because the X server already does everything, you just need to tell it where to position the windows and how to size them, and possibly process some input events. In wayland, the compositor is responsible for everything, including managing displays, gpus, input devices, etc. While a lot of this can be handled by wlroots or a similar library, you still need to interface with that library to tell it what exactly you want it to do.

[usta]

@michaellarabel Michael The topic and content/body is not matching. In topic it says : Without X11 Support on the other hand in content/body you wrote without XWayland support. Did i get wrong or is there a typo there ?

[azdaha]

@michaellarabel Michael The topic and content/body is not matching. In topic it says : Without X11 Support on the other hand in content/body you wrote without XWayland support. Did i get wrong or is there a typo there ?

XWayland is there to allow X11 applications to be run within Wayland; ergo, X11 ~= XWayland