KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout

[polarathene]

either they rewrite kwin and some components for Wayland or stop give F about music player or this funny text editor that can support only left to right languages

You know how open-source works right? If someone wants to volunteer their own personal time to work on a project like a music player or text editor, that's their choice.

It's not a company allocating paid resources based on what makes users happy. There are tasks that need to be worked on that are less enjoyable for a dev, and important to users satisfaction and moving forward. It's not like the stuff you care about isn't being worked on, I wouldn't know for sure but assume that'd be the sponsored work (eg employees being paid to or from the KDE e.V funding).

[royce]

You strip out X11 functionality and then what's left? An empty compositor?

What you just said was deprecate a fully functional window manager in favor of a simplistic one that can't do now and never will what the fully functional one already can.

You do realise X.org is already deprecated and on life support don't you? In fact the only significant developer time on X is being spent on Xwayland. There's no future on X11.

In any case, forking kwin to a x11-only version won't delete it from the internet and suddenly make it unavailable.

[gbcox]

I agree there have been vast improvements with KDE Wayland, especially since the release of Plasma 5.20.4; yes there are still some major issues but hopefully with the release of Plasma 5.21 those will be resolved or at least in a state which will allow Fedora to make KDE the default in F34. One particularly troublesome issue right now is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1897717 - which is a black screen if you try to use SDDM to start KDE Wayland and if you're using a Radeon card. The workaround for the time being is to just use GDM, which while not ideal, is workable. I would encourage everyone who hasn't tested wayland to give it another chance. If you notice issues, please open bugs. That is the only way things are going to get fixed.

[k4ever07]

While I have seen KDE Plasma's Wayland session stabilize on my laptops with both Nvidia and Intel GPUs, I have also seen some regression with the disabling of the virtual keyboard in the Wayland session. The lack of a reliable virtual keyboard in KDE Plasma's Wayland session on my tablet is a MAJOR show stopper.

However, even without the virtual keyboard, KDE Plasma's Wayland session has surpassed GNOME's Wayland session on my tablet in terms of stability and usability. There are still MAJOR bugs with GNOME's Wayland session, like Proton games and some other apps not running right or at all, which are issues I'm not having in KDE Plasma's Wayland session. Either way, KDE Plasma's Xorg session still runs circles around GNOME's Wayland and Xorg sessions, and around KDE Plasma's Wayland session. IMO, Wayland is still crap compared to Xorg 10 years in.

BTW, I have ALL of these sessions installed and running on the same hardware, so please don't try to BS me by telling me that one (GNOME Wayland) is somehow better than the other. I can see the results for myself.

[callegar]

Tested it very quickly out of curiosity on Manjaro that tends to be very up to date. Noted a generally smoother experience than X11 and no flickering. On the other hand, it took me 10 seconds to miss:

• mid-button paste (primary selection)
• ability to use applications remotely, that is not sending over the wire the whole desktop, but just the single application. This is something that in X11 still works decently at the LAN level, that even at the WAN level works super well with xpra and that windows too has supported for ages.

Furthermore, the inconsistency in the way to launch the X11 version of an application across different toolkits is hideous: setting QT_QPA_PLATFORM in Qt (with xcb or wayland-egl options);GDK_BACKEND in GTK (with comma separated options including x11 and wayland); who knows what on other toolkits. This level of inconsistency is only matched by the expectation that features will probably end up varying widely across desktop environments, with a window manager picking a standard for remoting and another one a different one, and another one not supporting remoting at all. Or with some environment trying to maintain the primary selection and others dumping it.

Sure in wayland there are pros. But minor flicker is often tolerable and the problem is that not only X11 is still good enough for many, for some it actually remains more feature rich and predictable. Unless more things are made consistent across different toolkits and desktops, feature parity is sought and some features users don't want to give up are recovered, I expect X11 to stick around for a long time and the transition to happen with way less enthusiasm than it could.

[gbcox]

Sure in wayland there are pros. But minor flicker is often tolerable and the problem is that not only X11 is still good enough for many, for some it actually remains more feature rich and predictable. Unless more things are made consistent across different toolkits and desktops, feature parity is sought and some features users don't want to give up are recovered, I expect X11 to stick around for a long time and the transition to happen with way less enthusiasm than it could.

X11 isn't going away tomorrow, but the writing is on the wall: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...e-Mode-Quickly

It's a kind of chicken and egg thing. Not enough people were using Wayland to create a sense of urgency for developers to step up and modify their applications. When major distributions start shipping Wayland as default, that will change. With the recent changes to KDE it appears we've finally reached that tipping point. Is it flawless or perfect... no, but appears like it's going to be close enough.

We already have some experience with this approach. One need only look at Fedora GNOME. I'm running GDM now to start KDE Wayland because of some apparent weird issue with SDDM - but GDM is working fine. SMPlayer doesn't work with correctly with Wayland, but Celluloid works just fine. I could go on and on. If people don't want to or can't modify their applications to work with Wayland, they're going to be left behind.

[Cide]

Michael, try using Wayland under Plasma for a few weeks and then report back on how stable it is. Preferably in a multi or external monitor set up.

We get it... You want Xorg to die off. Spinning half truths isn't the way to accomplish that. The reality is that Wayland is not ready yet aside from its current implementation with a fisher price tablet DE (GNOME).

[QwertyChouskie]

Tested it very quickly out of curiosity on Manjaro that tends to be very up to date. Noted a generally smoother experience than X11 and no flickering. On the other hand, it took me 10 seconds to miss:

• mid-button paste (primary selection)
• ability to use applications remotely, that is not sending over the wire the whole desktop, but just the single application. This is something that in X11 still works decently at the LAN level, that even at the WAN level works super well with xpra and that windows too has supported for ages.

Furthermore, the inconsistency in the way to launch the X11 version of an application across different toolkits is hideous: setting QT_QPA_PLATFORM in Qt (with xcb or wayland-egl options);GDK_BACKEND in GTK (with comma separated options including x11 and wayland); who knows what on other toolkits. This level of inconsistency is only matched by the expectation that features will probably end up varying widely across desktop environments, with a window manager picking a standard for remoting and another one a different one, and another one not supporting remoting at all. Or with some environment trying to maintain the primary selection and others dumping it.

Sure in wayland there are pros. But minor flicker is often tolerable and the problem is that not only X11 is still good enough for many, for some it actually remains more feature rich and predictable. Unless more things are made consistent across different toolkits and desktops, feature parity is sought and some features users don't want to give up are recovered, I expect X11 to stick around for a long time and the transition to happen with way less enthusiasm than it could.

AFAIR, middle-click paste is fixed in the current dev version of KWin, and will be in KDE 5.21.

[bug77]

Stabilize is a verb, not an adjective. To stabilize does not mean it is yet stable.

English is not my first language, but these guys seem to think "stabilize" means making something stable*: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stabilize

*I don't think they mean the animal shelter

[ResponseWriter]

I'm back to using Plasma Wayland on my Intel laptop. On my AMD desktop, however, with the latest version my web browser looked blurry because of the scaling which works fine on the X11 session. I need the scaling otherwise text is too small on my 200 PPI display, so kind of a dealbreaker.