KDE Sees Another Wayland Session Crash Fix, SDDM To No Longer Require Root

[JackLilhammers]

KDE, the only free enterprise level desktop environment where serious people can get real work done. The only reason it is not adopted by the big distributors is that it has strong and opinionated leadership on how things work and where they are heading. Kudos to all people working on it.

I'd say that it's more likely to depend on the fact that Gnome and Gtk are developed by Red Hat for the most part (with contributions from Canonical, Endless, et al.), therefore other parties save lots of money by using Gnome.

[MadeUpName]

Without being disrespectful: I have the impression, that Plasma isn't very stable. I ask myself, what is the procedure when they find a bug? Are they just debugging and fix the error or are they trying to reproduce the error by an unit or integration test and then fix the bug?
And are they using development methods like TDD, mutation driven testing¹, what static analyzer tools are they using etc.?


¹ https://software.rajivprab.com/2021/...t-good-enough/

For me traditionally Plasma has been very stable. Far more than Windows was. Right now it is a bit bumpy in Fedora as they are defaulting to Plasma on Wayland. But even there it is pretty solid if you have a fresh install.

[JackLilhammers]

Thats because it isn't used as much any more.

As in Ubuntu 20.04, Mint, most distros with Kde and Xfce, almost all Nvidia users?

PS: Don't take my remark as support for X11, it's not. Wayland is the future and I'm looking forward to it.

[ngraham]

Apps always survive when you kill KWin (and Plasma Shell) on X. I know that because I've had to do kwin_x11 --replace & or kquitapp5 plasmashell && plasmashell & in terminal for years (like a decade) after resuming my PC because I've often got broken desktop with blurred icon's labels or title bars. Problem disappeared around nVidia's 460.xx driver.

We're talking about Wayland here. On Wayland, KWin is the display server, whereas on X11, X.Org Server is the display server. Our apps have never been able to withstand crashing when the X.Org server crashes, but with Wayland, we are able to make then withstand when the KWin display server crashes.

[chuckula]

I actually login from a text prompt using greetd primarily because sddm and most other login greeters still require an X server. Dropping that allpwed me to completely remove the regular Xorg server from my system (Xwayland is still there as a separate package).

[caligula]

There is actually work in progress for allowing apps to survive KWin crashing on Wayland. This is something we never had in the X11 session, where apps can't survive the X server crashing.

Well, KWin isn't the X Server, it's just one X client app. But it's true that X apps will probably crash. OTOH, there are some DE processes that will actually survive a crash. Just look at some process monitor when killing Gnome/KDE desktop. I'm not exactly sure if the processes are forced to kill themselves due to some dependencies at process level. It's just logical thing to do if they didn't implement any way to reconnect to a new session.

[tildearrow]

Next we’re going to replace those little spiky triangles with dots

Options, options, options please.

[theriddick]

Of course, the X server doesn't crash very often these days.

Yes, I do on occasion manage to get a process into a FIXED zombie state with no work around to killing it (all methods fail), if the process is say linked to Steam you end up in a situation where steam refuses to close because it can still see the perma zombie process... basically only solution is a reboot. Fortunately that does not happen too often....

[polarathene]

Been noticing lately with the updates that "made X work properly again" has started showing a regular pattern.

What's going on with that? I assume there is some process in place to at least catch those cases where this happens so they're caught earlier if susceptible to slipping through future changes once more?

[Azrael5]

As in Ubuntu 20.04, Mint, most distros with Kde and Xfce, almost all Nvidia users?

PS: Don't take my remark as support for X11, it's not. Wayland is the future and I'm looking forward to it.

Yes, but X11 is obsolete, unmaintained and more inefficient than Wayland (wayland reaches the point by less steps). It's obvious that developers have to adapt the current graphical software to the new Wayland graphical stack. It's the same as to switch from gasoline to solar; solar stations are not so much spread but solar energy has much more direct and indirect benefits, Problem is in the transitional phase. So don't worth considering something of inefficient better than something of more efficient because the structure is not conformant to the new technology yet. When structure is adapted to the newest technology, benefits will be available. So nvidia has to adapt their own drivers to the way by which to take benefit from wayland though they are xorg conformant, but this is not positive, this is negative because it means that nvidia stuck on legacy relenting the progress. Progress is an advantage for linux and linux users. (I'm an Nvidia user, so I'm rather objective in my considerations).
KDe developers are adapting PLASMA to get benefit from wayland in order to optimize it on wayland graphical stack (transitional phase). By 5 years almost all linux Oses will be wayland based and x11 will be a far memory.