KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta Ready For Testing With Much Better Wayland Experience

[novideo]

I've been using Linux since the late 90s, I saw a transition from XFree86 to X.org, I witnessed the progress behind the development of KDE 2.0 and Gnome 2.0 and I don't remember this "We've made changes to better support XFree/X.org" ever. For some reasons the support for Xorg came naturally without any friction while the road to Wayland is not just bumpy, it's almost hellish.

XFree86 and X.Org are same protocol, while Wayland is a completely new one. What is so hard to understand?

[Azrael5]

XFree86 and X.Org are same protocol, while Wayland is a completely new one. What is so hard to understand?

He doesn't understand that what is written to work with xorg has to be rewritten to work by wayland, otherwise the system has to run Xwayland to allow an xorg application to work, so that the system has also to manage a dual stack increasing the general complexity.

[birdie]

Fedora works with Wayland for several years now. Ubuntu works with wayland by default. PLASMA needs to be burned in. The transitional phase is the most problematic. So who wants to help has to assume the right behavior to contribute by its own experience issuing feedback. It's more simple to make a new operating system based on wayland rather than to adapt a longstanding one.

It's amazing how you've completely ignored all my arguments and said "Gnome works for me". Gnome is not Linux, has never been and most Linux users do not use it. Multiple Linux websites have had polls about the preferred DE, and almost always KDE has won by a large margin.

[birdie]

He doesn't understand that what is written to work with xorg has to be rewritten to work by wayland, otherwise the system has to run Xwayland to allow an xorg application to work, so that the system has to manage a dual stack too increasing the general complexity.

I've never said or claimed Xorg is not broken, in fact I've never even said it mustn't be replaced however I continue to claim with a ton of evidence, that Wayland, the way it was designed, is not a good substitute for X.org. Stop lying about me.

[birdie]

XFree86 and X.Org are same protocol, while Wayland is a completely new one. What is so hard to understand?

Windows 95 and Windows Vista are all completely different protocols: GDI and Direct2D/DirectWrite. Various low-level utilities which target GDI from Windows 95 still work just fine in Windows 10, e.g. applications which change desktop resolution, capture the screen, etc. etc. etc. Not only that Microsoft backported some of its APIs to older OSes which is unheard of in Linux.

Wayland on the other hand broke everything! It only allows old Xorg applications run as basic windows in a Wayland session. It's amazing how ill-informed Linux fans are and how they continue to argue something which is so badly made.

What's even worse, while there's libX11/XCB for X.org, Wayland doesn't provide any rendering APIs. None. It allows to put pixels on the screen.

[ms178]

Considering that I see frame drops and stuttering around 60 Hz on a 144 Hz display after each startup makes me cry, all I hope for is KwinFT getting adopted in more distributions going forward where I don't get this issue. As a workaround, I need to startup a game and close it to get Kwin to stick to 144 Hz eventually on the desktop and in the browser with no more frequent frame drops.

[MadCatX]

Windows 95 and Windows Vista are all completely different protocols: GDI and Direct2D/DirectWrite.

Could you elaborate how is this relevant? Vista introduced DWM which is basically the same thing as composited desktop on X11. Introduction of composited desktops on X11 also didn't break compatibility because the way how applications talk to X11 server hasn't changed.

What's even worse, while there's libX11/XCB for X.org, Wayland doesn't provide any rendering APIs. None. It allows to put pixels on the screen.

Why would it need one? Even X11 applications that weren't written in the early 90s use their own rendering facilities instead of X11 rendering primitives. If you want to paint stuff on the screen, you can pick from a lot of good rendering libraries that already exist. Most of them provide hardware acceleration, Vulkan support and work with multiple display systems. What problem would a dedicated rendering API for Wayland be addressing?

[piotrj3]

When I love KDE, and i find it the most complete and best customizable and best looking desktop, I really dislike that distros like Kubuntu tend to break desktop enviroment using standard update scripts (like from 20.10 to 21.04 made all icons in desktop enviroment glitched, I updated kubuntu similar way 3 times in the past and pretty much only 1 time i didn't have that issue.

[birdie]

MadCatX

I don't understand your first point at all. Despite Windows transitioning from GDI to Direct2D/DirectWrite (and changing the driver model as well, so two huge API changes), most old low level Windows 95 GDI applications continue to work fine in Windows 10, yet not even low-level X11 applications are 100% unusable under Wayland, e.g. those using screen capture.

As to your second point: it leads to a duplication of effort FFS. GTK/Qt/EFL and all other toolkit developers must write a ton of code to to simply output something on the screen. And what if I don't want to use these three toolkits? Am I royally screwed? Wayland also requires you to duplicate a ton of code to write a compositor. Xorg on the other hand provides basic window management by itself, so full-featured WMs/compositors can be written relatively easily and we have a ton of DEs and WMs for Xorg/X11 which all work nearly perfectly and have minimum complexity and duplication of code.

Lastly Wayland compositors offer different APIs for certain functions, so good luck writing an app which supports all of them and doesn't break down the road because those APIs are not part of any standard. Mutter APIs are not a standard.

God, I've spelled it all out at least a dozen times already. Over and out.

Wayland is perfect. I yield.

[MadeUpName]

Someone knows if Firefox works without struggles on 5.22 "Full Wayland"?

I need to use xwayland (which is a bit confuse IMO) on the latest kde to make it work decently

I'm running FC-34. FF on full Wayland works for me and I haven't found any issues. firefox-wayland fails hard on both XWayland & Wayland so I removed it a quite a while ago.

So I use X because I think (not tested lately) video conferening does not work yet on Wayland because the programs (WebEx, Teams, Skype, ...) are not yet up to speed. So no pressure there to push Wayland as the programs are not that far yet.

Zoom works fine for me. I had a conference this morning. Webex I wouldn't be surprised if it never works. I would be surprised if Teams and Skype didn't work but I haven't tried them..