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

[markus40]

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.

I, too, have been using Linux since 1998 and various Unix (SGI, SUN, HP UX, even SCO at the beginning of my career) longer than that. But boy, do you have rose-tinted glasses about the history of X11? You now Xorg was XFree, do you? So of course the transition was smooth. The first releases were about splitting the code in modules to make the maintenance of the code easier. Plus putting in autoconfiguration. Let me repeat this, putting in auto-configuration. You know, it was 2004 already by then, 20 years from the beginning of X11. XFree is from 1992, 12 years earlier and no autoconfigure worth mentioning. Other reason to start Xorg was the re-licensing of XFree which prevented to modularize XFree which some people wanted to add modules to allow easier hardware accelerated 3D and 2D by, essential, working around X11. So, in short dragging X11 kicking and screaming into the new century by circumvent it. Let me put this in bold to let sink in the irony of the bulk of your comments. Probably a waste of time looking at your grumpy, get of my lawn writings.

A little off-topic, screen sharing works great in Gnome under Wayland, thanks to pipewire. For the first time in ever I can run 3D applications remote with Linux. Running Gnome under Wayland runs great, and I've been using it since over a year without ever switching. But that doesn't count of course because like you mention, sort of, in a previous post. Nobody uses or want to use Gnome. Certainly, not people who use Linux also professionally. Like, for example, me.

[szymon_g]

Can it display heic pictures yet?

[Slartifartblast]

Wayland is a serious brain trauma in progress which wastes people's time and energy:

It's only natural during a period of transition for the more timid elements to run for cover.....

[Nocifer]

I haven't found the time to report this, but since nothing seems to get fixed in under a year, I guess there's no rush.

If you take a year to report it then yes, it will take at least a year to get fixed. No rush at all.

In the Wayland land you can base your compositor on wlroots to avoid having to write most of the boiler-plate code yourself.

I agree with most of your other points, and I've long reached the conclusion that birdie is nothing more than a flamer with an agenda so I don't much care about him or what he says anymore, but here I must disagree: the single devastatingly, painfully valid argument against Wayland in its current state is that a library like wlroots should have been the default, official implementation, and all toolkits and window managers should have been provided the option to build off it, right from the start. Wayland should have been developed (not only designed, developed) as a neutral component for the whole Linux ecosystem, just like Xorg, and not like the pet project of a corporation that only really cares about integrating it with their own line of products (i.e. Gnome).

While I disagree with most birdie's arguments (like the one with migration between different X11 implementations or strict comparison to commercial systems), I think that some of the Wayland criticism is actually legit.

Most people here do not really have a problem with birdie's opinions (although they do tend to be bollocks much too frequently) but rather with his extremely asinine attitude. He's simply not a guy you can have a reasonable debate with, without him immediately resorting to snide remarks and expletives if you don't agree with him 101%. Anyway, I agree that his criticism on Wayland is not wrong - Wayland does have many flaws, either by design or by current implementation (which isn't surprising really, considering its "official" implementation is developed by the notoriously community-unfriendly and collaboration-averse Gnome folks).

Nobody uses or want to use Gnome. Certainly, not people who use Linux also professionally. Like, for example, me.

Stop spouting nonsense. Absolutely nobody uses Gnome these days. Even if you exclude the Ubuntu hordes that probably account for more than 50% of total Linux users (but who cares about Ubuntu n00bs, amirite?), there is absolutely no one else that would willingly choose to use Gnome as their DE because, you know, they like its design concepts, or appreciate its minimalism, or enjoy working in a bug-free and stable environment.

Jokes and all aside, let me just take a moment here to congratulate the KDE folks for (almost) having made it to the finish line and presenting us with a product that works equally great for both the average user and the power user, all without them being a corporate entity with an endless amount of money behind them, but rather mostly freelancers working on their spare time. It seems to me that far too many people have forgotten what Linux is really about and have turned into corporate fanbois utterly indistinguishable from their Windows counterparts. So really, congratulations to KDE, and here's to hoping that you won't lose your way and will keep up the good work after Wayland support is done and away with.

[birdie]

I, too, have been using Linux since 1998 and various Unix (SGI, SUN, HP UX, even SCO at the beginning of my career) longer than that. But boy, do you have rose-tinted glasses about the history of X11? You now Xorg was XFree, do you? So of course the transition was smooth. The first releases were about splitting the code in modules to make the maintenance of the code easier. Plus putting in autoconfiguration. Let me repeat this, putting in auto-configuration. You know, it was 2004 already by then, 20 years from the beginning of X11. XFree is from 1992, 12 years earlier and no autoconfigure worth mentioning. Other reason to start Xorg was the re-licensing of XFree which prevented to modularize XFree which some people wanted to add modules to allow easier hardware accelerated 3D and 2D by, essential, working around X11. So, in short dragging X11 kicking and screaming into the new century by circumvent it. Let me put this in bold to let sink in the irony of the bulk of your comments. Probably a waste of time looking at your grumpy, get of my lawn writings.

A little off-topic, screen sharing works great in Gnome under Wayland, thanks to pipewire. For the first time in ever I can run 3D applications remote with Linux. Running Gnome under Wayland runs great, and I've been using it since over a year without ever switching. But that doesn't count of course because like you mention, sort of, in a previous post. Nobody uses or want to use Gnome. Certainly, not people who use Linux also professionally. Like, for example, me.

I don't see how you counter anything that I've said earlier. Yes, XFree was split apart and modularized - all the apps written for XFree continued to work just fine in X.org, no one broke compatibility, APIs, nothing.

[ColdDistance]

While I disagree with most birdie's arguments (like the one with migration between different X11 implementations or strict comparison to commercial systems), I think that some of the Wayland criticism is actually legit. I wouldn't go into technical details, because I don't have any power to judge design of something as low level as this, but I think that Wayland is not designed with users - and how they tend to interact with desktop Linux - in mind. There was higher priority of decreasing responsibility of display protocol (going from extreme to the opposite extreme?) and making it secure, rather than creating solution that is reasonably easy to implement/adopt, that fits the ecosystem (multiple DEs, fragmented pieces everywhere). It might not be any issue with how the protocol works at all. Actually I'm typing it on Wayland session on a PC that I use day-to-day for gaming, internet, multimedia and some amateur audio production. It's pretty snappy and while dealing with 4K screen it works way better than X11 session. The thing is, there are those little caveats here and there and it takes a lot of time to solve them all. I've spent quite some time (out of curiosity) to check out the development process reading through GitLab pages and mailing lists. The biggest issue here is to coordinate all those people with different points of view and make them came out with common ideas. Those are not technical difficulties and rather political ones.

Anyway, Wayland seems to be the nearest future of desktop Linux whether we like it or not, Birdie. After all a lot of good things have happened to Linux in order to make Wayland possible and the graphical stack is not so heavily dependent on a single, monolithic server anymore. If not Wayland then something else sooner or later.

I'm a Wayland advocate, but I admit that it's bad designed. More that ten years after starting the development we don't have any fully functional Wayland compositor. I know that Wayland presents a radical change in the graphics stack, so the transition would take more than five years, but after more than ten years even Mutter needs much improvements to be a substitute for Xorg for all situations. Today in GNOME 40 there are some regressions that prevents me to record with OBS at 60fps on a Wayland session using a Radeon GPU when I could do that in GNOME 3.38 (although the stack wasn't very stable).

Wayland had to standardize more things. For example, Wayland doesn't have standardized functions for screencasting, screensharing, and display identifying. Screencasting and screensharing are being corrected through PipeWire (and PipeWire doesn't completely remove dependency on compositor) and the display identifying is being corrected through a external library developed by Wayland people. Wayland was designed in 2008 and I think that it was the designed for the context of that age, when screencasting and screensharing were niche sectors and CRT screens were still very much present. By other hand, many developments around Linux desktop don't take care about common users because common users are the last priority for them.

I think that Wayland developers simply took Xorg from an extreme side to put Wayland in the exact opposite side (so, the other extreme side) when the solution would have been a middle term: "We define all these functions because they are the most common and provide the basic functionality, but the rest has to be implemented by the compositor as it can".

[Vistaus]

I had very bad experience with Plasma on Wayland

Shh, you can't say that on here

[Nocifer]

Wayland was designed in 2008 and I think that it was the designed for the context of that age, when screencasting and screensharing were niche sectors...

In 2008 Facebook (and social media in general) and smartphones with cameras and video calls and wireless networks were already a thing or at least emerging as dominant market factors. But even if we accept that screensharing and screencasting were still more or less niche sectors, they were niche sectors for precisely the kind of people that the Wayland devs are supposedly catering to: technically oriented people and enterprises.

So, that's still on them: if for whatever reason they failed back in 2008 to recognize the emerging computing trends for the next 10 years or so (not especially hard to do at that point in history) and subsequently failed to make sure that their new and shiny and backwards compatibility-breaking display server should account for those almost certain future developments, and ended up making a display server that can't handle basic use cases like screensharing and screencasting, it's their own goddamn fault. More so because they've been dragging their feet and they've failed to address these issues in the many years since the 1.0 release (which admittedly was much later than 2008). Even more so because in some cases they simply refuse to address these issues, publicly displaying a lack of empathy for the needs of projects beyond their own (Mutter and embedded systems), creating chaos in the community which in turn desperately tries to hack around the lack of official support. We haven't even been using Wayland by default yet, and we're already at the point of using duct tape to patch it up.

IMHO, as I've already said, the real curse of Wayland is that it is controlled and developed by the same people (and with the same general attitude) that have created the "wonder" that is Gnome. This means that it's a good product for what it is (stable and efficient) but sorely lacking in both key areas, and in the willingness to adapt and address the issues in these key areas.

[JackLilhammers]

Nocifer How dare you say such things. Gnome is the desktop environment of the people, by the people, for the people!
Well, the people of Red Hat/IBM...

[Charlie68]

In my opinion there are always exaggerations on both sides. Wayland is a revolution in the way a desktop has to display content, certainly a better and safer way.
However, the Linux world is made up of a multitude of projects, different from each other, whose nature is that of community development.
This obviously leads to some problems, especially on adoption times, the speech "do you want it? Well do it yourself, otherwise don't complain" is always valid when it comes to open source software.
If this were not enough the development of Wayland, initially it was functional to Gnome, some choices show it, even today some APIs are missing, which Gnome does not need, but which KDE, XFCE, LXQT etc. they need instead.
Every time you read the same useless speeches ... Plasma is already usable on wayland, I myself use it daily, but it is undeniable that the wayland session is not yet the same as that of Xorg as regards the various functionalities.
However with each release we see improvements, so it bodes well, other DEs are far behind, but every time I read controversy about the times ... it seems to be in kindergarten!
When Plasma-wayland is really ready, it will be set by default, until then, we can use it and report possible bugs. There is more to life than wayland!