KDE Plasma Wayland Fixes "Severe Screen Distortion" For Some Multi-GPU Systems

[ngraham]

And I think it's long past time to stop assuming a personal use case and opinion is the same experience for everyone or even a sizable minority. The reason these changes are made in bleeding edge distros like Fedora is because they are being tested not because they're "ready" to be placed in stable distributions where the stakes of failure cases are significantly higher.

Fedora may be "good enough" for the person who likes to tweak everything and doesn't mind the occasional regressions and glitches. But Fedora is NOT designed to be production ready and that's what "it's not ready yet" actually means. The software and configurations are "ready to be widely deployed" in major failure sensitive environments - and that's definitely not Wayland. Only a fool deploys Fedora (or Tumbleweed, or SID, etc) in such environments (granted there's a hell of a lot of fools out there).

I pretty much agree with you on this that Wayland is ready for adventurous users and maybe even normal users, but not in major failure sensitive environments. But, with one caveat: it's not ready for major failure sensitive environments that aren't locked down by admins following intensive QA, with that process repeated before every update.

Because if the environment is really "failure sensitive", there's a team of people who are paid big bucks to find all the things you can do with the system to cause failures, and then they prohibit the user from performing those actions, either as a matter of policy, or via technical means, to make the actions impossible to perform. If nobody is doing this, then it isn't really "failure sensitive". And if people are doing it, then I absolutely assert that the Plasma Wayland session can be used--same as the Plasma X11 session, Windows XP, Mac OS 7, MS-DOS, and anything else. Mission-critical systems have run on every junky software environment ever created by humans. They just had people whose job it was to prevent people from touching them in ways that made anything explode.

[ssokolow]

I pretty much agree with you on this that Wayland is ready for adventurous users and maybe even normal users, but not in major failure sensitive environments. But, with one caveat: it's not ready for major failure sensitive environments that aren't locked down by admins following intensive QA, with that process repeated before every update.

Because if the environment is really "failure sensitive", there's a team of people who are paid big bucks to find all the things you can do with the system to cause failures, and then they prohibit the user from performing those actions, either as a matter of policy, or via technical means, to make the actions impossible to perform. If nobody is doing this, then it isn't really "failure sensitive". And if people are doing it, then I absolutely assert that the Plasma Wayland session can be used--same as the Plasma X11 session, Windows XP, Mac OS 7, MS-DOS, and anything else. Mission-critical systems have run on every junky software environment ever created by humans. They just had people whose job it was to prevent people from touching them in ways that made anything explode.

For me, failure sensitive boils down to "I'm used to turning off compositing in KWin or using kwin --replace every few weeks and getting months on end without X.org crashes or having to restart my desktop session to shed glitches", so the non-negotiable feature I'm waiting for is crash-recovery.

(Yes, I'm aware it's being worked on, and I thank everyone who's involved on getting it designed and plumbed through all the relevant layers of the stack. I'm just saying that Wayland isn't ready for me by the standards I work with. It's bad enough that Inkscape exists as the one example of an application on my desktop which isn't itself 100% rock-solid under my workflow.)

[Nth_man]

I pretty much agree with you on this that Wayland is ready for adventurous users and maybe even normal users [...]

For me, Plasma on Wayland works at least using Intel + Kubuntu 23.04 + backports, with very minor inconveniences. The big problem comes when trying to automate things like sending keys to programs or reacting to what programs are showing. Other people wrote it better:

AutoHotkey is a power user tool. Those are two APIs from it that a ton of users use to automate their workflows using smart scripts that require no input (other than get triggered):
- https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v1/lib/WinGetPos.htm
- https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v1/l...elGetColor.htm

As you can clearly see, "spying" on another app's pixels or position is in no way malware and is perfectly legit and valid use case.

Windows, which is used by the vast majority of people who care about GUIs the most (not servers), allows this. So it's obviously far from insecure as paranoid guys from Wayland claim.
-- Adapted from https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...45#post1372445
There is more information on https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/com...o_wayland_yet/

[Luke]

Not sure what you mean; I've been using the Plasma Wayland session as a daily driver for years, but to my knowledge still 0% of my electricity is produced by nuclear fusion (directly, that is; 100% of it is produced indirectly by nuclear fusion, collected via solar panels). By contrast, you can use the Plasma Wayland session today. Fedora KDE ships it by default. I think it's time to bin this "Wayland isn't ready" mindset. It's been ready for years. The presence of bugs to fix doesn't imply "it's not ready" anymore than it would imply that the X11 session--which also has bugs--never became ready. The major difference is that the Wayland session gets better over time, while the X11 session degrades and bit-rots.

This, and not knowing for sure whether x11 or wayland will dominate in ten years is why I've been working my ass off to port MATE to wayland, probably 40+ hours in that as of now,. Since Wayfire is shipping by default w/o xwayland support though I can't yet make it my default session as I need to be able to run kdenlive, GIMP, and audacious. Kdenlive is the most important of all and my main desktop is built around the video editing role. I've not successfully compiled kdenlive against QT6 yet, and the QT5 install I have doesn't seem to support wayland and I can't find the missing piece. A local build of wayfire might be a better fix for now, to support xwayland. If the QT6 versions all support wayland natively, this problem will simply go away with time, and I won't need xorg for anything but testing.

[rommyappus]

Boy that is severe…. Here I was complaining about portions of my window constantly redrawing.. at least I could still use my desktop. Sigh.. kde really needs to do better.

[toughy]

So does the great KDE still lack the feature to maximze a window across multiple screens ? Why is no DE implementing this, not even Windows ?