cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39342270
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
Do you have some examples? Most things I (and others) do are in the category “showing a desktop”, multiple desktops with different resolution / scaling / refresh rate, maybe opening a virtual monitor using krfb.
Wayland has been a complete game changer for me regarding performance and reliability (as soon as it hit a certain stability lol).
Yeah I second this. I’ve been on wayland for a few years now and while my needs are pretty standard I also regularly need slightly-off-the-beaten-path features. Not everything used to always work, but in the last, I want to say 18 months, I never found my needs lacking.
Multiple monitors work, adaptive sync works, mic / webcam works, screen / window sharing works, remote desktop and wayland forwarding works, etc.
That’s not to say everything is guaranteed to work all the time, but I am surprised to see people saying that even today they always find something fundamental that is broken when they attempt to switch.
Screen sharing is a great example. I used to have issues with it, but since about a year I’m able to share my screen in the MS teams PWA in Firefox and even the Discord flatpak without a hassle.
Yup.
X11 forwarding which I use extensively - I realize there’s waypipe which is supposed to allow you to do this, but I’ve not had a chance to test this yet as there’s always something else.
Remote desktop woes - Feels like a total crapshoot with this one, on a box I was experimenting with the build in RDP seemed to work ok, but being able to connect to the actual working desktop vs. start up a separate session that isn’t connected to the running desktop doesn’t seem to be a thing. aka, I could use x11vnc to connect to the running desktop or regular VNC to get a separate X session which wasn’t attached to the monitor and didn’t interfere with the desktop. There’s probably a way to get this working but it seems this is all built into KDE or Gnome now instead of being separate functionality. Tell me if there’s something I’m missing here.
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
OBS window capture - Just had this happen to me, went to update my streaming box and it swapped to wayland with no X11 option anymore, Ubuntu has completely dropped support, not even “you can install it yourself”. So the pipewire window capture is woefully lacking in features, I’m not sure it had the ability for me to crop the captured window at all, which I need to capture a pixel perfect section of the window to line up the control pixels in the stream exactly. But even if that feature was hidden and I was missing it, when it tried to capture the window for the serializer it was utterly munged, smeared and stretched and total trash. Regular OS windows captured ok, but the serializer, which is a unity app, was unusable. A full restore of the out of date OS was required to get things working again.
Yeah, I realize I’m using all the most esoteric features in the world, but that’s what makes X11 so damned functional, yeah it’s crufty and old and has issues, but damn if it doesn’t do all the things.
Edit: I’m sure if you just need it to do normal desktop things it works great.
Edit2: One more thing while everyone is going to be looking at this post, is there a way for me to set the display I want a window to show up on? I don’t mean multiple monitors, I mean like I can be ssh’d into a box and set my display variable to DISPLAY=“:0.0” and anything I run from that session with a GUI will show up on the main desktop display on the monitor, and if I have additional X sessions I can set it to :1.0 or whatever to have the window pop up on that one, does wayland have anything analogous to this where I can control where my windows appear from sessions not attached to the display manager at all?
Barrier has been unmaintained for a while now. The two active forks are deskflow (upstream) and input-leap. Deskflow has limited supported for Wayland. It seems that they’re working on resolving the remaining issues: https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/discussions/7499
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll check out deskflow!
I’m not the OP, but tbh the only thing that doesn’t work for me is the apps that replace your input by the same thing in another layout.
For example, you have 2 keyboard layouts, type something and realize afterwards that you forgot to change the keyboard layout. You press the hotkey to trigger a script that removes your input, translates it into a different keyboard layout and pastes it back.
People who only use 1 keyboard layout don’t even think about this issue and usually don’t know such software exists.
I miss it a lot. There’s 1 script that works in wayland but it’s pretty buggy and it’s not in arch repos, so I don’t trust it too much. X11 had many options.
that’s mainly because of Wayland’s security model I think, it’s trading a tiny bit of convenience for lots more security in terms of things like preventing easy keylogging.
You can still do keylogging in wayland but that has to be done at the compositor or evdev layer, which requires root access or control of the DE, which makes it more secure. I’m sure you could write something in C to do this though
It might be an annoyance for you and I get that, but your small annoyance improves security for lots more people than you realise. I’m sure you can adapt to not using the script though (I also use multiple layouts and I work fine without a script like this)
I get what you are saying and understand the balance between convenience and security, however most end users don’t care. Their thing stops working and they complain “Wayland bad, my workflow now broken!”, nothing you can do.
Right, but the point is that for most end users, their workflow isn’t broken.
Orca slicer, bambu studio
To be clear: that’s their issue.
Those both work fine in Wayland.
Those work fine in Wayland for me.
At least Orca Slicer works fine for me in Wayland.
As someone that is stuck with an Nvidia card rn, I’ve had a few applications just refuse to work with Nvidia and Wayland on KDE Neon. Maybe I just need to tinker more.
yeah you sometimes need to force applications to run with xwayland, for qt apps I think you just assert the environmental variable:
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcbthat usually works for me
Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try!
TBH this is one reason I got off Ubuntu/KDE Neon.
It kept trying to roll Nvidia+KDE fixes forward (including one I dealt with in their bug tracker), which I had to manually figure out and maintain, which I kept breaking, so I finally decided “why don’t I just use a distro where everything Nvidia/KDE is up to date?”