As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.

Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?

edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:

  • remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.

  • nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.

  • applications in general felt sluggish

  • it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.

  • lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.

  • screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.

  • application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.

here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.

so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
    2·
    2 days ago

    The issue is that maintaining X11, like any large and old software, is a lot of work, even if it does not add features. Probably way more than you think.

    And as far as I understand, the people who used to work on X11 are moving to Wayland, too. Unless volunteers pick that work up, X11 will rot and become unusable over time.

    The other thing: Replacing and modernizing a very large piece of software which is so much integrated will always be a lot of work, take a lot of time, and be somewhat painful. That’s just life. And there will always be early adopters and late movers - which is fine, too.

    And by the way, I am using stumpwm on X11. It is called the Emacs of window managers for a reason, and WMs written e.g. in Guile Scheme are still catching up.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    25·
    7 days ago

    I think realistically the best option is to stick with an older version of KDE until your issues get fixed upstream or switch to another DE.

    Anyone technically literate enough to port KDE back to X11 is likely also literate enough to fix the blocking bugs.

    … Unless they’re doing it purely on ideological grounds, which is probably not a healthy way to run a project.

    • wer2@lemmy.zip
      21·
      7 days ago

      Well… Unless those blocking bugs relate to getting new Wayland protocols approved.

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
        71·
        7 days ago

        you don’t need approval to make a protocol, make an implementation and just use it yourself

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    172·
    7 days ago

    Plasma and Gentoo user here.

    The transition has been so uneventful and simple that I didn’t even noticed. I run some 15 desktops with different mixed hardware setups and use VNC / RDP sometimes too.

    One day I started noticing on some desktops Wayland was now in use, by chance. Then I started taking notice.

    I can say the ones moved to Wayland are smoother, but might be aneddotical. Beside that, cannot care less about X11 or Wayland, they both work just fine for all my use cases.

    For the sake of future, welcome Wayland!

    /smallrant Sorry for X11, have to say I have been in the business since kernel version 2 and I DO NOT miss losing X11, its a bunch of half assed half baked spaghetti tech that has done its own time and would not have kept up with life. /rantover.

    • northernscrub@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      RDP

      How do you approach RDP? Do you have multiple monitors at all? Is your approach scriptable? The reason I ask is because I can easily access my machines like so:

      exec xfreerdp3 /u:<user> /p:<pass> /v:<address> +f +clipboard /drive:/home/<user>>,Z: /drive:/,Y: -grab-keyboard /monitors:0,1 /multimon

      This can be added to a script that also checks the state of the target machine, and boots it via my IPMI console if necessary, waiting until the machine is ready to login. And, as you’ll note, I can specify which monitors I would like to provide for the connection. grab-keyboard allows me to set a keyboard shortcut that minimises the remote session, and you’ll note the mapped drives also. This is pretty much the lowest level of functionality I’m after. If that can be replicated on Wayland, that’s at least one hurdle down.

  • mub@lemmy.ml
    224·
    7 days ago

    Wayland development continues to push forward. Currently it works better than X11 in 95% or setups, and it won’t be long before it covers 99.5%. X11 is legacy now, and Wayland works perfectly for the vast majority of users and is only improving. The time to move on is coming.

    For legacy use cases there will be an alternative X11 DE you can use for a long time yet.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      5·
      7 days ago

      There are few Wayland only apps today. But as the percentage of Linux desktop users on Wayland goes over 80 percent, that will change.

      And today, GUI toolkits and desktop environments have to limit features to those that will work in both environments. But not for long.

      My guess is that it will be totally impractical to use an X11 only desktop 3 years from now. 5 for sure. In fact, I bet few people will even have Xwayland installed 5 years from now. To run what? Xfig? Netscape?

      But certainly it will still be possible to run an X server. Xorg itself will still probably run fine. It already uses KMS and DRI from the kernel and those may not change much. And I am sure at least a few zealots will still be pushing XLibre a decade from now. And Wayback will almost certainly let you run an X11 desktop for many, many years to come for those “legacy use cases” you talk about. Like running CDE for a couple of hours.

      Probably the most interesting development has been Phoenix. They have floated the idea of having an X11 first environment (eg. using an X11 window manager) that can run Wayland apps too. If that actually happens, I am sure it will find some fans. If you have spent 15 years fine-tuning your FVWM or Xmonad config, you won’t want to give it up.

      It will be interesting to see where the BSD world goes with all of this. I think FreeBSD will go Wayland. But NetBSD and OpenBSD could be x11 holdouts. But the Wayland-only app problem will impact everyone. Time will tell.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    6·
    6 days ago

    I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.

    One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.

    Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.

    I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.

    • northernscrub@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      I habitually use a clean install whenever I move OS - so much so that I’ve been buying new storage drives for the sake thereof. I actually have one ready to go for Trixie, once I finish a current project.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    7·
    6 days ago

    I imagine that some graphical environments will always support X11. I’d suggest you switch to one of those. If someone forked Plasma, it’d have far fewer eyes on it than something like i3. I assume XFCE will continue to support X11 for a while too since it’s only just working on Wayland support. Maybe some of the less common DEs like MATE are worth looking into?

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      4·
      6 days ago

      I could see MATE going Wayland only before XFCE does. They are a “traditional” desktop but not committed to old tech in general. Their whole system has already been ported to Wayland when used with a compositor like Wayfire or LabWC. As a small project, they may not want to maintain both longer term.

      Lots of MATE users on other UNIX systems though. Not just BSD but Solaris and such. So, who knows.

      XFCE is building libraries to make supporting both longer term easier. So, they should support X11 for a long time. We will see what happens if GTK5 is Wayland only.

      Trinity Desktop is probably stuck on X11.

      And most X11 window managers will remain X11 window managers forever. The only reason Sway exists is because i3 is not moving. There is Wayland Maker instead of WimdowMsker and DWL instead of DWM. This list goes on. What non-DE x11 window manager is porting to Wayland? I cannot think of one.

      But Plasma is not ditching X for a year or more. And many distros will ship the X version far longer. The freaking out seems more like a political statement than a pragmatic requirement at this point.

      If Debian Forky ships Plasma with X11 support in 2027 (and I bet it does), the first version of Debian Stable to ship Wayland-only Plasma will be Debian 15 in 2029/2030. Many, maybe most, never-Waylanders will have migrated to Wayland by then.

      • communism@lemmy.ml
        2·
        6 days ago

        Yeah. It looks like a lot of the BSDs might be the way to go if for whatever reason you want/need to stay on X11. I’ve been trying out OpenBSD on one of my machines, and following for quite a lot longer, and progress on Wayland support seems to be relatively slow over there.

  • normonator@lemmy.ml
    101·
    7 days ago

    Remote access is the one pain point. There is very little for RMM or remote software that works on wayland. KDE has that in the works already.

    Everybody says Rustdesk but it is a bad joke regardless of wayland.

    Personally I host a simplehelp server(paid) and it’s really good but wayland support is a no go so far.

    Everything else has been categorically better and fixed a lot of issues for me that I used to have on X11 which I’ve used for like 15 years.

    X11+Gnome until gnome 3 then KDE for me because I’m not using a damn tablet (or workspaces).

    • Corngood@lemmy.ml
      3·
      7 days ago

      It obviously won’t work for everyone, but for remote access I’ve been very impressed with waypipe. I use it to pull windows from headless machines onto my main workstation, like X forwarding.

      I’d like something for persistence, like wprs, but it’s not quite there yet.

  • jtzl@lemmy.zip
    103·
    7 days ago

    In fairness, x11 is a bit of a dumpster fire and has been as long as I’ve used Linux (since 2003).

  • mononoke@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    41·
    6 days ago

    Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    5·
    7 days ago

    I switched from x to Wayland eaely/mid last year, prior to that there were quirks. But now: no screen tearing, no nvidia issues when using their driver, steam games play instead of black screen.

    The bonus is security.

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
    41·
    6 days ago

    I have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    I feel similarly especially about remmina, though as I understand it this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I’m quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).

    It’s too bad because on Debian 13 here wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren’t for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.

    I would hope plasma’s decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.