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
    0·
    2 months 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.

  • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    As someone who likes X11, Wayland works fine. To say it has so many things wrong is a self report. People like you make shit up about Wayland because you had some unrelated issue years ago. Just give a rest.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months 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.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months 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
      0·
      2 months 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.

  • mononoke@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months 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.

  • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 months ago

    Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.

    People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.

    Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.

    I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.

    Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.

    The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.

    • anelephant@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      Pipewire and alsa are completely different things. Pipewire uses pulse/jack which then use alsa, or am I missing something?

      • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 months ago

        People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).

        When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.

        Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.

        I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.

        It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.

    The wayland team simply doesn’t give a shit about that. They’re locked in an ivory tower debating the perfect protocol for allowing applications to position their own windows near 15 years after starting their project.

  • notagoblin@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    KDE on Manjaro - The Wayland update caused issues with programs that I used and had depended on for years. I struggled to find suitable replacements or workarounds for the features I was comfortable with on X11.

    I experienced random lockups and sound issues, displayport would reset now and again. I worked with these issues until I got fed up and reverted to X11 in the login screen after installing plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11. Everything works as it used to, for now.

    This experience made me want to look for alternatives to KDE, I’m not ready for Wayland.

    Incidentally, does Wayland have an alternative to X2GO apart from RDP?

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    0·
    3 months 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
      0·
      3 months 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.

  • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
    0·
    3 months ago

    What exactly isn’t ready? All I know is the lack of trackpad gestures and fractional scaling(even though I don’t use it) in x11. X11 is the one that feels more janky while wayland has been smooth sailing.

    I’m even developing a gtk4 program, I assume if there were problems with wayland I’ve would’ve noticed it by now. On the other hand, testing my program on debian 13 with x11 did make the experience a little jankier.

    Given such huge differences in reported experiences, I can only assume it’s a difference in hardware compatibility? Are some machines just better in x11 and others in wayland? Is that why everyone has such different experiences?

    • swelter_spark@reddthat.comEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I don’t notice any difference in performance between x11 and Wayland, but there are some things I just haven’t been able to get working right in Wayland. Changing font DPI. Screenshots, when I want to capture a selected area and not the entire screen. Color pickers. I’ve tried several that supposedly work with Wayland, but they don’t. Screensavers. Alt-tabbing between a fullscreen game and the desktop or another window. I should mess around with it some more. I know my own distro is getting rid of x11 at some point.

      • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
        0·
        3 months ago

        Have you used a different machine? None of your issues are what I experience(on both x11 and waland). My issues on x11 are to do with general lags and unreliable sleep/wake. It’s weird how there’s no consistency, everyone seems to have a different set of issues. If even the issues are different, I wonder how the devs can even fix it.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      0·
      3 months ago

      Wayland has improved a lot in the last few years. And yes, there are and have been differences in hardware.

      I think the biggest difference is likely to be software though. Primarily in two ways.

      First, a lot of people are using older software. Not to pick on Debian but it is a good example. A Debian Stable user may be using NVIDIA drivers that are literally years older than what an Arch user is using. Paired with Wayland compositors and XDG portals that are older as well. So when they talk about Wayland (even today), they are really describing the experience from years ago. Alma Linux probably falls on this camp.

      Second, what use cases are well supported on Wayland still varies from compositor to compositor. Somebody using Plasma 6 may experience that pretty much everything just works. Somebody using Sway may find that some uses cases are still immature.

      Put these together and you have a lot of NVIDIA on Debian people telling you things don’t work and a lot of AMD on Fedora people wondering what they are talking about.

      Today, Wayland and Xorg are more “different” than better or worse. If you are happy with Wayland, migrating to Xorg would probably feel like a real step back and there would be all kinds of issues and deficiencies. But, for some, the reverse can still be true. Wayland still has a few gaps.

      Finally, they ARE different. Which means that if you insist on trying to make Wayland work exactly like X11, it is easy to make it seem like it is not working, even if Wayland can do exactly what you need in some slightly different way.

      The important thing to acknowledge though is that more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And the majority of new users start in Wayland and will never switch. So X11 is the weird one now. And while Xorg is about as good as it is ever going to be, Wayland gets better every day.

  • stuner@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    Personally, I’m quite happy with Plasma Wayland on multiple machines and distros. However, Plasma has already been forked to create Sonic DE: https://github.com/Sonic-DE/sonic-win No idea if this will gain any traction once Plasma drops X11. For now, the activity seems to focus on the readme file…

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      0·
      3 months ago

      And quite a dishonest readme at that. All the “not natively supported” entries for things designed to work with XDG desktop portals are hilarious.

      This is obviously more of a political statement than anything else. I would not expect much from it.

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I really hope the X11 session stays maintained.

    Otherwise, KDE will finally have a reason to get get its MATE/Cinnamon equivalent

    What should the fork be called? Surely someone can do better than “Plaxma DE”.