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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I've been trying Wayland for quite some time, but Wayland is a chore to work with and most applications still needs to use the xwayland compatibility solution anyway. After a long time of using it I decided to just switch to X11 and save myself the stress. However after seeing this and reading some comments I decided to try it out yesterday (maybe stuff has changed?) and then turned off my PC and went to bed, then today kwin_wayland started crashing for no reason. For a supposedly superior display server, it sure has a lot of issues and low adoption.
Maybe the Wayland developers should consider it a failed project and work on X11 instead?
Not true.
The reason is that Wayland support in Plasma will only be finalized by 6.0, therefore you're using an experimental feature.
Again factually wrong. Gnome changed defaults years ago. Hardy anyone noticed.
Wayland developers are X11 developers. Wayland if the official successor to X11 because its developers agreed that X11 is too broken to be worth it.
Okay so I need to use X11 because you think the Wayland support for KDE Plasma isn't finalized? Well consider the fact that on Linux no support is ever "finalized". Even something that should be mature like pipewire still causes issues from time to time. Or even bash itself. Most likely Wayland will still not work consistently past Plasma 6.0. I don't put much faith into your claim.
I think that you're factually wrong about me being wrong about Wayland support. Most applications I use still run xwayland. Steam for example cannot be run in Wayland, Discord and some other applications only works through Electron which I admittedly don't know a lot about but doing so seems like running it through yet another compatibility layer. Therefore I wouldn't consider an application run through Electron as Wayland compatible either.
Your post paints the picture that Wayland is "just a thing for Gnome", but I'm not going to change to Gnome to run Wayland. Of course nothing ill meant toward Gnome users but I think Gnome is ugly as sin and hard to work with. Maybe my negative perception of Wayland would change if it had better support for KDE. Or if KDE had better Wayland support as this could also be an issue with the kWin rather than Wayland. I have to admit, I've never liked kWin either. I mean as much as I love Plasma, I think the compositor coupled with it is generally dogshit and unstable and it's a travesty KDE pushes kWin so hard down my our throats.
Of course I know that, but if Wayland has such low support and low adoption and "just a thing for gnome" then maybe Wayland isn't so successful after all is what I'm saying. Kind of a bad result to work on a display server that only really works well on Gnome and leaving KDE out in the dark.
You need to understand the difference between the quality of Wayland itself and the specific implementation of a compositor but you don't. "Plasma's Wayland port is incomplete, so Wayland developers should consider it a failed project and work on X11 instead" as an attitude just makes zero sense.
You initially said that most applications in general are not compatible with Wayland and that's untrue. If you personally happen to mainly use only outdated Electron applications, that's your problem but doesn't reflect of the state of the wider ecosystem. Qt 5&6 and GTK 3&4 applications run on Wayland and most don't even need a dedicated Wayland port.
No, but it is a fact that Gnome is ahead in Wayland support and all major distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL) default to Gnome with Wayland, therefore your claim of low adoption is just wrong.
KDE doesn't push anything down your throat, you're just incapable to replace KWin with an alternative, even though at least one wlroots-based one exists.
Now you're using a complete strawman here. I never said it's because the Wayland port is incomplete but because I think it doesn't work on key software in 2023. Wayland had its first release in 2008, that's 15 years ago, that's a long time and if there's still questions about its maturity then that's a fatal flaw. Maybe it even says something if downstream developers have to port it instead of being able to just switch out X11, but of course that might just as well be a quirk of X11.
It doesn't? Don't get me wrong it's great that Wayland works on so many QT and GTK applications, but if it doesn't work on the key applications users interact with daily, then it's kind of a moot point, isn't it?
Yeah you have a point, Gnome is certainly popular but is that because of Wayland or other reasons? I think Wayland support isn't the reason why Gnome is recommended by default and I think it's a bad idea to even recommend Gnome by default because it deviates too far from Windows design which most people would be most familiar with. A better choice would be KDE in my opinion but ofc as we have discussed KDE has its own downsides.
KDE used to be able to switch out the compositor in the gui, but they removed that feature. And kwin comes with plasma by default. True I can definitively replace kwin but I don't currently know how to and I don't want to break plasma either.
Yes, because you don't understand the difference between an incomplete Plasma port to Wayland and the maturity of Wayland itself. I showed you how dumb your argument is but you did not even manage to understand that.
First it was most software, then it was most software you personally use, and now it's key software...
The fatal flaw is with your knowledge.
That has nothing to do with the fact that adoption is high.
That as well has nothing to do with the widespread adoption of Wayland.
Yes, I can see that.
There is no difference between the maturity of wayland and the plasma port. The maturity of wayland hinges on its usage. Thats what this topic is about.
It's after all the cited reason for the limited support for wayland (outside of gnome apparently).
You claim wayland is widely adopted but you're lying about that. Most applications still require xwayland as far as my experience is concerned. So why would I accept your arguments?
Your argument is basically that it works on gnome and since gnome is used by the biggest distributions so it works on most things. It sounds like the goal of wayland as you describe it is to work on gnome and nothing else. It's "a thing for gnome". Am I understanding you correctly?
Someone who doesn't even know how to change the window manager cannot judge that.
Oh piss off. All evidence I have points to that you're lying.
In my experience, Wayland has been the one that "just works." No disabling compositing, higher than 60 refresh rate on my monitors, screen share portals, and a few other things that annoyed me about x11. From what I hear, x11 is ancient and wasn't designed to be used as it is today. Waiting on a couple features but never had any stability issues, hopefully more app devs realize it's existence and switch from x11 like all it's devs did.
I'm on nvidia, have 2 screens mixed resolutions and mixed framerates with kde plasma at the moment. I use jetbrains a lot which only really works through xwayland. I've tried every nvidia friendly DE there is and nothing ended up working consistently. I had been on wayland for more than a year on my previous Intel gpu machine but I had to go back now to x11 for stability and haven't really had any issues ever since. Think whatever you wish but nvidia still has a large market share so until wayland works solidly with nvidia then lot of people will have issues with it. I imagine it works great on amd same as it does on Intel. (yes I know it's debatably nvidia's fault for this mess)
I have the exact same setup. NVIDIA card with dual monitors with different refresh rates. I could try wayland but it'll be a risky bet or i will be stuck with two 90hz instead of one 144hz and one 90hz. Because of this i was actually kinda forced to go back to windows. If anyone has a solution i'll be happy to hear it because i would like to switch back to linux
Run Gnome never had an issue with Wayland for awhile. Wayland is the successor to X11 being worked on by the same people, would it make you feel better if it was called X12?
I run KDE Plasma and very rarely have issues with wayland either. Maybe I am imagining it but it feels smoother than X11. I love that in wayland I can use adaptive sync with multiple monitors connected. X11 can't do that. My main issue with it is that anything involving screenshare doesn't work properly. So steamplay (as host, client is fine), slack screenshare (again, as the sharer) don't work. I don't understand all the people having issues, maybe it's a hardware/driver thing? On my AMD GPU it is practically flawless.
No it would make me feel better if Wayland ran properly.