I have a really weird workaround to use remote desktop while display is off. If I set my monitor to an invalid input (ie. my desktop uses Displayport and I set HDMI on the monitor) and let it shutdown automatically due to no signal, it remains “connected”. So I log in to KDE Plasma, let sunshine autostart, set an invalid input on the monitor then I can remote into my desktop whenever I want using moonlight, while display remains off. This can be combined with tailscale and even with Wake on LAN by enabling SDDM autologin.
Anything but sunshine is not usable when not on the local network, I experience massive latency.
Ironically moonlight is my soft blocker regarding wayland, I rarely remote while I use touchpad gestures regularly so I stay on wayland.
Unfortunately the video author decided to not do that but instead draw attention onto a merge request for a much wanted extension protocol.
Through that they have, hopefully just temporarily, robbed the people working on that protocol of their primary collaboration channel.
Instead of collaborative work, senior compositor developers were choosing to stonewall the proposal in full, refusing to participate and offer what they wanted changed in order to compromise. It’s all there in the MR.
This is a special case and I still believe this disruption is necessary. In fact, it should be ongoing, with a clear motive to get Wayland 100% functional before X11 is removed. In cases like this, where the spec is essentially complete and being nitpicked by a handful, why not press on?
Perfectionism seems to be holding Wayland back more than legacy X11 components in the Plasma session are.
When collaboration stalls it is essential to keep the lines of communication open, not force them to be shut down.
How does making Matthias’ work impossible help those who would like this to be implemented?
Exactly!
Instead of commencing the equivalent of a DDoS attack on this important MR, effort could have been directed in getting the protocol more widely implemented, e.g. in Qt and GTK, in other compositors than KWin.
I hope at least some of those responsible have realized what they have done and apologized to Matthias in private.
Indeed, this is something I see over and over again. Another example is people pinging bug reports or writing long rants in them about how KDE developers “don’t care”. All of which de-motivates the volunteer developers who would be doing the work to address those issues, and makes said work less likely to materialize.
Disrupting the process — even a stalled process — can only make things worse, never better.
Good self-justification!
Main thing in the world are people and their needs, not the process!
Of course, but the process is what meets people’s needs. If people are so frustrated by their needs not being met that they disrupt the process of meeting those needs, then their needs won’t be met.
I have to say you are being very selfish here. Now I am not a KDE dev. I have contributed few code here and there but have not been following things too much.
Now I do agree that theoretically Wayland should include all the features X11 have don’t get me wrong. But there are multiple party involved here. A lot of people with very different ideals/goals of what they thing “getting Wayland 100% functional” sentence means.
First of all I want to say Wayland is not perfect. However I absolutely hate the fact that for some reason X11 have become a religious thing like it is a holy piece of software which work for everyone - It did not. I have countless times tried to make my hardware work in early to mid-2010s while using linux and couldn’t. The only response I got was “change your workflow”, “deal with it”, “change your hardware”.
X11 didn’t work. It worked for you specifically for your specific setup? Maybe. But I can bet vast vast majority of people it didn’t. If Wayland is not working for you here is my blunt response like I got many many many times in the last decade while trying to get anything working: “deal with it” or “change your workflow” or “change your hardware”. Or even simpler thing I wish people should say more often: “Keep using what you have”.
I don’t like it. I sincerely hope you will be accommodated but I am pretty sure unfortunately it is not possible.
Just like X11 was a compromise Wayland will be a compromise. There is no “Perfectionism” in Wayland cause there never was any in X11 and there never will be any. It is all a compromise.
I don’t know much about KDE but I am pretty sure KDE want to remove X11 cause like everyone there are not many people who are willing to maintain X11 code. It is not a job for many, it is a hobby. Why should open source developer maintain code they don’t like for people who only do is complain and do youtube clickbait to get money from ads and target people who work on free software for everyone.
And if you are talking about the same youtube video I literally had a very “insightful” communication with a person who referred to that video saying how Red Hat - a private for profit company owned by a billion dollar company - is a woke communist establishment. I am not even going to say anything else.
In the end if open source devs think they don’t want to maintain then either fork it and use it by compiling yourself or deal with it or create your own company and pay people to work on software you want.
I am not speaking on behalf of any developer here. The only significant contribution I have is for a bug bounty for which I got paid. But honestly It is putting very bad taste in my mouth that people like you are acting like they deserve everything they want for free and that too at the expense of other people who are working on free and open source software.
How do you think things get done? Things don’t fall from sky. For a piece of code to work someone must write it. When multiple people are involved those people involved must communicate to each other to find a good compromise between them.
What I mean by getting Wayland 100% functional is having 1:1 feature parity with X11, which it currently does not. Window positioning is currently the most prominent, poignant feature Wayland has left to address, why shouldn’t it be highlighted?
I never belittled the work actually being done by dozens of project teams, and respect the developers that actually want to implement this feature and get it widely accepted. That should go without being said.
However I’ll believe that there is compromise in Wayland when I see it. I’ll never defend or attempt to justify the unnecessary stonewall put up by several prominent developers, right there in plain sight. People are really surprised a frustrated mob spoke up? I’m not.
X11 is stable for many, and stability is valued. It wasn’t always that way, particularly during your noted timeframe. Wayland is “stable” now concerning displays and drivers, but still lacks several crucial features.
The only thing keeping me tethered to X11 at the moment is window positioning and remote access, just like almost everyone else. I’m not some die-hard zealot for the display server itself, I’m a fan of standard window management abilities.
Have a mint. The core issue is Wayland lacks features that users value from X11, if it didn’t, this page wouldn’t exist. I hope it can be completely scratched off by 6.8, but once again, I’ll believe it when I see it.
I never said Wayland is not lacking features. But as I said: “use what works for you”. If X11 is working for you it is great really. I am not being sarcastic when I say it. If something works and the alternative is not upto standard then what is working is superior. For you X11 is superior. For me specifically I understand the compromise and am willing to live with the features Wayland don’t have. In other words the features of X11 don’t affect me.
Surprised? Definitely Not. Disappointed? Yes. It is not a government, you don’t pay taxes to use the software you donate maybe but the software is free, open source for everyone to use. There are many ways to show your displeasure. Use those. You can criticize things in your space no one will bat an eye. Don’t pollute things where people are trying to cooperate.
Whether you agree or disagree with “several prominent developers” it doesn’t matter that much. Those are the people who maintain software which is used for free by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. They have their own interests, they have their own priorities. And thousands of people agree with those interests. Those people are different from you.
Once I was working on a project with my team and for a part of the project we have to work with the team lead of another project. He was very disinterested in our project and was not too keen to work with us. We all hated him and that lead to a good verbal showdown. At the end? We couldn’t finish our project. He didn’t lose anything and we didn’t gain anything. It was a loss for us and us alone.
Back to the topic I don’t agree with “some prominent developers” but it is their choice. I agree they should be more accommodating maybe but it is unfortunate they are not. There is nothing we can do about it. I repeat it is a “free and open source software”.
Everyone is free to work on it and everyone is free to not work on it. They should not and must not be forced to work on things they don’t want. Again I do agree they should compromise sooner or try to be more friendly but if they don’t it is completely useless trying to create drama. Creating more noise will definitely not convince them to work together. It will only divide.
If we’re talking about KWin, it’s at least millions, actually. Likely tens of millions. If we’re talking about all compositors using the Wayland protocol, it’s definitely tens of millions. Maybe even 100 million.
just being curious, so feel free to ignore…
Are there any numbers on kwin on other OS than Linux? it has to be 1>, at least I’m enabling full telemetry 
hope you don’t mind the partial offtopic.
keep up the good work. And kudos to the kde Team and to the folks who bring the plasma experiences to the BSDs. FreeBSD Plasma6 on both wayland and xorg and OpeBSD on xenocara/xorg work like a charm here.
KDE Plasma has Krfb for its VNC server, which supports Plasma Wayland. Please try it out and file bug reports for things that don’t work!
Thanks for the pointer, with a name like krfb (remote framebuffer?), one wouldn’t assume VNC capability by it’s name. I gather is this is geared towards people that have used Windows Remote Assistance in the past.
Didn’t take long to find some big and small issues, using the x11vnc experience as a reference. It’s still not capable of full remote access from a cold start, but at least it draws the screen layout as I’d expect.
RFB is the official name of the VNC protocol. The VNC name is trademarked by RealVNC, so in the early days, people avoided the name for alternative implementations.
At least in KDE Plasma Version 6.3.6 (the one distributed with Debian Trixie) there are many things that either doesn’t work with Wayland, or work very differently from how they work in X11. Is this corrected in the new version?
You can see for yourself how much work has gone into Plasma 6.4 and Plasma 6.5.
Every single Plasma release adds significant capabilities to the Plasma Wayland session. You’re missing out. 
I’d recommend trying a distribution that ships fresh KDE Plasma on the regular, like Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition, openSUSE Tumbleweed, or other similar distributions. Or if you prefer an LTS distribution, AlmaLinux Kitten 10 offers a KDE variant that ships fresh KDE Plasma.
6.4 and 6.5 do not solve some major issues I have with 6.3.6 on Debian and it is not even clear if they’re fixed when 6.8 becomes released (you know, when X11 becomes dropped). So it may helps in some cases, it does not in others. @vansnyder to answer the question it is required to know what bugs you are running into. I am pretty sure the worst things I have are some edge case scenarios most people do not have.
Again @ngompa: Debian is only as outdated as people want it to be. They can backport packages if required (as I do with graphic drivers only) and if something on Plasma 6.5 fixes major issues, it can be worth trying to backport only related packages or jumping to the testing branch for two years if it makes the use of Wayland easier. But people usually choose Debian to not deal with changes all the time.
A year is long and unless users express themselves to have their Wayland shortcomings fixed, it won’t get fixed…
Bug fixes are not highlighted in the announcements (unless major features), only the full changelog reveals them: https://kde.org/announcements/changelogs/plasma/6/6.3.5-6.4.0/ https://kde.org/announcements/changelogs/plasma/6/6.4.5-6.5.0/
Plus all the maintenance releases ones…
Except those changelogs are, by design, written for ease of maintenance rather than for end-user understanding. Bug reports are bridging this gap.
A bug can only be fixed if one is report. Report it !
Or comment on existing bugs, bug comments allow to prioritize which bugs to fix.
That’s how FOSS steadily and slowly moves forward and has always been.