Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite a bit lately with the announcement that Fedora KDE is proposing to drop the Plasma X11 session for version 40 and only ship the Plasma Wayland session. I’ve read a lot of nervousness and fear about it lately.
Well said, Nate.
I’ve used Wayland on Fedora KDE for about two years or so and it has gotten so much better with every release. Even though I was skeptical at first I don’t think dropping the X11 session in Fedora will affect that many people, and I agree that those who do rely on legacy technologies are better of not using a distro with a track record of being early adopters of new technologies anyways.
I’ve seen this coming for ages (Fedora dropping X11) so if I was worried about that change I would have switched away from Fedora already.
It could be argued that going Wayland exclusive will have a more dramatic impact than switching to BTRFS or PipeWire, as I know plenty of people do in fact rely on things that aren’t ready on Wayland quite yet (such as color management) but other distros exist for those people.
And I’m certain that Fedora’s decision will accelerate developments on that front just like with other technologies Fedora adopted early.
I’ve been using Wayland on KDE-Neon with no problems. Do wish it had a setting disable touchpad when mouse is plugged in like X11 does. But can live with it this way. Thanks to all the Team members working on making KDE Wayland a great choice.
I am using tumbleweed (X11 session), and KDE wayland is actually working fine for me, but there are still some minor problems, such as the input method window drifting, and some software cannot be called out through shortcut keys.
I agree with Nate that third party developers need to proactively port and adapt their applications to wayland. I will continue to use X11 for a while, and some of the problems I encountered require follow-up porting and adaptation work by developers.
X11 will eventually be retired, wayland is the future.
What about those looking to have the security focus Fedora has but have no other choice but to use X11 with things like Wayland color management being at minimum a year out or more? No other distribution has the level of security focus that’s been put into fedora.
People already consider linux a joke in the broader art/video/content creation community and I don’t think moves like this do us any favors to show them otherwise. What’s being said intentionally or otherwise is that as a content creator your needs dont matter in the face of a vision of progress and they’ll be given no choice but to take a hike without any say in the matter.
I’m not someone who will generally be effected by this, but to relegate those who are to an unimportant minority I feel is short and narrow sighted. There is a reason the linux community jokes about “the year of the linux desktop”.
I know Fedora folks have said otherwise, and I don’t think there is any malicious intent but chances are this is going through from the general response to the matter and simply continues a trend of pushing people out of the Linux community.
absolutely, and it should be. Thing is that wayland still has some serious pain points for a number of people and the nuking of X11 from fedora really should happen a little farther away.
Lets take the pipewire transition for example as its essentially the wayland of audio/video. I understand its different than what waylands trying to do but hear me out. I dont think i heard of many people who didnt absolutely praise the shift to using pipewire by most every distro on default. Pipewire came in as a default though with very little downside to using it and covered most any base you could need it for when it came to audio/video streams. It near instantly replaced pulse due to being a straight upgrade and making the move relatively painless for users. You can do regular desktop use, audio production, use it to replace jack, etc. and in the case of my Audio Interface plain out performs pulse (i dont use jack so cant compare).
Nuking X11 needs to happen when there really isnt much reason to use X11 at all anymore. Most of the problems have been solved but In 1-2 years i think this should definitely be revisited but now its simply not the right time. Doing this all on a promise of “itll work eventually” for those that absolutely require X11 when that could be 3yrs away is just silly.
That’s one of the things I brought up in the post: that the transition is taking forever because Wayland was not designed to be a drop-in replacement for X11, the way PipeWire was for PulseAudio. That transition was indeed fast and mostly painless as a result. Really a model for how things should be done.
But Wayland was first released in 2008; I have a feeling if its authors could go back in time and do things differently to make the transition happen faster, they might.
I agree Wayland needs to be a drop-in replacement. I’ve tried it over 2 years and each time I have had different problems, had to find workarounds or give up.
I also dislike the Wayland crowd downvoting everyone that share their negative experiences as if those problems don’t exist if they aren’t affected from it.
I just want it to work. I don’t care if it’s wayland/xwayland/gpu vendors/DEs/application devs etc fault.
Yes, we want it to just work too. That’s why we haven’t formally recommended it yet for mass usage as the default Plasma session. Once we feel that our software and the surrounding ecosystem work well enough with it, that will change.
Of course, you might still experience some bugs. There are X11-related bugs too, such as janky multimonitor support, the inability to screenshot context menus, and no security isolation between processes. The difference is that those X11 bugs will never be fixed, whereas all the Wayland bugs can be eventually fixed.
On this desktop PC with nVidia, I am still stuck with X11, but my other two are running Wayland and I am very pleased. The progress made recently is quite impressive. My hat is off to all involved.
I wish for KDE team to not get pressed by some distro movement to drop X11, because the priority for Plasma users is not to use Wayland but to feel the same level of stability reached in 5.27 with Qt6, and also to continue using all our favorite apps either on X11 or Wayland.
We will be very happy to use 5.27 for another year if the migration is not complete, the important thing is to not rush things.
Indeed, sometimes people don’t. In fact, I’d say most of the time, most people don’t. It’s the nature of having users who aren’t developers or technical experts. And even then, a lot of those folks also don’t learn how the system works before immediately breaking it, or submitting bug reports about things that are working normally because they arrived with well-formed expectations that weren’t met 100%!
My only problem with wayland is the way it handles libreoffice icons on the panel. As a user I’m not really interested in whether it’s LOs, KDEs or a Wayland problem. As the majority of my work is document related I would just like it to work without having to hack .desktop files please which btw still gives inconsistent results… it’s not just about ‘your software’, but the software that a lot of linux users rely on (at least I assume they do as it ships as a default office package with many distros!) No offence intended btw.
as soon as you open the app IT’s there an option.