Wayland + Compositors and all kinds of problems that come with them

Development
1

I will make this quick. KDE Plasma on a debian base. A rather low spec computer (Raspberry Pi 5 to be spesific).

When X11 (without a compositor) = Responsive and fast desktop. Relatively high performance. Lower use of system resources. No refresh rate (or frame rate) limit. Can actually play 60fps youtube. The only downside is of course “screen tearing”. Which is what wayland resolves. But…

When Wayland (with or without a compositor, doesn’t even matter) = Less responsive, laggy desktop. Mouse cursor acting like an 80 year old grandma. App windows go crazy and do not follow the global settings. 60 fps videos play like they are 30 fps. Yes, screen tearing is gone, but at what cost???

Questions:

  1. Am i the only one? (regardless of hardware)
  2. If i am the only one, is this because i am on a low spec hardware? (RPI 5 is actually great. I wouldn’t consider it low spec.)
  3. If not, is this a wayland problem?
  4. Or is this a compositor problem?

BTW,
X11 (with the compositor) = Flickering mouse cursor :slight_smile:

2

Does KDE Neon even support Raspberry Pi?

3

Oops. Sorry. I was gonna say KDE Plasma :slight_smile:

4

DMA fence deadlines support was recently added to fix frame drops. The issue was initially reported against Intel iGPU but I believe it should apply generally to most low-power GPUs.