cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39342270
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
Despite all its shortcomings, I do believe Wayland is the future. Sooner or later, all the funky decorative quirks will be some relics of the past.
Maybe someday, they will be added back, and we’ll once again have that jelly window effect, but at the moment, people actually depend on this thing to do some work, even more true with the Windows exodus.
I’d rather that they focus at the risk of being dull rather than fumbling on this chance.
Yes, I know that popularity isn’t everything, but considering how big they (and GNOME) are, they can really make The Year of Linux Desktop™.
The people who are most upset by this use LTS Debian and won’t even see the current version of Plasma until 2050
Wayland dragging Linux nerds kicking and screaming into the 21st century
I just want my AHK stuff to work again. They’re dragging us kicking and screeming into un-avoidable security that breaks software that noone is up for fixing.
Well shit. I would like this better if more things played nicely with wayland, as wayland itself seems pretty great. Remmina for example can’t do multi-monitor outside of x/xwayland for example and this is breaking for me when i remote into my work computer.
I realize that this is the fault of remmina and not wayland. Any RDP client recommendations that work on wayland for this?
Try KRDC.
I did earlier and it bugged out for me for some reason and was unusable. Possibly a config problem, will try later on when I have a bit more time.
As soon as I saw this i knew I had to go to the phoronix comments and bask in the shit flinging
I do like Wayland but it still has some issues that are annoying:
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When using remote input solutions (e.g InputLeap) you have to approve the input capture, and you need a mouse and keyboard connected to the PC to do that, making it kind of pointless.
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Remote desktop also requires the same thing, like, what if I don’t have a mouse & keyboard attached? What if it is a PC you are accessing from another country? You can’t just fly back to approve the remote desktop request.
This needs to get fixed ASAP in my opinion, since people do need these tools and sometimes you can’t connect a mouse & kb to the PC to just approve the request.
If your user is in the
inputgroup (set up in pretty much every distro), you can use uinput over netcat for forwarding devices (display server agnostic) without extra privileges. Same with thevideogroup. No idea if anyone used this in an actual remote desktop piece of software tho.InputLeap is the only thing that keeps me on X at the moment. Especially since I need it between a Linux host and a Windows client. It just doesn’t work if I use Plasma with Wayland unfortunately and honestly, the github page of InputLeap is everything but helpful.
Have you tried out Deskflow?
InputLeap is effectively abandoned and the maintainer has taken over Deskflow which has better Wayland support
No, I haven’t, but will check it out, thanks!
I didn’t know InputLeap is also abandoned. Heck, I moved to it from Barrier for the same reason :P
Hah yep, I started with Barrier too.
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The only real problem I have with Wayland is not being able to find a reliable way to have unattended Remote Desktop in the same session as the local user. I can do most of my remote work over ssh but for some things I prefer a gui.
I think the main thing holding Wayland back are older drivers which don’t work well with it and impact on things like games. Once its over that hump there isn’t much reason for maintainers to suffer two back ends any more.
God dammit, everytime I have to use wayland I find something that I need to use which doesn’t work.
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11 and not pretend just showing a desktop is all it needs to do?
Do you have some examples? Most things I (and others) do are in the category “showing a desktop”, multiple desktops with different resolution / scaling / refresh rate, maybe opening a virtual monitor using krfb.
Wayland has been a complete game changer for me regarding performance and reliability (as soon as it hit a certain stability lol).
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Screen sharing is a great example. I used to have issues with it, but since about a year I’m able to share my screen in the MS teams PWA in Firefox and even the Discord flatpak without a hassle.
I use Talon voice. It’s software that let’s me use the pc still, due to write severe RSI.
However, Wayland doesn’t allow a lot of functionality that tools like this need.
Therefore, anyone who requires a tool similar to Talon, needs X11.
KDE is out.
2027/2032 is still some time away.
However, accessibility features provided by third-party applications may be worse in some aspects. Please open a bug report if you have any special requirements that we don’t cover yet! This is an active topic we’re very interested in improving.
Let them know what you need.
Accessibility is a huge blindspot in all of these conversations. The tools that work with Wayland are not up to parity with what works in X. Until that is the case I see no reason to switch.
Yup.
X11 forwarding which I use extensively - I realize there’s waypipe which is supposed to allow you to do this, but I’ve not had a chance to test this yet as there’s always something else.
Remote desktop woes - Feels like a total crapshoot with this one, on a box I was experimenting with the build in RDP seemed to work ok, but being able to connect to the actual working desktop vs. start up a separate session that isn’t connected to the running desktop doesn’t seem to be a thing. aka, I could use x11vnc to connect to the running desktop or regular VNC to get a separate X session which wasn’t attached to the monitor and didn’t interfere with the desktop. There’s probably a way to get this working but it seems this is all built into KDE or Gnome now instead of being separate functionality. Tell me if there’s something I’m missing here.
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
OBS window capture - Just had this happen to me, went to update my streaming box and it swapped to wayland with no X11 option anymore, Ubuntu has completely dropped support, not even “you can install it yourself”. So the pipewire window capture is woefully lacking in features, I’m not sure it had the ability for me to crop the captured window at all, which I need to capture a pixel perfect section of the window to line up the control pixels in the stream exactly. But even if that feature was hidden and I was missing it, when it tried to capture the window for the serializer it was utterly munged, smeared and stretched and total trash. Regular OS windows captured ok, but the serializer, which is a unity app, was unusable. A full restore of the out of date OS was required to get things working again.
Yeah, I realize I’m using all the most esoteric features in the world, but that’s what makes X11 so damned functional, yeah it’s crufty and old and has issues, but damn if it doesn’t do all the things.
Edit: I’m sure if you just need it to do normal desktop things it works great.
Edit2: One more thing while everyone is going to be looking at this post, is there a way for me to set the display I want a window to show up on? I don’t mean multiple monitors, I mean like I can be ssh’d into a box and set my display variable to DISPLAY=“:0.0” and anything I run from that session with a GUI will show up on the main desktop display on the monitor, and if I have additional X sessions I can set it to :1.0 or whatever to have the window pop up on that one, does wayland have anything analogous to this where I can control where my windows appear from sessions not attached to the display manager at all?
Barrier - Keyboard and mouse sharing via network - I use this extensively and the break in compatibility is destructive for me.
Barrier has been unmaintained for a while now. The two active forks are deskflow (upstream) and input-leap. Deskflow has limited supported for Wayland. It seems that they’re working on resolving the remaining issues: https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/discussions/7499
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll check out deskflow!
I’m not the OP, but tbh the only thing that doesn’t work for me is the apps that replace your input by the same thing in another layout.
For example, you have 2 keyboard layouts, type something and realize afterwards that you forgot to change the keyboard layout. You press the hotkey to trigger a script that removes your input, translates it into a different keyboard layout and pastes it back.
People who only use 1 keyboard layout don’t even think about this issue and usually don’t know such software exists.
I miss it a lot. There’s 1 script that works in wayland but it’s pretty buggy and it’s not in arch repos, so I don’t trust it too much. X11 had many options.
Tablets and color calibration it seems https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide#1-wayland
Orca slicer, bambu studio
To be clear: that’s their issue.
Those work fine in Wayland for me.
At least Orca Slicer works fine for me in Wayland.
Those both work fine in Wayland.
As someone that is stuck with an Nvidia card rn, I’ve had a few applications just refuse to work with Nvidia and Wayland on KDE Neon. Maybe I just need to tinker more.
Can we please wait until wayland can actually replace x11
Unfortunately there’s always devs that refuse to change so long as their setup still works, even if there’s significantly better alternatives. The only option for dealing with them is to rip off the bandaid. Either they’ll put in the work to keep up or they’ll fall into obscurity
Meanwhile, my OS switched to Wayland while updating at some point and I didn’t even notice.
Meanwhile, most Unices don’t even have Wayland.
“Most Unices” haven’t been relevant for a decade or more. At this point it’s really just Linux, OS X, Android (to the extent it counts as a Unix), and BSD as an also-ran. Obviously OS X and Android don’t care about Wayland or X11 to begin with, so all you’re really saying is that BSD is getting left behind.
My brother in arms, given Linux’s desktop market share (which is where KDE is used), Linux is the also-ran in your list. For the point I have made, however, market share is not really relevant. Unices don’t stop becoming Unix just because of how many people use them.
The point is, nobody gives a shit about Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc. anymore and your argument is stupid.
Every Unix or Unix-like OS that matters in 2025 is either switching from X11 to Wayland or never used X11 to begin with.
“Nobody”. I see. Please try to leave your bubble every now and then. There are quite a few people (including me) who still need those systems, and it is rather disappointing to see that they are left behind without a good reason.
It’s proprietary shit. If it’s being left behind, blame the megacorp that makes it, not Linux devs.
“KDE: We hate Unix.”
