As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.
Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?
edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:
-
remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.
-
nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.
-
applications in general felt sluggish
-
it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.
-
lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.
-
screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.
-
application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.
here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.
so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.
There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work
People complaining about Wayland always like to say that, but usually don’t give any specific examples.
If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn’t be actively working to switch.
For what it’s worth, since a few years Wayland works better on my PC than X11 ever did, and with more features.
I’ve used Wayland exclusively for years, but here’s an example: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/
tl;Dr the Wayland ecosystem has still not caught up in all edge cases, the weirder setup you have the more likely you’re affected
i use x11 termux with xreal glasses for my travel rig. as far as i know, there is no wayland support for termux.
also when i use steam link from wayland it is very buggy. i tried again a couple months ago and had the same issue.
are these niche use cases? absolutely. but i have 2 different niche use cases that exclude using wayland. its a shame if ill have to quit using gnome (i know this thread is about kde) over this.
I’ve been quite happy with moonlight/sunshine on Wayland. Is that an option?
it can except when im away from home. dont get me wrong, i use wayland on a few other computers. im not hating on wayland, i just find i have to keep using x and its frustrating and sad to see it being phased out.
Seems like it would take less effort to improve Wayland than maintain a forked DE for X11.
deleted by creator
I think realistically the best option is to stick with an older version of KDE until your issues get fixed upstream or switch to another DE.
Anyone technically literate enough to port KDE back to X11 is likely also literate enough to fix the blocking bugs.
… Unless they’re doing it purely on ideological grounds, which is probably not a healthy way to run a project.
Well… Unless those blocking bugs relate to getting new Wayland protocols approved.
you don’t need approval to make a protocol, make an implementation and just use it yourself
Wayland development continues to push forward. Currently it works better than X11 in 95% or setups, and it won’t be long before it covers 99.5%. X11 is legacy now, and Wayland works perfectly for the vast majority of users and is only improving. The time to move on is coming.
For legacy use cases there will be an alternative X11 DE you can use for a long time yet.
You can just stay with the last plasma version that supports x11 as long as it doesnt start to bit rot. Btw, try wayland and see if YOUR workflow works
Remote access is the one pain point. There is very little for RMM or remote software that works on wayland. KDE has that in the works already.
Everybody says Rustdesk but it is a bad joke regardless of wayland.
Personally I host a simplehelp server(paid) and it’s really good but wayland support is a no go so far.
Everything else has been categorically better and fixed a lot of issues for me that I used to have on X11 which I’ve used for like 15 years.
X11+Gnome until gnome 3 then KDE for me because I’m not using a damn tablet (or workspaces).
It obviously won’t work for everyone, but for remote access I’ve been very impressed with waypipe. I use it to pull windows from headless machines onto my main workstation, like X forwarding.
I’d like something for persistence, like wprs, but it’s not quite there yet.
Plasma and Gentoo user here.
The transition has been so uneventful and simple that I didn’t even noticed. I run some 15 desktops with different mixed hardware setups and use VNC / RDP sometimes too.
One day I started noticing on some desktops Wayland was now in use, by chance. Then I started taking notice.
I can say the ones moved to Wayland are smoother, but might be aneddotical. Beside that, cannot care less about X11 or Wayland, they both work just fine for all my use cases.
For the sake of future, welcome Wayland!
/smallrant Sorry for X11, have to say I have been in the business since kernel version 2 and I DO NOT miss losing X11, its a bunch of half assed half baked spaghetti tech that has done its own time and would not have kept up with life. /rantover.
RDP
How do you approach RDP? Do you have multiple monitors at all? Is your approach scriptable? The reason I ask is because I can easily access my machines like so:
exec xfreerdp3 /u:<user> /p:<pass> /v:<address> +f +clipboard /drive:/home/<user>>,Z: /drive:/,Y: -grab-keyboard /monitors:0,1 /multimonThis can be added to a script that also checks the state of the target machine, and boots it via my IPMI console if necessary, waiting until the machine is ready to login. And, as you’ll note, I can specify which monitors I would like to provide for the connection.
grab-keyboardallows me to set a keyboard shortcut that minimises the remote session, and you’ll note the mapped drives also. This is pretty much the lowest level of functionality I’m after. If that can be replicated on Wayland, that’s at least one hurdle down.My use case is much simpler. I access via RDP client and that’s all, not needing multi monitor
_
On the contrary, they provided a piece of information that I’m very interested in. They’re hardly shilling.
Ok, i deleted it.
In fairness, x11 is a bit of a dumpster fire and has been as long as I’ve used Linux (since 2003).
I really hope the X11 session stays maintained.
Otherwise, KDE will finally have a reason to get get its MATE/Cinnamon equivalent
What should the fork be called? Surely someone can do better than “Plaxma DE”.
This already exists, sort of. It’s called Trinity Desktop. However, it’s a fork of an older version of KDE, specifically 3.5.
Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this.
Checkout the Wayback project on fdo
I feel similarly especially about remmina, though as I understand it this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I’m quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).
It’s too bad because on Debian 13 here wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren’t for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.
I would hope plasma’s decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.
Personally, I’m quite happy with Plasma Wayland on multiple machines and distros. However, Plasma has already been forked to create Sonic DE: https://github.com/Sonic-DE/sonic-win No idea if this will gain any traction once Plasma drops X11. For now, the activity seems to focus on the readme file…
KDE on Manjaro - The Wayland update caused issues with programs that I used and had depended on for years. I struggled to find suitable replacements or workarounds for the features I was comfortable with on X11.
I experienced random lockups and sound issues, displayport would reset now and again. I worked with these issues until I got fed up and reverted to X11 in the login screen after installing plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11. Everything works as it used to, for now.
This experience made me want to look for alternatives to KDE, I’m not ready for Wayland.
Incidentally, does Wayland have an alternative to X2GO apart from RDP?
