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.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
    3·
    2 days ago

    The issue is that maintaining X11, like any large and old software, is a lot of work, even if it does not add features. Probably way more than you think.

    And as far as I understand, the people who used to work on X11 are moving to Wayland, too. Unless volunteers pick that work up, X11 will rot and become unusable over time.

    The other thing: Replacing and modernizing a very large piece of software which is so much integrated will always be a lot of work, take a lot of time, and be somewhat painful. That’s just life. And there will always be early adopters and late movers - which is fine, too.

    And by the way, I am using stumpwm on X11. It is called the Emacs of window managers for a reason, and WMs written e.g. in Guile Scheme are still catching up.

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    202·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • northernscrub@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      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 /multimon

      This 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-keyboard allows 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.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    7·
    6 days ago

    I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.

    One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.

    Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.

    I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.

    • northernscrub@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      I habitually use a clean install whenever I move OS - so much so that I’ve been buying new storage drives for the sake thereof. I actually have one ready to go for Trixie, once I finish a current project.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    7·
    7 days ago

    I imagine that some graphical environments will always support X11. I’d suggest you switch to one of those. If someone forked Plasma, it’d have far fewer eyes on it than something like i3. I assume XFCE will continue to support X11 for a while too since it’s only just working on Wayland support. Maybe some of the less common DEs like MATE are worth looking into?

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      4·
      6 days ago

      I could see MATE going Wayland only before XFCE does. They are a “traditional” desktop but not committed to old tech in general. Their whole system has already been ported to Wayland when used with a compositor like Wayfire or LabWC. As a small project, they may not want to maintain both longer term.

      Lots of MATE users on other UNIX systems though. Not just BSD but Solaris and such. So, who knows.

      XFCE is building libraries to make supporting both longer term easier. So, they should support X11 for a long time. We will see what happens if GTK5 is Wayland only.

      Trinity Desktop is probably stuck on X11.

      And most X11 window managers will remain X11 window managers forever. The only reason Sway exists is because i3 is not moving. There is Wayland Maker instead of WimdowMsker and DWL instead of DWM. This list goes on. What non-DE x11 window manager is porting to Wayland? I cannot think of one.

      But Plasma is not ditching X for a year or more. And many distros will ship the X version far longer. The freaking out seems more like a political statement than a pragmatic requirement at this point.

      If Debian Forky ships Plasma with X11 support in 2027 (and I bet it does), the first version of Debian Stable to ship Wayland-only Plasma will be Debian 15 in 2029/2030. Many, maybe most, never-Waylanders will have migrated to Wayland by then.

      • communism@lemmy.ml
        3·
        6 days ago

        Yeah. It looks like a lot of the BSDs might be the way to go if for whatever reason you want/need to stay on X11. I’ve been trying out OpenBSD on one of my machines, and following for quite a lot longer, and progress on Wayland support seems to be relatively slow over there.

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
    61·
    6 days ago

    I have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    6·
    7 days ago

    I switched from x to Wayland eaely/mid last year, prior to that there were quirks. But now: no screen tearing, no nvidia issues when using their driver, steam games play instead of black screen.

    The bonus is security.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • mononoke@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    41·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    52·
    7 days ago

    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”.

  • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
    31·
    6 days ago

    Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.

    People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.

    Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.

    I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.

    Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.

    The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.

    • anelephant@lemmy.world
      5·
      6 days ago

      Pipewire and alsa are completely different things. Pipewire uses pulse/jack which then use alsa, or am I missing something?

      • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
        3·
        6 days ago

        People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).

        When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.

        Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.

        I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.

        It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.

  • stuner@lemmy.world
    31·
    7 days ago

    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…

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      5·
      7 days ago

      And quite a dishonest readme at that. All the “not natively supported” entries for things designed to work with XDG desktop portals are hilarious.

      This is obviously more of a political statement than anything else. I would not expect much from it.

  • notagoblin@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 days ago

    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?