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Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk

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Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#151

Post by thesuitonym »

c-hendricks wrote: post #117
thesuitonym wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's fine, but it shouldn't be necessary. If Windows and Mac OS just had native support for always-on-top windows, you wouldn't need it.

I actually prefer macOS's PiP handling compared to other operating systems. In that it's a blessed concept that only goes to one corner of the screen and can be shunted out of the way easily.

Now imagine if that was designed properly, and you could just do that to any window, regardless of what the program thinks it should look like.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#152

Post by okanat »

shevy-java wrote: post #7

Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11. Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.

David is the definition of old-school KDE developer. Do you know how far back his commits go? I remember his name from my first rodeos with KDE when I was a teenager. He was blogging about KDE in 2009 FFS: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/2009/09/

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#153

Post by cwillu »

suby wrote: post #46

I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution. The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call s…

Screentearing has been solved on x11 for a decade; if nvidia don't support TearFree in the driver, that's an nvidia issue, not an X11 issue.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#154

Post by kmeisthax »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #41
senfiaj wrote: post #8

What's sad is that after many years Wayland still lacks several things/features that X11 has/allows. Some of them are intentionally not implemented because of security paranoia. For example, Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top. If I had a lot of time I could list how Wayland breaks many applications. Not saying that X11…

I have a virtual pinball cab with two (and soon) three displays. Wayland really makes life difficult here because the software needs to always put the playfield on one display, the backglass on another, and the "dot matrix display" window on a third. That's a big no-no with Wayland. Fortunately KDE has window rules as a workaround. Sway and Hyprland allow similar rules. Mutter on Gnome has no equivalent. I'm guessing…

Ironically, the use case you described is exactly the sort of thing Wayland really excels at - if you're willing to write your own compositor. There's plenty of embedded devices that ship with an extremely simple Wayland compositor that does exactly this. It opens up one app, accepts as many windows from that app as it has displays, and renders one window per display. That's that. There's no super-secret desktop that could wind up accidentally displaying if the app crashes or gets its window accidentally moved about, because there's no desktop and no moving any of the windows. You just take output from an app and put that on the display, then send input back to it.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#155

Post by superkuh »

novafunc wrote: post #98
superkuh wrote: post #39

This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA be…

> here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight

That is good to hear. But the third post down on acidiclight's mastodon page is a link to another user's blog post:

>As a KWin developer and KDE's accessibility engineer... >https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 >This is a problem. We need to solve it. Fast.

And this is a quote from the page intro,

> As the Linux Desktop transitions to a Wayland-only future, I will be locked out of my computer, as the accessibility software I rely on is left behind. The desktop environment I use, KDE Plasma, has announced that in early 2027, X11 support will be removed from the system. That means in about roughly 9 months, I will no longer be welcome on that desktop environment, being forced to cling to an older version or switch to a more niche environment that still supports it.

The problems described therein haven't been fixed. And mclassen's (of gtk) comments on the fedora bug tracker make it clear that even if KDE tries to implement GNOME's new AccessKit it still won't solve the problems. mclassen seems to think the people asking for things like getting and setting cursor position are just sealioning "accessibility maximalists". The core idea of his argument argument is valid, you can't get it working all at once and progress is incremental. But if that's true then don't remove X11 support that works while the waylands are still progressing towards working.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#156

Post by nickserv »

brooke2k wrote: post #83

in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.

You can try running in gamescope, although in my experience Wayland has not been an issue. The few games I have that gave me problems in Wine didn't work any better when using an X11 session.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#157

Post by nickserv »

tosti wrote: post #38
mug1 wrote: post #10

I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps

Linux users are more likely not to opt-in and actively opt-out of spyware, telemetry, or whatever you want to call it. The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to p…

Linux are also more likely to contribute bug reports and crash dumps.

Security conscious doesn't mean not getting involved with the community and helping useful projects.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#158

Post by amlib »

cwillu wrote: post #153
suby wrote: post #46

I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution. The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call s…

Screentearing has been solved on x11 for a decade; if nvidia don't support TearFree in the driver, that's an nvidia issue, not an X11 issue.

Until you connect a second monitor.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#159

Post by [deleted] »

thesuitonym wrote: post #150
porridgeraisin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it, if you're on google meet, and you want to make one of many videos PiP. How can you ever do that in the window manager? It has to be done in the application! You right click or click on the menu on that particular video, and click Picture in picture. How the heck can the window manager do it?

If things were designed well, it would be as easy as clicking the pin icon on the window border.

[deleted]

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#160

Post by Zardoz84 »

fhars wrote: post #106
bityard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years. Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine.…

On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.

Then something os wrong is in your machine. I'm just using KDE on Wayland on Debian 13 and just works fine.
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