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KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

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Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#101

Post by ottah »

gary_0 wrote: post #61
ferguess_k wrote: post #52

I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in…

> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it 1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications. 2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy. The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix th…

I 100% agree with the performance improvement goals, but I think the security claims are overblown, and overly cautious. I honestly don't understand the point of trying to implement the security boundary in the display manager. It solves one class of security issues, while breaking a lot of accessibility and automation. The display manager just shouldn't be enforcing rigid per processes security controls, that's better done further down the stack. Or at a minimum security controls should respect user freedom enough to let a user access normally restricted features, with out the all or nothing elevation to root. There's a middle ground here where we don't break the world, and they get their shiny security policies.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#103

Post by kanbankaren »

electroly wrote: post #84
kanbankaren wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My monitor DPI is 70. 70/96 is 0.73, but there doesn't seem to be a way to set 73%?

You might be out of luck. I don't think it's possible to set the scaling lower than 100%. DPI scaling is primarily concerned with high-DPI.

That is why some of us still need X11 support.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#104

Post by quibono »

k4rli wrote: post #36
artisin wrote: post #4

As an X11 holdout, my time seems nigh.

Wayland+sway switch from x11+i3 is so simple and works so well. Only minor annoying thing not working for me are right-click context menus on some applets like Blueman and Steam.

With a tiny tiny caveat of wanting to run Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#105

Post by marcodiego »

ferguess_k wrote: post #52

I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in…

Just one example: Around 2009 I met Thiago Vignatti. His master thesis was about improving X so it was easy to use in a multi-seat setup (2 monitors/keyboard/mouse) so a single computer could be simultaneously used by two people.

He later worked for Nokia, Intel and eventually his own startup related to VR.

During his time as a Google summer of code student, his project was to paralelize X code so it could run in multiple threads, making better use of modern hardware with many cores. His project failed. The reason: X code was so bad that paralelizing and making it thread-safe required so many locks that it ran slower! It was a better idea to start from scratch. I remember, at the time, taking a look at the source code and asking him why there was a X86 emulator built-in in X source code. His answer was that that was required to run some video BIOS on non-x86 computers, namely Sun workstations. That was the level of legacy code in X.

This is just an illustration of many problems X had. Vignatti was one of the X devs that migrated to wayland development. Many other core X devs did the same. People saying that X is fixable, that it can be improved or what else... These people may be right, but I trust X core developers more than these people when the subject is X development.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#106

Post by simion314 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #80
ferguess_k wrote: post #52

I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in…

Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it. The redesign also reflects their priorities. The best analogy I can come up with is imagine a small group of people maintaining an old car frame and mechanical workings. They work hard to keep the engine running, but it's in a chassis with leaf springs and direct steer…

>Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.

Isn't wayland just soem protocol? so did the ex X11 devs wrote soem specifications and then soem went to GNOMEI think the issue is that there is no wayland library that a DE can use so everyone is forced to implement it as part of the DE , so the end result is a lot of missing features and incompatibility.

I could be wrong, I still run Linux but I decided years ago to stop following the Linux drama, I will use Kubuntu LTS and hopefully when it drops X11 the Wayland implementation and the X11 fallback would be usable.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#107

Post by aseipp »

lvncelot wrote: post #45

Hm. Just a few months back, the KiCad team posted about their woes with Wayland: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

That whole dust up just ended up being some bugginess in their native EGL/Wayland backend, which was known, but it was amplified by some distros accidentally enabling the Wayland backend by default. A build setting triggered the default render path to use EGL, but if you just set GDK_BACKEND=x11 and force KiCad onto XWayland, everything works just fine. And those bugs have probably been sorted out in distros by now. See https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayla... for some details.

TL;DR their Wayland backend is incomplete, it accidentally got enabled for some users, run KiCad on XWayland instead until their EGL backend is ready.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#108

Post by kanbankaren »

kronicum2025 wrote: post #97
kanbankaren wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My monitor DPI is 70. 70/96 is 0.73, but there doesn't seem to be a way to set 73%?

I could set my screen to 75%, not really 73% but close may be?

How did you do it? It doesn't allow any value below 100%?

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#109

Post by ChocolateGod »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #68
gary_0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it 1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications. 2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy. The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix th…

> X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics I really wish they would figure this out. It just feels like with Threadripper etc the time is perfect for a return of thin-clients/not-so-dummy terminals running X11-like applications over the network on a server. Especially for development where many of us are running under-powered laptops and could use the boost to compilation from a beefy…

It's not really something to figure out, it's just X protocol design was made for when thin clients running over the network was assumed to be the future, it wasn't. Unfortunately though unlike Mac or Windows the migration to a better protocol has been ugly.

When you start to consider things such as HDR, hardware planes (important if you want energy efficient video decoding) etc, the protocol just doesn't make that kind of thing easy, compared to Wayland which does by it's use of surfaces etc.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#110

Post by elcritch »

o11c wrote: post #99
elcritch wrote: post #33

I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz. Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.

Yes, Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop; unlike other Wayland complaints, this one fundamentally will never be fixed. This is unlike X11, where it was very common to recover from the inevitable single-component crashes.

Ouch I didn’t know that.
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