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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

#141

Post by saint_yossarian »

etamponi wrote: post #58
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…

I might try to explain with some examples. 1) it would really be nice to renovate that old house in the city center of an old Italian town! Oh but hold and behold: you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. And it would cost twice as much as building a new one. And the new one would have better insulation…

> you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house.

Ah you mean like in the wayland-protocols repo? :)

(not disagreeing with your actual point though)

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

#142

Post by o11c »

exceptione wrote: post #125
o11c wrote: post #90

Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3). But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have t…

What are they denying? You can continue using Xwayland for *most* X applications. I think they explain your options quite well in this blog post: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f... As they say, distro's like "AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032".

That's like saying "my car has most of its components working", when it has no engine, only 12V battery power.

For me personally, the first dealbreaker I keep hitting is the fact that input-method-adjacent keyboard logic is quite broken (necessary if you ever want to use a language other than English, even temporarily).

There are also, of course, the innumerable minor bugs that will be fixed from one release to the next (but also replaced by other bugs). The number of these decay exponentially and it will probably be a decade or so before Wayland sessions becomes as stable as X11 in this regard.

There are quite a few cases where applications auto-detect that Wayland is running and as a result run in degraded mode, intentionally or unintentionally. I remember some bug with menus not working properly ...

And scaling, often touted as one of Wayland's features, often works better under X11!

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

#143

Post by Pet_Ant »

Balinares wrote: post #111
Pet_Ant wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There is nothing to figure out, unfortunately. The design of X11 precludes hardware acceleration; the hardware acceleration you see on a X11 desktop works by using extensions to entirely route around the X11 client-server model. To make it work they'd need to rethink the design. And they did -- that's how we got Wayland.

> The design of X11 precludes hardware acceleration

I wasn't talking about X11, just that capability.

Never heard of Waypipe before, but it was mentioned in a sibling comment, and that might be exactly what I'm looking for.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

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

#144

Post by npteljes »

happymellon wrote: post #134
npteljes wrote: post #130

This is interesting to me, because SteamOS, so Steam Deck uses KDE. I really wonder how they are going to tackle going from X to Wayland on 4 million machines, and what that will bring.

I thought it used Gamescope, with the option to boot to KDE. So they won't have to do.much for Gamescope, and the current hardware should support Wayland. We shall see with the new hardware coming out next year though.

Oh, that's right! They use KDE only for the Desktop Mode operation, not the normal one. So yes, not much is impacted.

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

#145

Post by brooke2k »

vrmiguel wrote: post #113
brooke2k wrote: post #35

That's extremely disappointing. Wayland has gotten a lot better but there are still many, many instances where I have to switch into an X11 session in order to play certain games (especially older ones). I am a huge fan of KDE but this may actually force me to switch to something else :(

These older games don't run fine with Xwayland?

Nope. Off the top of my head, I've had serious issues (crashing, visual glitching, extreme lag, etc) running OpenMW and Minecraft on XWayland, both of which were resolved entirely by switching to X11. There have been many others too, those are just at the front of my mind because they were the most recent.

Oh, also Godot has a lot of issues on Wayland at the moment, specifically the Godot editor. I spent a long time trying to figure those out, because if I'm developing I would really rather be in a Wayland session where my DPI stuff works much better, but ultimately I resigned to just running the Godot editor only under an X11 session.

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

#147

Post by greenavocado »

KeepassXC (a must-have application and dealbreaker) is still broken on Wayland.

The recommended "solution" is to edit the .desktop file to resemble the following:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 keepassxc

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973

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

#148

Post by 0134340 »

tsoukase wrote: post #146

In the domain of graphics, Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart. In a Qemu VM a testing installation of Plasma+Wayland is dog slow and crashes the whole system. Using the workaround for X it runs faster and stable.

>Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart >Using the workaround for X it run faster and stable

I think your post proves opposite.

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

#149

Post by bigyabai »

greenavocado wrote: post #147

KeepassXC (a must-have application and dealbreaker) is still broken on Wayland. The recommended "solution" is to edit the .desktop file to resemble the following: QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 keepassxc https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973

There are lots of Keepass clients you can use. My go-to on Wayland is Secrets: https://apps.gnome.org/Secrets/

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

#150

Post by mzajc »

0134340 wrote: post #148
tsoukase wrote: post #146

In the domain of graphics, Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart. In a Qemu VM a testing installation of Plasma+Wayland is dog slow and crashes the whole system. Using the workaround for X it runs faster and stable.

>Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart >Using the workaround for X it run faster and stable I think your post proves opposite.

The latest Plasma version still includes the X session. This post concerns the upcoming version, which takes away your choice of using the X session.
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