https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058531 ("KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support (phoronix.com)"—231 comments)
KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#22What is the solution regarding the display manager? As SDDMs Wayland support is considered experimental. What do you guys use/recommend?
I use lemurs because as far as I can tell there's no good graphical display managers (lightdm may be the closest as SDDM doesn't show battery level and GDM doesn't allow changing the mouse cursor theme).
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#23What I am uncomfortable with is the inability to run Wayland on older video hardware. X11 will happily run with Vesa driver on older hardware which no longer has functional 3D accelerated drivers. What is the way forward for the retro community to run a modern Wayland system on older hardware? Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in or correct me
If your Linux distribution is handling Mesa packages correctly, you will never lack OpenGL/Vulkan drivers . The reason is that Mesa includes "software rendering" drivers for both OpenGL ("llvmpipe") and Vulkan ("lavapipe"). As the name(s) might suggest, they use LLVM to JIT shaders for your CPU (supporting SIMD up to AVX2, last I checked - although typical compositing shaders tend to get pattern-matched and replaced…
Software OpenGL rendering technically works, but is IME unusably slow for compositing. What does work okay is direct software rendering. It might work to configure OpenGL to hit all the fast paths in the software backend (which you might need to add first), but I'm really not sure if you can do it without at least some unnecessary data copying.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#24Oh the downplaying > In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots In what way is this copy&paste-like staple of general computing some "specialized" task? Will the new opportunities include reaching "specialized" feature parity? > In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.
It's actually wild that they're trying to sell lack of basic desktop features as "security features". Try explaining to an average person that when they are playing a game and want to capture a cool moment to share on Discord with their friends that by design the window server they are using will not let them do that and it's "for their own good". Like God forbid I want my computer to be actually usable. We had the s…
I'm using KDE with Wayland and I don't have problems to make screenshots or capture video.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#25Bluetooth is still broken beyond belief and here we are with another post from KDE about Wayland. If Wayland will be as buggy as the KDE bluetooth implementation, it’s an easy pass.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#26Oh, that's a shame, just when I thought KDE was looking quite good. Back to Xorg and Gnome then, because I need accelerated graphics.
A very basic functional test, with NVidia drivers 580.95:
Gnome and Xorg - Minecraft with a heavyish shader gives 60fps, Kerbal Space Program gives 60fps, DaVinci Resolve works
KDE and Wayland - Minecraft with the same shader gives 4fps, KSP gives 2fps, DaVinci Resolve does not work
Gnome and Wayland: Minecraft gives 3fps, KSP gives 3fps, DaVinci Resolve does not work.
So, acceleration is not supported, it seems. Bummer.
Maybe next year Wayland will be relevant.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#27Oh the downplaying > In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots In what way is this copy&paste-like staple of general computing some "specialized" task? Will the new opportunities include reaching "specialized" feature parity? > In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.
It's actually wild that they're trying to sell lack of basic desktop features as "security features". Try explaining to an average person that when they are playing a game and want to capture a cool moment to share on Discord with their friends that by design the window server they are using will not let them do that and it's "for their own good". Like God forbid I want my computer to be actually usable. We had the s…
Wayland had the same odor a failed state has.
It's a huge hairball with no easy fixes, but at the same time, that's of significant benefit to some specific players. You can have a very usable X11 desktop with positively pre-Cambrian software. But to keep up with Wayland's ever evolving omnishambles, you basically have to run KDE or GNOME, or maybe Sway.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#28I love Wayland. I just absolutely love hard-rebooting my computer twice a day. Oh, need to walk away from the desk? Better switch into a TTY before unplugging the dock so I can force restart SDDM when it crashes. Oh no! Walked out of WiFi range? Your DE is hard frozen and the only operable button is the power button.
Wayland truly saves me so much time at work. It's forced me to re-up my ctrl+s reflex. Now I never lose work when it randomly crashes!
We've also been playing a fun new game. Every morning when I walk into the office my giant 5Kx1K monitor might be reset to literally any imaginable resolution and I have to figure out how to navigate to the display configuration menu to manually reset it because of course replugging the screen doesn't work.
I love Wayland. It's so easy to use and reliable. But MOST IMPORTANT it's newer than X11. Thank god I don't have to use gross old software written in uncool languages. God for-fucking-bid we have to run old software that works instead of new software that-- while not as good as the old software-- is still new
What's that? Wayland is almost 20 years old and still not to feature parity with any other OS? Well, it's newer than X11!
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The infrastructure is already there, for 3rd party apps to request these abilities (with the user getting the choice of following through, or denying the request), e.g.: Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)? > really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated What's wit…
> So what was the screenshot feature of X11? In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature . Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client. > Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption? I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (whic…
> In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.
Which is a load of FUD, the X11 security extensions from (checks google) 1996, restrict this.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So what was the screenshot feature of X11? In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature . Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client. > Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption? I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (whic…
> In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client. Which is a load of FUD, the X11 security extensions from (checks google) 1996, restrict this.
> Which is a load of FUD, the X11 security extensions from (checks google) 1996, restrict this.
Wait, what ? X11 has extensions ? As in can be "extended" ? And has the same thing since ( for the sake of dialogue) 1996 ? That't why it must die. We need a monolith window system, with clear versions, all incompatible with each other. Only then, real progress can be made. /s