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Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk

251–260 of 392 posts

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

#251
post #2

I think the KDE developers in particular have done a great job of pushing Wayland forward and getting features that people want and need added as new protocols. KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11, and by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland so I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage. > Moving forward with a sing…

> KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11 Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less? > by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I…

Yeah, I'm not optimistic about KDE's future with recent attitudes from them.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11 Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less? > by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I…

Perhaps the Wayland code path does not have to do thousands of workarounds with an ancient API made thinking on remote graphical terminals.

Pretty easy to have a simple codebase when you simply dismiss all user needs.

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

#253

I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11. I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.

> but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11. The risk in that in this age of AI-assisted bughunting, X11 security vulnerabilities are more numerous and as nasty as they've ever been. And that says a lot. https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTU1NzA https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-9-Vulnerabilities-AI

X11 is not and has never been a security boundary.

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

#254

Slight tangent but has anyone moved from AwesomeWM to a Wayland-based tiling WM? Interested to hear what people chose. I tried Sway for a bit and while it's not bad by any means it's a bit too unlike what I'm used to. SomeWM is an attempt at "porting" AwesomeWM to Wayland and looks very promising but not quite there yet (I couldn't get Vicious widgets working and not sure if supporting them is even a goal). I'm still…

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.

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

#255
By the way - David refused to publish the source for the image he showed, aka "nobody uses x11 anymore".

This reminds me of the systemd folks - they also don't allow for discussions yet alone cite anything related to their claims. They just claim. If the earth is flat, they don't need evidence. Their word must be enough.

It is this image:

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/...

David claims "internal metrics", but he also does not explain how those metrics were gained, is there bias in how they were gained, which time span and so forth.

I am not saying he is fabricating the graph, though this could be the case too. What I am asking for is to show (ALL of) the data and explain the graph and data. Otherwise this is simple propaganda, with a pre-set goal to cover-my-ass (aka explain why KDE devs try to eradicate all xorg users).

By the way, next step, as you guys may know: systemd-only. Both David and Nate also announced this before. I wonder if there are financial kickbacks.

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

#256
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My touchpad still works like shit on libinput (which is the only input method available on wayland). I guess in a few years I'll need to patch it and carry my patches forever. Yay progress!

Taking a wild guess that this may or may not help you: https://github.com/kekekeks/waynaptics

> This particular model is used because it has hacks in libinput codebase to enable smooth scrolling with wheel.

Yet another glowing endorsement for libinput.

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

#257
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I upgraded to the latest PopOS with Cosmic running on Wayland. Honestly everything just worked, but using it made me so nauseous. There was some latency somewhere, never figured it out. Running Cinnamon on X11 now. I did read some suggestions to improve latency but I have PTSD so it's going to take a while before I try Wayland again.

That’s interesting. I have the opposite effect—X11 always had jank and latency, to the point that it drove me to windows for a couple of years.

This is with multiple monitors on Nvidia’s, all of which support vsync. Disabling that did help, but why would I want to?

Wayland, currently, is butter smooth.

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

#258
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you really just [sic] a British guy using British spelling?

Is that a British spelling? Oops. Honestly my computer gave it a red underline so I decided to do that. I didn’t think about it harder than that. If I recognized it like “colour” I wouldn’t have.

It's fairly common for us to use "-ise" instead of "-ize", but having now looked at Wikipedia on the subject, it appears that I incorrectly thought of "-ize" as an Americanism. The "-ize" suffix predates "-ise" - it comes from ancient Greek/Latin whereas "-ise" comes from French.

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

#259

Sadly, recent GNOME versions introduced a hard dependency on systemd and can no longer be used on systemd-free distros. This is the kind of problem that the anti-systemd people had in mind back then when debates about systemd raged.

I'm sorry, but are we still going on about this? I love a good debate as much as the next guy, but being able to just have one interface (systemd's) for all services and having a more-or-less consistent language really helps. At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.

You could also just use one system (Windows) for everything if you wanted. Some of us decided to use Linux because we want things to work how we want and not how some bigshot decides they should work.
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