KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
blogs.kde.org
KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#2Interesting, I always heard that x11 was not getting dropped until Plasma 7. While I am now fully on wayland myself, still not sure how to feel about this, feels a bit soon.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#3What 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
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#4What 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
How old? Im running KDE on 6700k and gtx 960. (I can run on without 960 too). Thats 10 year old at this point
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#5Interesting, I always heard that x11 was not getting dropped until Plasma 7. While I am now fully on wayland myself, still not sure how to feel about this, feels a bit soon.
The x11 will be supported for 1.5 more years in latest state. And then there will still be support from LTS distribution for bug fixes. Only new features won't be there. It seems very glacial to me still.
> This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#6What 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
Wayland compositors can use llvmpipe: https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/llvmpipe.html
That being said, your bigger problem is trying to view modern websites on 1080p displays on that ancient hardware...
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#7What 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
Software compositing is possible. Wayland doesn't strictly require hardware acceleration or operations that are hopelessly slow without hardware acceleration.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#8Oh 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.
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#9What 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 with plain `memcpy`s etc.).
So you should always be able to run a fully-featured Wayland desktop (albeit limited in performance by your CPU), on any unaccelerated framebuffer, nowadays (and I remember doing this even before Plasma 6 launched, it may be older than usable Wayland desktops tbh - the Mesa code sure is, but maybe distros hadn't always built those drivers?).
Re: KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
#10I love kde and it is what i use but still having the bug from time to time that the panels dissapear and have to relaunch plasmashell, also i wish they merged the virtual desktops and activities into one concept and allowed different wallpapers on each.
The theme settings is also confusing because of gtk apps, global theme etc. Feels everything around theming could be made nicer.
Prob some more nitpicks but overall it is a really great desktop environment.