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 single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
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.
Well, there's SonicDE, but like many such projects it's probably maintained by reactionaries which introduces its own suite of issues around security, code quality, and "will this be maintained in a year, 5 years?"
Thank goodness I never jumped back on the KDE bandwagon once KDE4 stopped sucking donkey balls. I just went with xmonad and the few apps I actually use.
What's sad is that after many years Wayland still lacks several things/features that X11 has/allows. Some of them are intentionally not implemented because of security paranoia. For example, Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't remain to the top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top. If I had a lot of time I could list how Wayland breaks many applications.
Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
If you use KDE, you can work around this because of the powerful feature set the window manager has for setting custom window behavior.
1. Right click the PIP window and then click "More Actions-> Special Window Settings".
2. On the window that pops up, click "Add Property", and add "Window title". Change the drop-down from "Unimportant" to "Exact match" (this works on Firefox because the window title is always "Picture-in-Picture", you might have to do something slightly different on Chrome if it does something different).
3. Click "Add Property" again, add "Keep above other windows", change the drop-down to "Force", and change the radio button to "Yes".
4. From now on, all PIP windows will show up on top of other windows.
It would definitely be nicer if there was some sort of "always on top" permission that applications could request, but it's not too bad.
I have a virtual pinball cab with two (and soon) three displays. Wayland really makes life difficult here because the software needs to always put the playfield on one display, the backglass on another, and the "dot matrix display" window on a third. That's a big no-no with Wayland. Fortunately KDE has window rules as a workaround. Sway and Hyprland allow similar rules. Mutter on Gnome has no equivalent.
I'm guessing this would mess up other games as well, like multi-screen flight simulators or driving games. It would be really nice if user-trusted apps could be granted permissions on an app-by-app basis to allow absolute placement of windows for these cases instead of making us jump through hoops.
I know nothing about the detailed technical differences between X11 and Wayland but with Hyprland for me the PIP is working as expected so I assume its not just a Wayland issue but specific to the window manager you are using? Maybe somebody else can explain?
As far as I know, there are multiple Wayland implementations. Which is also not good because it creates fragmentation and potential inconsistencies (some subtle differences in behavior, differences in bugs, etc). Maybe Hyprland solves the issue, but I don't want to use this DE just because it solves this particular issue. I have tons of other needs and preferences.
Isn't that usually how it goes? Wayland is a million little optional protocols, which in the abstract is a lovely idea but in practice means which things work depends on which grab-bag of features your compositor supports.
Gnome has a "Always on Top" toggle for each window. I imagine there's a protocol for an application to set it by default but the OP's window manager might not implement it or there might be an incompatibility.
1. Right click PIP window
2. More Actions -> Configure special window settings
3. Add property -> Layer Force Popup
After this it spawned always in middle, I also added property Position Remember, so it spawns where it was previously. I have no idea if this is the best way to fix but worked for me.
I can't speak for Chrome, but I can right click a Firefox picture-in-picture window, tell it to remain on top, and it does, no problem. I've been using Plasma Wayland for years now and this has worked for ages
A huge thank you to the KDE team. Plasma is good (finally) on Wayland for me (AMD graphics, single hi-dpi screen). I finally switched over from GNOME and I am happy with the experience.
> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations [sic], and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
I've been using Kubuntu for the past 12 years without any X-related issue, and have and am actively working on stuff that requires it. I guess it's time to switch to another DE.
Most people are not you. A small minority do things that really need X. However there is good reason to say that the things that really need X are things you shouldn't do anyway.
Meanwhile there is a slightly larger minority that need things that cannot be done in X.
For the vast majority of people they cannot tell the difference, either works just fine. If there are issues they are tiny things they don't notice until somebody points it out - and then they forget in a few days.
Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....
Linux users are more likely not to opt-in and actively opt-out of spyware, telemetry, or whatever you want to call it.
The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to privacy cincious people. There was a study that backs up this claim, but I'm not google.
Crash reports are only mentioned as confirmation of other statistics, and in any case, the vast majority of crashes have nothing to do with the window system used.
They showed the statistics based on their telemetry tools and said they match crash data.
Not that it was 100% from crashes.
Also the fact they can tell which one is in use does not mean that’s the reason it crashed. It could be crashes due to bad network handling or file corruption or something that has nothing to do with the GUI.
This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's particular wayland. It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this loss of support. Basically the only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support.
Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11.
Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.
Funny, my impression of KDE in the 3 and 4 eras was “Wow, this is shiny and sleek— oh, and it crashed. Nevermind.” Nowadays there is nothing I would recommend more to the average user who just wants something normal that works. It just works.
What you’re saying just sounds like a pointlessly personal and ideological attack. Against a piece of software. Why?
I don't really like Systemd neither - but Wayland and Systemd are pretty much opposites of each other. Systemd does (too) many things, many of them badly. Wayland does well what it does, but it (still!) does too little. Wayland is adding features and is pretty close to doing "everything necessary". Systemd keeps accreting worse replacements for existing services.
I dont know when where these "good old days" but in 2000s KDE was superunstable. It seemed to have all the cool UI tweaks but 30% of them barely worked.
Modern KDE is nothing like that, and i cannot see how this is a bad thing.
> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.
Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
1. Right click the PIP window and then click "More Actions-> Special Window Settings".
2. On the window that pops up, click "Add Property", and add "Window title". Change the drop-down from "Unimportant" to "Exact match" (this works on Firefox because the window title is always "Picture-in-Picture", you might have to do something slightly different on Chrome if it does something different).
3. Click "Add Property" again, add "Keep above other windows", change the drop-down to "Force", and change the radio button to "Yes".
4. From now on, all PIP windows will show up on top of other windows.
It would definitely be nicer if there was some sort of "always on top" permission that applications could request, but it's not too bad.
I'm guessing this would mess up other games as well, like multi-screen flight simulators or driving games. It would be really nice if user-trusted apps could be granted permissions on an app-by-app basis to allow absolute placement of windows for these cases instead of making us jump through hoops.
1. Right click PIP window 2. More Actions -> Configure special window settings 3. Add property -> Layer Force Popup
After this it spawned always in middle, I also added property Position Remember, so it spawns where it was previously. I have no idea if this is the best way to fix but worked for me.
I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
The maintenance and performance stuff is good, but it’s not exactly end user stuff. Yeah you benefit but it’s less obvious.
I don’t follow this stuff closely so personally I have no idea what kind of Wayland only features could exist that couldn’t before.
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.
Meanwhile there is a slightly larger minority that need things that cannot be done in X.
For the vast majority of people they cannot tell the difference, either works just fine. If there are issues they are tiny things they don't notice until somebody points it out - and then they forget in a few days.
The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to privacy cincious people. There was a study that backs up this claim, but I'm not google.
OTOH, xfce is doing fine.
They showed the statistics based on their telemetry tools and said they match crash data.
Not that it was 100% from crashes.
Also the fact they can tell which one is in use does not mean that’s the reason it crashed. It could be crashes due to bad network handling or file corruption or something that has nothing to do with the GUI.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.
Modern KDE is nothing like that, and i cannot see how this is a bad thing.