Been on Wayland since 2016 and to this day my only issues (apart from when I had an Nvidia card for a few months, that is…) was video sharing in Discord/steam in-home streaming, both of which still don’t work right.
Other than that, it’s been great. Multi-monitor works way better, far fewer bugs, my desktop feels a lot more fluid and smooth.
On laptops, Wayland+Gnome gestures are exceptional, putting even Apple’s gestures to shame. I cannot stress enough how good of a job Gnome+Wayland does with trackpad gestures. It makes other gesture systems, especially ones under X11, feel like they were cobbled together by a Fallout 3 modder.
Overall Wayland has been great for me. I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app.
Plasma Panels have now gained a new visibility mode: “Dodge Windows” aka “intelligent auto-hide!” In essence, the Panel auto-hides when touched by a window, but is otherwise visible
Finally! With this, we can now have a panel behave like a proper dock.
I’ve tried running Plasma 5 on Wayland occasionally but due to having NVIDIA card there’s always been bigger or smaller annoying issues so I always reverted back to X11.
Looking forward to try out Plasma 6 as soon as it’s released!
i have a rtx3080ti and am using KDE plasma 5 wayland on Fedora 38(now 39) exclusively for gaming. i made the switch to wayland a month or so ago and i am having a considerably smoother experience than x11. especially with multiple monitors and flatpack apps like discord in the mix.(steam is running native though). no issues that i am aware of so far
Meanwhile Wayland absolutely hates my year old AMD laptop. It hangs itself on a regular basis, some applications go completely unresponsive every so often to the point they need to be kill -9’ed. Rock solid when running X11, completely unreliable in Wayland. It’s a shame, I want to like Wayland as I think there is no future for X11, but as it stands currently I simply cannot use it yet for my day to day business.
Just tried it yesterday. It is a LOT more smooth for me, but it can’t seem to handle 144hz. I turned it down to 60hz and it seems to be going well for now. I can live with this I think.
I’ve tried running Plasma 5 on Wayland occasionally but due to having NVIDIA card there’s always been bigger or smaller annoying issues so I always reverted back to X11.
Yeah, I tried it again this morning and got a black screen with mouse trails. I also have an Nvidia card and will give it another go when Plasma 6 comes out.
In the meantime please share that these issues exist on nvidia forums. Issues caused by nvidia drivrers shouldn’t come under the purview of the kde devs.
Exiting news! Can’t wait for final release to hit the repositories!
Yesterday I gave Wayland another try on Plasma 5 using the latest NVIDIA drivers, but unfortunately there were several visual glitches and the panel stopped updating itself :(
Same. Really wanted to give Wayland a chance, but having artifacts on blurry windows where the cursor was is just too annoying for me. Plasma team is already aware of the issue but said it’s too huge of a change for 5.x
To be honest, X11 is not terrible, even with multiple monitors with different refresh rates. I’m running 2x 60Hz and 1x 144Hz without any problems on X11.
FWIW link works fine for me (looking at other responses here).
Plasma’s global Edit Mode toolbar now has an “Add Panel” button that lets you add panels. With this located there, the desktop context menu has now lost its “Add Widgets” and “Add Panels” menu items since the functionality is fully available in the global Edit Mode. This makes the menu smaller and less overwhelming by default. Of course, if you want those menu items back, you can just re-add them. 🙂
I know it’s not a competition, but that right there encapsulates what I see as the philosophy difference between KDE and other teams. I love Plasma as a user, but this sort of thing is why I arrived here from there in the first place. Am I going to put those menu items back? Nope. But I like that the possibility I might want to matters to the team.
People need to understand Gnome’s goal is to bring simple Linux machines to the masses. I’m not even talking about your grandma or neighbour Joe, they spend a lot of time going after the 1.2B people in Africa and 400M people in South America. There’s a reason they only have one calculator named “Calculator” and not 2-3 like KDE has with “Kalk” or “Kcalc”. There’s a reason they created stopthemingmy.app.
Lots of power-users still love Gnome, some because it they came from MacOS (which Gnome is still vastly more customizable than), and some because the terminal gives all the power they need on Linux. For people who don’t like Gnome, you can still appreciate the sheer amount of resources they spend upstreaming work and keeping a fully FOSS GUI toolkit, something KDE never had the resources to do.
So yea, it’s frustrating see people hate on Gnome when they don’t even realize they’re not the target audience. (I know you’re not hating on Gnome, but wanted to vent that out a bit)
I have to admit I am a little bit of a Gnome hater, because I was a very happy Gnome 2.6(?) user when they moved my cheese (and then moved it again, and again, and again) - Gnome was for me until they decided I wasn’t the kind of user they wanted anymore.
Having said that, I appreciate the point you are making, and I only (tangentially) referenced Gnome in my first comment because the contrast is huge. KDE likes you to use the system how you want. (and it’s one of the things I love about KDE) Gnome likes you to use the system how they want. That’s all there is to it, regardless of how reasonable the logic behind that distinction may be.
It was pretty much the same story for me (although much earlier, in the 1.2 days I think).
Gnome was great but you couldn’t rely on anything. They loved removing stuff to make it more “lean” or changing it to match their “vision”. They didn’t care about their users, only their circlejerk.
I’m not sure it has changed a lot in since then. I’m glad I dropped that dumpster fire. I still have no idea why it’s the default on so many systems.
At least there are many great options for those who want something else.
I think Gnome is great. The workflow is amazing imo, better than a clunky Windows-inspired UX, and it’s nice to have a distro I can depend on being bug free without it being a project that moves too slowly.
And those trackpad gestures. Man. They make even Apple’s trackpad gestures feel like you’re using a £300 Acer laptop.
It’s also nice to have a desktop that actually gives a shit about UX, distraction-free computing, and consistency. It’s nice to have a desktop that encourages great third party apps that integrate well with the system and follow excellent design guidelines. It’s nice to have a DE team that are ballsy enough to go against the Win95 UX paradigm and does its own thing, despite knowing they’ll get extreme amounts of hate for it.
Just because it’s not your cup of tea doesn’t mean it’s a dumpster fire or they hate their users and are doing a circlejerk.
We don’t struggle with the idea of “Arch is too bleeding edge for me, so I won’t use it, but cool project nonetheless” or “Debian is too outdated for me, so I won’t use it, but cool project nonetheless”, so what is it about DEs - or tbh more accurately, Gnome specifically - that has people being like “this isn’t what I want, therefore it’s a piece of SHIT. Why do they hate their users? Why do the users use it? Don’t they realise the devs hate them??”
This elitist, tribal mentality is one of the worst parts about the Linux community, and is, ironically, a circlejerk of its own.
[ … ] what is it about DEs - or tbh more accurately, Gnome specifically - that has people being like “this isn’t what I want, therefore it’s a piece of SHIT. Why do they hate their users? Why do the users use it? Don’t they realise the devs hate them??”
You’re comparing Gnome and distributions which isn’t a very good comparison. Firstly because distributions are pretty much interchangeable, despite what people say, as they all pretty much do the same thing and install the same software, and secondly because Gnome has some history behind it.
In the early days, there wasn’t really much of a choice as far as desktop environments were concerned. You had a few fairly nice (for the time window managers), but if you wanted something integrated, there was Gnome or KDE. And KDE relied on the non free (at the time Qt). However Gnome kept changing and breaking stuff. The users kept asking the devs not to do it, and the devs quite literally told them to fuck off. A good number of people grew resentful towards the whole project around that time (and notably towards de Caza, who managed the whole thing). Soon enough Qt was freed, and many moved to KDE where the devs listened to users, where the concept was to empower and not to coerce. The difference was simply amazing.
I just suspect that you came in late to the show. I’ve had Linux on my desktop for close to 30 years now. So maybe Gnome got better, but it’s too late. They burned their bridges. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their turn to fuck off.
Now you know why there’s bad feelings towards them.
I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
Video tearing has basically disappeared.
Video timing issues seem to be improved.
Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.
Been using Wayland since 3’ish years ago and my desktop experience has been really smooth – no crashes, errors or anything of the sort. Everything “just werks” just as if I were on Xorg instead. Even on a completely obscure/zero linux support single board computer (Orange pi zero 3).
Not as bad as you might think. The nouveau drivers have come a long way for maxwell. You should give it a shot if you haven’t. But, unfortunately, if you are using anything new then nouveau sucks. It’s a fun game where you get to wait until nvidia no longer wants to support your GPU and hope by that point that nouveau has progressed far enough that you won’t be looking at noman’s land.
I meant the GTX900 series. I’m aware the 700s have decent support in nouveau, but the 900s has already been dropped by nvidia so we are on older drivers not capable of the latest vulkan extensions required by modern Proton.
For nouveau it needs GSP firmware that wasnt released as part of that release they did a while ago. I think pascal users are on the same situation, they just havent been dropped by the proprietary drivers yet. I wonder if we are gonna be stuck on xorg forever.
The newer cards got the important bits released by nvidia so the community can at least have a path forward…
I wasn’t fully aware of NVK and where it’s at. It’s actually pretty exciting. I wouldn’t mind dropping my current nvidia binary blob for fully open source drivers.
it didnt work ootb for me on ubuntu so i dropped it, but i hear it can already be made to work well with the desktop and basic stuff. performance in games is still bad but they are running.
I’ve switched away from Xorg a few years ago because of its terrible multi monitor support and bad experiences with picom. Sway and now hyprland are imo a better tiling wm experience then their Xorg equivalent.
Plasma 6 seems to be fixing a lot of the issues I currently have with Plasma - bugs, inconsistency, general jank. Looking forward to its release so I can give it another go
I wouldn’t say it breaks everything. Franky it fixes / handles better issues that are common usecases today that was not the case during the time X11 was still the norm / actively maintained such as:
Multiple monitor support with varied refresh rates
Hybrid GPU setup (including being able to use your motherboard’s hdmi socket and your dedicated gpu hdmi at the same time)
Display scaling
Better isolation of applications (to the deterrence of existing linux applications)
Of course granted its a new protocol, it doesn’t support all the usecases that X11 was designed for due to variety or reasons (including controversial decisions)
Mind you, Wayland isn’t perfect either. For example, I found out that despite Wayland having better Hybrid GPU setup support out of the box, there are applications that ended up having broken multi-gpu support (where the application in question can choose which gpu it would utilize for its processing) where it works fine X11.
With the state of the hardware we are having, it is understandable why distros have been focused on pushing Wayland as the default, although honestly, it would be wise for these distros to not completely phase out x11 because currently, Wayland isn’t perfect.
Quite literally, the only problem or “stuff broken because or Wayland” is some old ass apps or lazy companies that won’t update their electron version. Looking at you discord, screen sharing COULD WORK if you managed your stuff
My experience with Nvidia+ Wayland was… Less than desirable. Enough to make me pickup an AMD card.
However, once I did that my experience instantly better. Hell, even X11 worked better - I was never able to get the desktop to stay at a consistent 60FPS (I’m still on a 60Hz panel which I’m just now getting around to upgrading shortly) in X until I moved to my AMD card.
The 545 driver update just made things so much worse. So I’d say Wayland+Nvidia is not great (for others it works fine so maybe it’s down to what card you have?) however on my AMD card (and my old MacBook with Intel integrated graphics) it’s fantastic.
The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames!
Yeah, it regularly appears in my nightmares /s. Sorry Carl, but I’m gonna have to patch this out. I hope this will get a config option like the change to the Dolphin details view that made the click area to open a file span the whole row (doesn’t look like it’s configurable as of now). I kept patches to undo that for a while as well…
Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording!
Oooh, I’ve been waiting for that. Very cool! Now I hopefully don’t have to fiddle around with OBS anymore to record a section of the screen.
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