It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution.
The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland.
I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work.
For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem.
I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.
I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE.
Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant.
My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life.
Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now.
I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?
I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users.
He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me.
Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland.
I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.
"Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work."
I think that is the only way forward. There is no "Linux desktop". There is KDE, Gnome etc. and if you want to do "system utilities" you have to target one of those.
The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.
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.
When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years.
Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine.
I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.
my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps.
in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS.
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.
For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.
> 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 don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared?
> I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage
Why is this contradicting what others report then?
> I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :)
Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like?
Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from last year:
> Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this.
That is because people who don't have a problem don't think about this and so don't comment. Many wayland users don't know. I think I switched this machine I'm using now to wayland a while ago but I don't remember, and maybe it switched back in an update and I didn't notice (which is the point, I know I switched at some point and I couldn't tell the difference - which is how it should be)
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 stay on 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.
Not too bad? A hidden procedure with ten clicks, which the user has to repeat for each web browser. And it may break at any time if the browser changes some details. Or if KDE changes. And it's specific to KDE, with no alternatives in most Wayland WMs.
All that for _one_ feature which works out-of-the-box with Xorg, and which Wayland removed for security reasons. From what I've seen, sharing the screen is another common feature which was broken with Wayland and is still painful.
I don't think Wayland's security model is very relevant to me since I have faith in Debian for filtering out rogue applications. So I have to reason to drop my smooth UX for a world of "not too bad" workarounds.
Look, I'm not a Wayland booster, I still prefer X11 most of the time, but this is really the way it should work. Applications should not be allowed to dictate how windows appear. That is the job of the window manager. Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.
This is the issue with imposing semantics of the programming model on the behaviour.
User behaviour is the only _real_ thing, it happens. Everything else is in your head. If people in the real world use PiP, then it should happen. The programming model has to bend and change to support it. It simply does not matter if the window manager does something or the window does something.
Sure, there is always the security argument wayland folks fall back to. But what ever is the problem with making a one-time permission popup? "Google Chrome wants to open in PiP: allow | allow once.". Just expose the existing PiP code in the window manager as an API guarded with an `if` that apps can call. It's not even that much real work, just pure bikeshedding and architecture astronauting.
Right right, and I'm not saying users shouldn't be able to have a floating window with video (or whatever) in it. I'm saying it shouldn't be Chrome making that window floating and always visible.
I don't get it, if you're on google meet, and you want to make one of many videos PiP. How can you ever do that in the window manager? It has to be done in the application! You right click or click on the menu on that particular video, and click Picture in picture.
The application could tell the window manager it wanted an always on top window. The window manager could ask the user if it should allow or reject and remember for this application or not.
That's exactly what I said... and also not how wayland works.
I cannot comprehend the way wayland folks think... quote from the xdg-pip discussion:
> To not make PiP windows effectively "always on top" and "on every workspace" dialogs - a terrible and sadly by applications used concept on X11 - PiP windows must be input-only, i.e. not receive keyboard, pointer and touch input
Like what the heck even? That is how pip windows are expected to work? And of course you want inputs on them? e.g to mute/unmute on a video call? Like these are use cases used daily by people. And its "terrible".
>> Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.
What are you talking about? It's very convenient when I watch video while I do some work or entertaining thing on other web page or app. It's fine if you don't want to use it but many people do.
I actually prefer macOS's PiP handling compared to other operating systems. In that it's a blessed concept that only goes to one corner of the screen and can be shunted out of the way easily.
I tried this for getting windows to open where I want them instead of the center of the screen. Couldn't figure it out in five minutes. Though I'll probably try again, this shouldn't be a problem.
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.
Yes, exactly. This security paranoia makes the devs' lives much more complicated. I have seen many apps turning off advanced features, such as screen color pickers. Automatation tools can be broken. Apps cant know their window positions, etc. You can see countless dev rants about Wayland and how it's generally unpleasant experience to work with.
Isn't it also impossible to spawn a window in the last place it was open (or any arbitrary point) because you're not allowed to know or change where your window is by design? Nonsense like that makes me dread having to eventually use it.
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?
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.
I can't speak for Gnome, but KDE makes it pretty easy to create rules that apply automatically to any new window that meets whatever arbitrary criteria you set.
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.
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
Ah, for some reason I figured this was a minor bug that'd be fixed eventually. Wayland windows are never allowed to spawn always-on-top? Sort of lame.
If the logic is that it's the window manager's job to set window rules for this, fine, but in that case Plasma should probably ship with preconfigured rules matching the Chrome/Firefox PiP window.
I also find the lack of an Xlib-compatible macro API disruptive but I usually run an X11 session inside Xvnc for this purpose anyway.
> Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top.
Wayland doesn't allow apps to force themselves to be always on top. I would argue that it is up to the window manager to provide this functionality at the discretion of the user. Kwin does this.
I definitely have to right click on the window in the taskbar and select Always Keep On Top with Firefox on Plasma Wayland. Not too big a deal but would be nice if it was something Firefox could just set on its own.
As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of.
In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.
> a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means
They started doing that in early 2024 with the release of KDE 6.0 by enabling KDE Wayland by default. The Wayland-only change won't happen til 6.8 which will be an early 2027 release.
Anyone on the most recent LTS Kernel (6.18) with an older nvidia GPU will not have a good experience on Wayland. I have two machines with Pascal GPUs and:
- The nvidia binary driver is shit with Wayland
- The nvidia OSS driver does not support Pascal GPUs.
- Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly.
You can get a stable system either by using the latest kernel+nouveau or:
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.
I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.
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?"
Is that "reactionaries" in the "we object to certain technology decisions" sense, like the anti-systemd crowd, or in the "software compatible with our political views" like the xlibre project?
A quick search (in which I found no evidence of heated controversy) suggests to me that it's the first one.
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.
I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo.
The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell.
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.
> 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 wouldn't say its "plain impossible" with X11, but its significantly easier on Wayland because its a far simpler design that aligns better with the graphics hardware, we're sending surfaces (or pointers to them) with metadata to the compositor, not drawing APIs.
That already works with Plasma Wayland. It's still a bit finicky to make it work with things running in XWayland (Windows games primarily) but it's getting better.
It would be a good habit to check (for example on the Wiktionary – I have a Chrome search keyword dedicated to that) because those are not the only differences.
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....
Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :)
And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.
But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.
Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
I have jgmenu mapped to F4 but I never remember to use it. I usually just CMD+P and type what I need.
I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.
Wayland is great and I generally prefer it, but it's worth keeping X around for KDE Plasma I think. Things like remote desktop are nicer on X, X is much easier to use on Android compared to Wayland, etc.
in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.
As someone who likes games from various periods (from Ultima IV to WH40K: Rogue Trader), I haven't ran into many games which do work on X11 and don't work on Wayland. Though I don't really have any of the old Loki games (I believe there was a port of Unreal Tournament?), so I might be missing out on the specific games which really lean into certain X11 features which XWayland doesn't support well.
I'm very surprised to hear that. Ive seen some issues with apps using Xwayland, mostly scaling related. I dont recall ever seeing an issue with a game running on Xwayland. Its also how the Steam Deck runs all games.
I can't say I've run into issues running games under XWayland, but I have only been using the Wayland session for a couple of weeks now. The blocker for me was Discord (you wouldn't get messages on your phone if you were afk because the idle detection didn't work in Wayland), but the devs there seem to have finally fixed it.
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.
There's nothing about Wayland that ties it to Linux. Wayland compositors tend to require a few features exposed by the graphics drivers (e.g. DRM) but there's nothing stopping the BSDS adding these (iirc FreeBSD already does).
at least FreeBSD does already have Wayland. It has a few more hiccups and rough edges than on Linux (at least from my PoV on running it on an older laptop) but otherwise it works fine.
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 on AwesomeWM for now because I have no real reason to incur the pain of switching, but still curious to know what path others are taking.
qimgv uses libmpv for video playback support for example. I'm guessing that's not what you mean, but I'm struggling to think of how one might "embed" one application inside of another on xorg.
x11 supports foreign window embedding. You can embed window from other application into your own window. That's why lots of mpv/vlc based players/editors don't work probably on wayland. The only way to achieve this on wayland is writing a custom compositor for the foreign window.
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.
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.
And the statistics are only from the latest release, not over all KDE users. They mention this in the text but the disengenuous plot is what people see.
>For transparency, the one caveat in all of the above is that I've deliberately always focused on people using the latest Plasma release. We do still have a sizable chunk of users on X11 still using Plasma 5.27. Including them, the total Wayland adoption rate is about 76%.
Time to switch to Windows! yay! Where all of this stuff just works: HDR, remote desktop, gaming, Picture-in-Picture, ... all the stuff that Wayland devs are too stupid to get done correctly
Eh, IDK. Maybe? After 20 years of using Linux I'm looking on Windows more and more.
Linux Gaming is now better than ever, and ideological Linux dev community torpedoes it hard with Wayland.
I mean who Linux wants to be anyway? An OS for bleeding edge hardware? I think we have Windows for that. Because Wayland doesn't even work correctly on average-aged hardware.
Greybeards have created Linux, and cool new generation will shut it down (on Desktop).
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 wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. 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.
I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.
> There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all
Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago.
I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time.
Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes.
There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each.
I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.
> here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland
I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight
I can't be the only long time Linux use who still has no real idea what X11 or Wayland are. Except that sometimes software won't work properly with one or the other and I need to paste some arcane command to fix it.
It's what puts graphics on the screen. If you are not interested in hacking or developing it, there's not much else to know except X11 is deprecated and Wayland is not finished, leading to this suboptimal situation.
KDE 3.5.x really was peak desktop at the time, especially when all the K* apps were working as intended. As a Windows user discovering Slackware 10.2 back 2005, I was really blown away. KDE 4 just didn't feel the same.
My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily.
KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable.
I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.
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.
David is the definition of old-school KDE developer. Do you know how far back his commits go? I remember his name from my first rodeos with KDE when I was a teenager. He was blogging about KDE in 2009 FFS: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/2009/09/
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.
I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451
It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution.
The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland.
I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work.
For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem.
I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.
Screentearing has been solved on x11 for a decade; if nvidia don't support TearFree in the driver, that's an nvidia issue, not an X11 issue.
I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE.
Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant.
My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life.
Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now.
I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?
I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users.
He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me.
Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland.
I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.
"Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work."
I think that is the only way forward. There is no "Linux desktop". There is KDE, Gnome etc. and if you want to do "system utilities" you have to target one of those.
The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.
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.
When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years.
Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine.
Good job, KDE team.
I think I noticed lower latency, more consistent frame pacing (recent-ish improvement in KWin) and a more "solid" feel because everything in a frame is synchronized. On X11, you can have things like border and contents of a window not matching exactly while resizing. An early principle of Wayland was "Every frame is perfect", which is clearly reflected in how e.g. window resizing works.
my experience us sadly the opposite. when I'm recording gameplay with OBS with x11 and xfce I have roughly a 7-9ms frame render time and with Wayland and any desktop env it creeps up above 16ms, which means I can't get a solid 60fps.
in all other cases other than gaming and recording, Wayland has been a delight.
If your aim is to only record gameplay (and not stream), then there are far better Wayland-native tools like wl-screenrec[1] for wlroots-based compositors and gpu-screen-recorder[2] for others. The latter even supports live streaming, so could be used as a lightweight alternative to OBS.
[1] https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec
[2] https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/
Do you have "allow tearing" enabled?
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.
What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
For the records, Debian 13 Gnome with Wayland works as well as with X11. The only reason I'm still using X11 is that backlight control doesn't work anymore with my old laptop (it did with Debian 11) and X11 can work around it with gamma correction and Wayland can not.
Yeah agreed. I switched to kde from gnome a few months back, and it's amazing how much better it's been in a thousand little ways.
I mean… gnome has always been worse quality than KDE. I'd say even when the awful KDE4 came out was still better than Gnome3
> I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage.
I use it on a touchscreen and the on-screen-keyboard crashes several times a day.
I would not say it's fully ready.
> 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 don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared?
> I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage
Why is this contradicting what others report then?
> I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :)
Though, I am hardly the first with that either:
https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...
Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like?
Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from last year:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell....
> Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this.
That is because people who don't have a problem don't think about this and so don't comment. Many wayland users don't know. I think I switched this machine I'm using now to wayland a while ago but I don't remember, and maybe it switched back in an update and I didn't notice (which is the point, I know I switched at some point and I couldn't tell the difference - which is how it should be)
"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
i'd be interested on your take on the graphical interface of plan9.
It needs pie menus!
Perhaps the Wayland code path does not have to do thousands of workarounds with an ancient API made thinking on remote graphical terminals.
Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues[1]
No ability to save and restore positions of native Wayland windows
Real-fake-session-restored apps don't remember which virtual desktop their windows were on
No full-screen aspect ratio correction
"Spare Layouts" feature not implemented
"Per-application Keyboard Layout" does not work
No way to change the gamma or manually adjust the colors without generating or finding an appropriate ICC profile
Can't switch between multiple touch strip modes
No headless RDP
Opening files using command-line binaries in Konsole doesn't raise existing windows
Global Menu is not supported for non-Qt apps
Some apps' non-maximizable windows are broken with placement policy set as maximized
[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...
The Bluetooth integration needs work - missing features such as "never connect automatically."
Default lock screen experience still has a needless delay of 5 seconds when entering a wrong (even blank wrong) password, even on the first attempt.
+1 on the gamma controls
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 stay on 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.
Not too bad? A hidden procedure with ten clicks, which the user has to repeat for each web browser. And it may break at any time if the browser changes some details. Or if KDE changes. And it's specific to KDE, with no alternatives in most Wayland WMs.
All that for _one_ feature which works out-of-the-box with Xorg, and which Wayland removed for security reasons. From what I've seen, sharing the screen is another common feature which was broken with Wayland and is still painful.
I don't think Wayland's security model is very relevant to me since I have faith in Debian for filtering out rogue applications. So I have to reason to drop my smooth UX for a world of "not too bad" workarounds.
Look, I'm not a Wayland booster, I still prefer X11 most of the time, but this is really the way it should work. Applications should not be allowed to dictate how windows appear. That is the job of the window manager. Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.
This is the issue with imposing semantics of the programming model on the behaviour.
User behaviour is the only _real_ thing, it happens. Everything else is in your head. If people in the real world use PiP, then it should happen. The programming model has to bend and change to support it. It simply does not matter if the window manager does something or the window does something.
Sure, there is always the security argument wayland folks fall back to. But what ever is the problem with making a one-time permission popup? "Google Chrome wants to open in PiP: allow | allow once.". Just expose the existing PiP code in the window manager as an API guarded with an `if` that apps can call. It's not even that much real work, just pure bikeshedding and architecture astronauting.
Right right, and I'm not saying users shouldn't be able to have a floating window with video (or whatever) in it. I'm saying it shouldn't be Chrome making that window floating and always visible.
I don't get it, if you're on google meet, and you want to make one of many videos PiP. How can you ever do that in the window manager? It has to be done in the application! You right click or click on the menu on that particular video, and click Picture in picture.
How the heck can the window manager do it?
If things were designed well, it would be as easy as clicking the pin icon on the window border.
The application could tell the window manager it wanted an always on top window. The window manager could ask the user if it should allow or reject and remember for this application or not.
That's exactly what I said... and also not how wayland works.
I cannot comprehend the way wayland folks think... quote from the xdg-pip discussion:
> To not make PiP windows effectively "always on top" and "on every workspace" dialogs - a terrible and sadly by applications used concept on X11 - PiP windows must be input-only, i.e. not receive keyboard, pointer and touch input
Like what the heck even? That is how pip windows are expected to work? And of course you want inputs on them? e.g to mute/unmute on a video call? Like these are use cases used daily by people. And its "terrible".
>> Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.
What are you talking about? It's very convenient when I watch video while I do some work or entertaining thing on other web page or app. It's fine if you don't want to use it but many people do.
Yes, it's fine, but it shouldn't be necessary. If Windows and Mac OS just had native support for always-on-top windows, you wouldn't need it.
I actually prefer macOS's PiP handling compared to other operating systems. In that it's a blessed concept that only goes to one corner of the screen and can be shunted out of the way easily.
Now imagine if that was designed properly, and you could just do that to any window, regardless of what the program thinks it should look like.
I tried this for getting windows to open where I want them instead of the center of the screen. Couldn't figure it out in five minutes. Though I'll probably try again, this shouldn't be a problem.
For Chrome it's "Picture in picture"
Wow, I guess Linux is only free if you don't value your time.
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.
Yes, exactly. This security paranoia makes the devs' lives much more complicated. I have seen many apps turning off advanced features, such as screen color pickers. Automatation tools can be broken. Apps cant know their window positions, etc. You can see countless dev rants about Wayland and how it's generally unpleasant experience to work with.
Isn't it also impossible to spawn a window in the last place it was open (or any arbitrary point) because you're not allowed to know or change where your window is by design? Nonsense like that makes me dread having to eventually use it.
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?
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.
Gnome has the same problem, that's why this exists: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4691/pip-on-top/
Plasma/KDE always had it.
But users do not want to have to toggle that for every PiP video they watch. Its why I am still on X11
I can't speak for Gnome, but KDE makes it pretty easy to create rules that apply automatically to any new window that meets whatever arbitrary criteria you set.
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.
I think in Hyprland it just works because floating windows stay on top by definition.
I fixed this like this:
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
The issue is you have to do that every single time. On X11, they remain on top by default
Ah, for some reason I figured this was a minor bug that'd be fixed eventually. Wayland windows are never allowed to spawn always-on-top? Sort of lame.
If the logic is that it's the window manager's job to set window rules for this, fine, but in that case Plasma should probably ship with preconfigured rules matching the Chrome/Firefox PiP window.
I also find the lack of an Xlib-compatible macro API disruptive but I usually run an X11 session inside Xvnc for this purpose anyway.
> Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top.
Wayland doesn't allow apps to force themselves to be always on top. I would argue that it is up to the window manager to provide this functionality at the discretion of the user. Kwin does this.
Strange... with Firefox in KDE/Plasma just works.
I definitely have to right click on the window in the taskbar and select Always Keep On Top with Firefox on Plasma Wayland. Not too big a deal but would be nice if it was something Firefox could just set on its own.
As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of.
In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.
> a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means
They started doing that in early 2024 with the release of KDE 6.0 by enabling KDE Wayland by default. The Wayland-only change won't happen til 6.8 which will be an early 2027 release.
https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayla...
> And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.
Yes, that's the current step they'll be at with 6.8.
Time to fork and move on...
Anyone on the most recent LTS Kernel (6.18) with an older nvidia GPU will not have a good experience on Wayland. I have two machines with Pascal GPUs and:
- The nvidia binary driver is shit with Wayland
- The nvidia OSS driver does not support Pascal GPUs.
- Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly.
You can get a stable system either by using the latest kernel+nouveau or:
but performance is rather abysmal.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
Cool, seems useful. I should try it and package it for debian if it works.
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
I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.
I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.
When was the last time you tried? What compositor?
I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system.
What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides?
Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.
You are using a 3 year old Plasma release (5.27). Give the latest Plasma a try and you should hopefully be positively surprised.
They've made major strides in the last two years. Give the next LTS a shot and I think you'll agree.
Just works out of the box without problems in Debian 13.
The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.
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?"
Is that "reactionaries" in the "we object to certain technology decisions" sense, like the anti-systemd crowd, or in the "software compatible with our political views" like the xlibre project?
A quick search (in which I found no evidence of heated controversy) suggests to me that it's the first one.
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.
I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo.
The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell.
[1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/
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.
> 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.
They're still trying to figure that one out themselves.
I’m not surprised they’re not nailed down. But I’d appreciate seeing a “we’re looking at X or Y or if Z is now possible” kind of thing.
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.
One nice feature is trackpad gestures. x11's trackpad gestures are awful, but on Wayland you can have the 1:1 multitouch that everyone loves.
HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.
I wouldn't say its "plain impossible" with X11, but its significantly easier on Wayland because its a far simpler design that aligns better with the graphics hardware, we're sending surfaces (or pointers to them) with metadata to the compositor, not drawing APIs.
That already works with Plasma Wayland. It's still a bit finicky to make it work with things running in XWayland (Windows games primarily) but it's getting better.
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 would be a good habit to check (for example on the Wiktionary – I have a Chrome search keyword dedicated to that) because those are not the only differences.
fulfill vs. fulfil
judgment vs. judgement
disk vs. disc (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes)
hiccup vs. hiccough
diarrhea vs. diarrhoea
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.
(?) they didn't say otherwise
try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!
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....
nmtui
Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :)
And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.
But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.
Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
XFCE. Supports the tray plugins, has GUI settings, I don't ever have to use the CLI to configure it (actually... I'm not even sure how I would...).
I have jgmenu mapped to F4 but I never remember to use it. I usually just CMD+P and type what I need.
I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.
Wayland is great and I generally prefer it, but it's worth keeping X around for KDE Plasma I think. Things like remote desktop are nicer on X, X is much easier to use on Android compared to Wayland, etc.
in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.
As someone who likes games from various periods (from Ultima IV to WH40K: Rogue Trader), I haven't ran into many games which do work on X11 and don't work on Wayland. Though I don't really have any of the old Loki games (I believe there was a port of Unreal Tournament?), so I might be missing out on the specific games which really lean into certain X11 features which XWayland doesn't support well.
I'm very surprised to hear that. Ive seen some issues with apps using Xwayland, mostly scaling related. I dont recall ever seeing an issue with a game running on Xwayland. Its also how the Steam Deck runs all games.
I was under the impression that the Steam Deck runs under KDE Wayland? I wasn't aware of it having video game support challenges due to Wayland.
SteamOS recently shipped KDE with Wayland by default (for desktop mode).
They have their own custom compositor for handheld-mode, named gamescope. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-fil... XWayland based.
can you give examples of games not working?
what about emulation / virtual machines?
Can you give examples?
funny you say that, given that the SteamDeck (the largest/most popular Linux-based gaming console) runs on KDE on Wayland.....
I can't say I've run into issues running games under XWayland, but I have only been using the Wayland session for a couple of weeks now. The blocker for me was Discord (you wouldn't get messages on your phone if you were afk because the idle detection didn't work in Wayland), but the devs there seem to have finally fixed it.
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.
The only downside is several of the *BSDs don't have wayland. Not all the world is linux and sometimes that is a good thing to encourage.
There's nothing about Wayland that ties it to Linux. Wayland compositors tend to require a few features exposed by the graphics drivers (e.g. DRM) but there's nothing stopping the BSDS adding these (iirc FreeBSD already does).
at least FreeBSD does already have Wayland. It has a few more hiccups and rough edges than on Linux (at least from my PoV on running it on an older laptop) but otherwise it works fine.
Here is a short setup guide on how to get it working rather nicely: https://thesaigoneer.bearblog.dev/freebsdkdeplasma6wayland/
Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.
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 on AwesomeWM for now because I have no real reason to incur the pain of switching, but still curious to know what path others are taking.
How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?
qimgv uses libmpv for video playback support for example. I'm guessing that's not what you mean, but I'm struggling to think of how one might "embed" one application inside of another on xorg.
x11 supports foreign window embedding. You can embed window from other application into your own window. That's why lots of mpv/vlc based players/editors don't work probably on wayland. The only way to achieve this on wayland is writing a custom compositor for the foreign window.
Probably with Special Window Settings (right click top bar of your mpv window)
I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps
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.
How do you get that?
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.
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.
OTOH, xfce is doing fine.
And the statistics are only from the latest release, not over all KDE users. They mention this in the text but the disengenuous plot is what people see.
>For transparency, the one caveat in all of the above is that I've deliberately always focused on people using the latest Plasma release. We do still have a sizable chunk of users on X11 still using Plasma 5.27. Including them, the total Wayland adoption rate is about 76%.
RIP Linux Desktop
Time to switch to Windows! yay! Where all of this stuff just works: HDR, remote desktop, gaming, Picture-in-Picture, ... all the stuff that Wayland devs are too stupid to get done correctly
/s (maybe?)
Eh, IDK. Maybe? After 20 years of using Linux I'm looking on Windows more and more.
Linux Gaming is now better than ever, and ideological Linux dev community torpedoes it hard with Wayland.
I mean who Linux wants to be anyway? An OS for bleeding edge hardware? I think we have Windows for that. Because Wayland doesn't even work correctly on average-aged hardware.
Greybeards have created Linux, and cool new generation will shut it down (on Desktop).
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 wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. 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.
I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.
> There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all
Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago.
I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time.
Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes.
There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each.
I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.
> here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland
I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight
I can't be the only long time Linux use who still has no real idea what X11 or Wayland are. Except that sometimes software won't work properly with one or the other and I need to paste some arcane command to fix it.
It's what puts graphics on the screen. If you are not interested in hacking or developing it, there's not much else to know except X11 is deprecated and Wayland is not finished, leading to this suboptimal situation.
"We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. "
What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity.
Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
KDE 3.5.x really was peak desktop at the time, especially when all the K* apps were working as intended. As a Windows user discovering Slackware 10.2 back 2005, I was really blown away. KDE 4 just didn't feel the same.
until the next one
My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily.
KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable.
I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.
So long KDE. Xlibre for life.
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.
They're similar in that they're both new things that are worse than what they're meant to replace.
David is the definition of old-school KDE developer. Do you know how far back his commits go? I remember his name from my first rodeos with KDE when I was a teenager. He was blogging about KDE in 2009 FFS: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/2009/09/
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.
More and more Free SW will depend on Systemd (like next gen flatpak). Make something better or adapt.