Revisiting X11 vs Wayland With Multiple Displays - KDE Blogs
Posted by FengLengshun@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 135 comments
The Display Config page difference is kinda striking.
SadraKhaleghi@reddit
TLDR:
VRR doesn't work
HDR either doesn't work or the entire screen becomes magenta
omniuni@reddit
The pain points, as listed, are way too much of fundamental points for me. Especially things like copy-paste not working from a VM.
One thing that strikes me also is that most of the issues with X are fixable (panel performance), used to work (different UI scaling per monitor), or have never been tried on X (HDR). It's great to see that some of the advanced stuff like that works well on Wayland, especially considering that was one of the major development considerations, but it's equally concerning that there are still such fundamental problems like copy-paste and window positioning.
sequentious@reddit
The X developers disagreed, which is why Wayland exists in the first place.
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
You literally fail to understand that they are saying used to work under KDE. For instance.
This is abnormal under KDE-X11 for instance.
Different scaling per monitor is achievable X11 with xrander --scale, with nvidia settings, and under Cinnamon -X11. It is something X11 can do in a stupider way that results in apps not having to understand anything so that no apps for instance Libreoffice which is apparently broken under KDE wayland being out of sorts.
If Cinnamon can do it then KDE can.
bobbie434343@reddit
xrander --scaleproduces blurry graphics and not the ideal solution.Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
I used this for years it did not appear blurry on the 1080p monitor although it obviously didn't look as nice as the 4k beside it.
d_ed@reddit
>Different scaling per monitor is achievable X11 with xrander --scale,
With a trillion caveats!
- Your mouse will move twice as fast over the non-high DPI display as the low res one.
- You're wasting memory and performance like crazy, rendering your low res screen as high DPI only to throw it away.
- X11 apps that don't scale (hexchat or something) will be super duper tiny on the low res screen. On kwin wayland you'd get the right size on any monitor
(at some point when we tried it in KDE there was a bug that your mouse input would be wrong, but that did get fixed upstream later, that was the biggest blocker why it never landed)
Sure, you "can" do it, but it's so so much worse than what we do in Wayland.
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
No it just doesn't I had this configuration for years until just recently with 2x 4K + 1 1080p monitor. I only don't because my wife's monitor died and I had to sac the 1080p for what is effectively our TV.
This is nearly meaningless in 2025. The cost of rendering your spreadsheet in 4K and showing it in 1080p is meaningless. Notably this is only a factor when you have 2 or more monitors which means desktops and plugged in laptops. Furtheremore it is only a factor when one of monitors is already high dpi! So you are paying the cost of 4K x 1 vs 4k x 2
Absolutely wrong. Because apps are not in any way shape or form being expected to be even slightly intelligent. They are being expected only to support highdpi. For instance hexchat which is at this point completely unmaintained and abandoned as of over a year ago like your typical GTK app can be run with $GDK_SCALE=2 and looks appropriate on your high dpi screen. On your lower dpi screen it is rendered at 4K and scaled down by X to 1080p. Since X does the scaling down NOT your app it isn't expected to do much.
This is ironically a problem that literally only happens with wayland wherein apps now must be a bit smarter but developers somehow attribute this wayland only issue to X.
Much like the blog attributes KDE's 6.4 flaky display handling under X caused only by KDE's bad code to X wherein activating a display worked fine in 2003.
omniuni@reddit
I love KDE, but as bad as the X code is for setting up displays, Wayland is much worse. Last night, it somehow ended up with a gap between the screens (despite a warning that it wasn't supported) and with an unsupported refresh rate, and I couldn't get the mouse back. I had to use keyboard shortcuts to move display settings back to my other monitor and disable the second screen entirely just to set it back to rights. (Both displays work fine under X, and I've not yet had anything like that happen.)
I'm really trying to get comfortable with Wayland. HDR makes my games pretty. But it absolutely feels like beta software at best.
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
I think the big point is that X has no problems setting up displays. It flat out does not support mixed refresh but it has no problem setting them up. Wayland annoyingly isn't a thing there are 17 different waylands each of which may be better or worse.
Insofar as Wayland + HDR a feature which also will likely never be available on X you can actually run something like gamescope in a different TTY for gaming if you want to.
omniuni@reddit
X does support mixed refresh rates. I don't know how the idea got started that it doesn't.
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
No it doesn't
omniuni@reddit
It does. You can literally just open your display settings and set different refresh rates. The compositor may not, so you may need to disable the compositor to see the effect.
metux-its@reddit
Where did you get this fairytale from ?
sequentious@reddit
The last Xorg-server release was four years ago. A lot of distros are dropping xorg-server.
There's annual releases of XWayland, so it's not like there's no X development going on. But it's days of being used as a server are very rapidly moving to past-tense.
FWIW, I've been using Linux for over 25 years, and the experience with Wayland is providing the best technical experience I've ever had (I still pine for the old desktop UIs, but I've never had a smoother experience than now).
metux-its@reddit
Indeed. Redhat made sure about that. Thats why they've immediately banned me from freedesktop.org and deleted all my repos the moment they learned about my fork. They did me a great favor - Streisand effect kicking in.
Nevertheless, Xlibre release coming soon.
And the first distros already joined in for Xlibre.
There's a lot of work done on Xorg. Look at the git history. And even more in xlibre. Just Redhat prevented any actual release of Xorg.
Now that they've fired the shot that's heared around the world, we don't need them anymore. Xlibre declared independence.
perhaps for you and your peer group. Not for mine.
Me for 30 years, not just user, but also developer. (incl. Kernel maintainer). X does have its problems, yes. Much becsuse of its toxic community - xorg had become like xfree86 - history repeated.
Perhaps for your use cases - for mine its unusable.
omniuni@reddit
Fixable by the KWin devs.
cAtloVeR9998@reddit
The KWin devs who plan on removing X11 session support from Plasma?
omniuni@reddit
I didn't say they want to fix it. Nor do they probably want to deal with whatever issue is on nvidia's side. But they could.
KnowZeroX@reddit
Part of the move to wayland is precisely because any application can act as a keylogger. So while copy and paste and window positioning may seem like basic stuff, it is precisely this stuff that needs to be thought out on a case by case basis. If you ignore the security aspect breaking protocol and do it like X11, these things are super easy to fix on wayland.
The bright side is nobody is forcing anyone yet into wayland only (though future likely will), for me I plan to stay on X11 for at least the next year or 2 while things are sorted out. Before, I couldn't even boot a wayland session on any of my computers over the last decade, so I was pleasantly surprised I was able to actually boot it a few month back. But there were a few other issues so I went back to X11.
But as more usage of wayland increases, these things will iron out with time. Till then, if wayland doesn't work for you, stick to X11.
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
If one of your system apps is malicious you are still basically entirely fucked so this security benefit is fairly hypothetical
Deiskos@reddit
The point is it's any application even non-root applications.
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
My point is that even though this is laudable inherently in practice any malicious app executing outside of a sandbox means you are 100% pwned in practical situations meaning this benefit may be more hypothetical than real unless also paired with an effective sandbox + android like permission system.
KnowZeroX@reddit
One step at a time, the next front is likely towards immutable linux and use of containers
metux-its@reddit
This has been fixed in 1996. And with new Xnamespace extension it gets even fancier.
Gnome/Redhat is doing that to its users. The same gnome that bans people for life for nothing but mentioning the name Lunduke.
The appropriate fix of course is dropping gnome.
Humble-Variation-981@reddit
If redhat didn't keep threatening to drop X11 from RHEL no one would care about Wayland outside of Valve and maybe some auto companies who aren't just using Android or dedicated QNX or something. I don't really get it since their core business is servers and they're shifting to WebUI+CLI for most admin tasks.
metux-its@reddit
Yeah, and if they hadn't banned me from freedesktop.org, only few people have learned about the fork. But now its going viral. Streisand effect at its best.
sheeproomer@reddit
So nobody is forced, when the newer releases of Linux distribution don't include X11?
nee_-@reddit
Just as no one can force you to switch to wayland, you cant force others to provide support for x11. Wayland is happening because no one wants to do the work of maintaining x11. These things dont just maintain themselves only for the evil distro maintainers to zap them out of existence. Its open source, if you want to maintain it go ahead. If you don’t want to do that, then you’re doing exactly what you’re complaining about others doing.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
It doesn't work both ways. X11 is the standard. Wayland is the new challenger that needs to prove itself, which it isn't doing a very good job of.
nee_-@reddit
Again, I don’t understand this entitlement to other people’s time and labor. People are either volunteering their time to work on this stuff or are being paid by someone to work on something specifically. Feel free to work on x11 yourself or pay someone else to do it and you’ll find out pretty quickly why no one else wants to.
metux-its@reddit
I'm actually doing that.
Down200@reddit
Sweet, rooting for you!
Please make a post somewhere once you've pushed the source to a different provider, lots of us would love to track the progress.
metux-its@reddit
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
sheeproomer@reddit
If something works and it does not instanrly combusts like a live service.
BothAdhesiveness9265@reddit
afaik there's no distro as of yet that prevents one from using X11 if desired. might just have to install it yourself.
closest would be that iirc gnome's login screen thing is looking at hiding gnome (X11) as a launch option by default (but you can still dig into the config and unhide it. which I'm sure some distros will do by default)
sheeproomer@reddit
Fedora is Wayland only, where are the packages for X11?
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
be careful with that. Fedora is not Wayland only as a distro. GNOME and KDE (in the next release) won't have the ability to use the x11 sesson, but xorg-server is still there for i3, xfce, cinnamon and everything else.
sheeproomer@reddit
So, why is then the door closed for GNOME and KDE?
SEI_JAKU@reddit
Because GNOME and KDE want everyone to beta test something that doesn't really work, instead of being able to actually use their computer.
metux-its@reddit
Exactly
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
Because they want xorg-server gone in general, but don't want to remove support for those who have no other choice.
We all know that GNOME and KDE are dogfooding their X11 sessions less nowadays and as mentioned. As a sibling commenter mentioned, X11 is being removed completely from GNOME and will be likely be disappearing completely for KDE 7 aswell. The GNOME one will happen a lot sooner of course.
gmes78@reddit
GNOME is completely removing X11 session support in GNOME 50.
KDE will do the same in Plasma 7, and since 6.4 the X11 session support has been split off to a separate codebase.
The Fedora maintainers are removing support ahead of time because they want to.
crystalchuck@reddit
because they don't feel like targeting X11/xorg anymore.
BothAdhesiveness9265@reddit
I don't use fedora, but a quick check of their package search page shows many Xorg packages including the main X11 server.
google is free my guy.
crystalchuck@reddit
what do you mean "where are the packages", they're here: https://packages.fedoraproject.org/search?query=xorg
Lightprod@reddit
RHEL 10 is Wayland only.
blackcain@reddit
apt install x11.
FryBoyter@reddit
I use QEMU/KVM. The host uses Wayland. The guest uses X11. I can copy text in both directions without any problems.
omniuni@reddit
So after some 15 years, it's half working. That's progress at least.
zzazzzz@reddit
so you base your opinions of waland on 15 year old experiences and think ppl should take anything you say seriously? really?
omniuni@reddit
I'm basing it on my experiences from a few weeks ago.
It's just that 15 years ago, they were saying that Wayland was practically done. It's obvious that the developers lost the thread of what Wayland actually needs to support to be "done" many years ago. Based on my experience literally last night, Wayland is finally "beta" quality. I had some problems with the refresh rate on one screen, double pop-ups for screen sharing (which finally works at all from Chrome and Discord, yay), higher color accuracy caused my screens to completely scramble the display, and some problems with Firefox which could probably be worked around if I cared enough.
It's finally usable, even if it's not quite as stable as X. There are still a few nagging issues; especially IME and accessibility, window positioning, and some nagging issues with screen sharing and display configuration.
But we need to stop pretending that this is ready to be a default. If it weren't for having a second monitor that worked, for example, it would have been a pain to figure out how to set Wayland not to use a display mode that my primary monitor doesn't support.
somethingrelevant@reddit
man it really does feel this way at this point. I've ended up locked in to wayland because the advantages (no screen tearing!!) and software (labwc especially) are just so hard to leave behind, but man basic things like taking a screenshot of the active window or using push-to-talk in discord are still incredibly wacky
zzazzzz@reddit
ive had way more issues and unfixable ones at that with x11 over the past 2 years than ive had on wayland. and its not even close.
you are comparing whatever setup you tinkered together over the decade on x11 to a blank wayland install?
omniuni@reddit
I do absolutely nothing from a default X install.
RC2225@reddit
For me copy files works from Wayland to Windows guest works too. At least with drag and drop.
Misicks0349@reddit
what do you mean by "fundemental"? the Wayland issues are also fixable, and as others have said they've gotten VM copy-paste working.
omniuni@reddit
They can be implemented. There is a difference between something that all of what you need is already there, you just need to fix it, and you're waiting for the implementation to be ready.
Misicks0349@reddit
I mean thats true of the wayland issues as well: issues 1, 3 and 4 are ostensibly application issues and only require fixing bugs in the applications (and as others have said, they have working VM copy-paste). Issue 2 is a bit harder but there are some wayland compatible apps that do what autokey does.
theres also just straight up nothing there for HDR on X11, wayland has working specs and implementations for it, X11 has a 5 year old bug report with a single comment saying it isn't being worked on, and if it is it will most likely only be for XWayland and not X.Org.
omniuni@reddit
That's true, it's more that the cycle for Wayland tends to be very slow, because once it's added to Wayland, all of the compositors have to add it. Once all the compositors have added it, apps need to implement it. There's usually edge cases found at that point, and the Wayland protocol needs to be updated, and the compositors updated, and the apps updated. There are also a lot of features (like window placement) that the Wayland devs have just been incredibly slow on, or even resistant to. And, of course, no one wants to add a significant new feature to X, even though I can't help but feel that something like HDR and better support for scaling and monitors with different refresh rates could have been added to X in a lot less than 15 years, especially since X already has the underpinnings for them.
gmes78@reddit
That's not how it works at all. For a Wayland protocol to be accepted, it needs a number of compositor and client implementations. So, when the protocol is accepted, you already have a number of implementations ready to merge.
What makes Wayland features take a long time to see the light of day are the LTS distros that take years to ship new versions of software.
omniuni@reddit
That doesn't make any sense. First, the compositors often have missing features, even when an extension is available. Second, LTS distributions have their own packages. I'm not expecting new Wayland features to magically start working on old distributions. New features are always being developed against updated packages, and will be available in the next release.
Misicks0349@reddit
The way X treats multi monitor setups is basically a big hack. X11 doesn't really have the concept of multiple monitors (see note below though) so every approach to it basically boils down to "just pretend that every single monitor is one giant screen" which kinda works if every screen you have is the same resolution and refresh rate, but runs into issues once you start to get monitors with different resolutions/colour depths/refresh rates from each other, because from the perspective of x11 its all one big screen and the idea that a single screen can simultaneously have a refresh rate of 60 and 165 is completely foreign to it (note 2), there are some work-arounds for some of the issues I listed but its all a bit finicky and application specific. You can read more about it here if you like.
note: technically x11 has multiple "screens" but its not the same concept as having multiple monitors, the "screens" cant interact with each other at all and is basically designed for the kind of remote desktops x11 wanted to server (e.g. where you'd have a single computer running as)
note 2: I'm not talking about Variable Refresh Rate here to be clear
zzazzzz@reddit
copy pasting works just fine in all my wayland vm's ?
gmes78@reddit
Copy-paste to/from VMs works fine in a Wayland host.
Misicks0349@reddit
Not surprising, especially since KWins X11 implementation hasn't received nearly as much TLC as it did in the past. Multi Monitor and Fractional scaling support has always been a bit of a sore spot with X11 and its always either never worked properly and/or was filled with edge cases because it was never supported (e.g. fractional scaling, the only instance of "fractional scaling" I've seen working properly on x11 was exclusively with QT apps and was hidden behind environment variables).
metux-its@reddit
I still haven't found any reason why i should need HDR. (some day I might have use for wide gamut, but hdr ? No idea)
Misicks0349@reddit
because pretty I suppose, its no different to 4k or high refresh rate monitors.
HDR content is also becoming increasingly more common especially in movies, phone cameras, and games, so if you want to display those images correctly without compressing the colours its basically required (games being the exception of course because they can render natively in HDR as well).
metux-its@reddit
I have neither the content nor the HW. Really have no need for it. Perhaps I might be interested in actual wide gamut HW, but not the funny hacks sold as "HDR".
And implementing wide gamut in X isnt that hard.
Misicks0349@reddit
to be clear the HDR I'm talking about, and the stuff that people usually talk about WRT Linux HDR is wide gamut, as in increasing the size of the colour space your applications can use.
I know HDR is a bit of a marketing term and sometimes shady companies sell "HDR" as just being boosting the contrast a bit, but generally proper HDR includes wide colour gamut.
its probably never coming, and there could be issues getting it to work with compositors
metux-its@reddit
Yeah, but most available HDR hardware (thats somewhat affordable) is just playing backlight tricks. And copying with that just isnt worth it for me.
OTOH, some folks in Xlibre project already preparing to implement it.
There isn't much that had to be done in wayland. Most stuff is in KMS/DRI and Mesa. Wayland is just doing a bit signalling.
FengLengshun@reddit (OP)
Also, funnily enough, with the KVM tangent, Synergy went and started to support Wayland on both Synergy 1 and 3, making even more of a full circle of a journey.
RoburexButBetter@reddit
I make KVM devices and Wayland is hell for professional workflows as it stands, none of my customers want to move to Wayland yet because there's so much lacking in Wayland that they can do in X11
Acojonancio@reddit
Wayland is also hell for remote connections.
gmes78@reddit
RDP works fine.
itbedguy@reddit
Copy and paste is a pain and doesn’t work yet with Wayland for any remote software that I know of. Not bagging on Wayland, I still use it though. Mostly Mesh connections. Their janky copy and paste functions work well in place of normal copy and paste.
metux-its@reddit
Only if one wants to have full screen only, without desktop Integration. And enough bandwidth for video streaming.
Acojonancio@reddit
I tried with Anydesk, Rustdesk, Temviewer...
All remote software i use everyday without issues, if i try to access a Wayland machine it asks for confirmation on the remote computer if you want to connect to it and also blocks the connection if you are not on the desktop envoirment, so if you are outside on the login screen you can't access it with remote desktop software.
From their documentation on several of this softwares it's a problem with Wayland and has no solution at the moment.
If there was any update on it i would gladly change.
gmes78@reddit
GNOME supports remote login with RDP.
Acojonancio@reddit
I use Ubuntu and it doesn't work becuase the remote computer asks to confirm the connection and also confirm what screen you want to share (even if you only have one screen).
By RDP you mean any RDP software? I'm trying with Rustdesk and it's not working for me, documentation says it's a Wayland problem.
nabagaca@reddit
While not ideal, I've been using moonlight and sunshine for streaming my bazzite desktop running KDE and Wayland and I don't need to approve anything on the remote machine
Acojonancio@reddit
Will give a try, thanks.
gmes78@reddit
Ubuntu 24.04 uses an older of GNOME that doesn't support this.
spacelama@reddit
Cue all the freedesktop fanbois: "why would you want to use a KVM? That's never entered into my workflow and I don't have the imagination to see why anyone else would want one of those. You should be using instead!"
FengLengshun@reddit (OP)
Reading this hurts. It hurts deeply.
Sincerely, someone who've been watching the Native Host Messager portal issues for years 🥲
crystalchuck@reddit
That seems a bit saner than completely making scenarios up in your head because you have some irrational hatred for a windowing protocol
edgan@reddit
Synergy and friends still lack copy paste support between the computers when using Wayland.
https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/1698
ZunoJ@reddit
If only there was a wayland compositor comparable to awesomewm
HawkinsT@reddit
What features are you missing? I've recently moved from qtile to hyprland, and while there were a few things to get used to, on the whole it's been working well for me.
ZunoJ@reddit
Just one example. I have implemented a feature where I can dynamically assign a marker (in the form of a letter/number) to any window. I can then jump to that window by using the shortcut combined with the marker. If you know how to set a marker in VIM, it is pretty much this. This is just one example of many small quality of life features I've implemented over the years
_noctuid@reddit
Scripting hyprland (through hyprctl, not even making plugins) is very easy. Scroll and sway have marks ootb, and hyprscroller also does (though it will likely stop working at some point as the author moved from hyprland to scroll, his sway fork).
ZunoJ@reddit
Can I then also hijack the windows and draw a different border and make the taskbar show the assignes shortcut?
I mean this is just one little thing I've implemented and there are dozens of other qol features I wouldn't want to miss. To do this is braindead simple in awesomewm and I want something similar before making a switch
_noctuid@reddit
If you mean a window titlebar, sway/scroll allow customizing it for windows with a specific mark. Hyprland doesn't even have titlebars normally, that's a plugin and doesn't allow for much or any customization, so that would not be simple on hyprland.
I'm coming from bspwm and herbstluftwm and it was easy to port all the customization/scripts I had. More complicated things (like totally different tiling or visual display changes like zooming out and showing all windows with key overlays to select them) are only possible with plugins in hyprland. I'd definitely rather have lua as a plugin language than c++, but in my case I don't need to make any fundamental changes that would require a plugin.
ZunoJ@reddit
Not the titlebar (I don't have any use for a titlebar) but the window border. Writing plugins doesn't sound too bad and I very much prefer to write them in C/C++ (lua is what awesome offers and it is OKish but if possible I will never use it again lol). I guess I have to check the hyprland plugin system
Misicks0349@reddit
theres pinnacle but its still not fully released yet, I'd still follow that however if you want an awesomewm experience for wayland eventually
ZunoJ@reddit
This looks very promising! Thank you!
SocialNetwooky@reddit
this.
mrlinkwii@reddit
honestly for wayalnd being a 16 year old project it really dosent seem like , i think the decade plus odf bike sheading and and telling users they have the wrong use case really hurt the project , its gotten better the in the last 6 months to year
burning_iceman@reddit
They started specifying the core protocol 16 years ago with a small proof-of-concept library. Development on other required protocols started much later. And various pieces of software in the stack began implementing their support at different times, based on the maturity of the required protocols.
It takes a huge amount of work and a lot of time replacing a whole entrenched ecosystem with a new one designed from the ground up - even more so when certain hardware manufacturers and software projects are dragging their feet. That's a major reason it's gotten so much better in the last few months: they've given up their resistance.
mrlinkwii@reddit
tbh is the same difference , upto about a year ago , people bikesheading and arguing over use cases that users , leading to projects creating their own protocols and up when valve had to start making their own to make the wayland devs get some cop on and actually ban the people start the arguements and and actually merge shit
no it dosent pipewire it too near 3 years to replace pulse audio not 10 , they looked at users problems and fixed them and didnt wave them away
as mentioned im playing blame here at wayland devs , nvidia can be accused of alot in terms of wayland but didnt cause the bike shedding and the devs ignoreing users use case
Enthusedchameleon@reddit
To give you something new to think about that the other commenters didn't mention ; I don't remember what they were discussing but in some Wayland post on phoronix with the same peanut gallery flame warring as usual, Someone tagged an AMD engineer to complain about something, he dropped by and only said:
"When multiple parties try to reach a consensus, progress has to be slow. But for everything we do, the end result is better"
So Wayland advancements are slow sort of by design. Which is, on paper, better than anyone extending X with what they want how they want etc. Should also be better for the whole Linux Desktop ecosystem, due to clear targets of a protocol everyone abides by.
As you mention, Valve and others are trying different ways to push updates faster than by consensus, even if only by making and providing POC that people can use, to later be reworked when included or even deprecated.
But I know for a fact for every extension and protocol or portal etc., that the users want and you say people inside XDG or whatever "Ignore", there are people advocating for the users to have those features. Not everyone inside ignores the end users.
Still, this is the only point I'm adding to the conversation, users aren't ignored by everyone, it all takes time due to the need of consensus. I 100% agree with you that FOR US, USERS, all of this doesn't matter, what matters is the product, the solution, and IF that solution works for our use cases or not.
burning_iceman@reddit
You don't seem to understand how the process works. First a protocol must be created and implemented by someone before it can get included as an official addition to wayland-protocols. They want proven and tested protocols.
Oh sure, if it's quick and easy to move a pebble, the same must be true of a mountain.
Interesting story.
gmes78@reddit
The problems PipeWire solves are a few orders of magnitude simpler than Wayland's.
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
a sound server is simpler than a display server
__ali1234__@reddit
Yeah, Wayland is now at the EWMH stage, where the core protocol is calcified and everyone has to make up protocol extensions to make things work, but nobody implements them the same way.
gmes78@reddit
Throwing out that number with 0 context is incredibility misleading.
__ali1234__@reddit
Yeah. For context, X11 was only 23 years old when the Wayland developers declared it hopelessly out of date.
whamra@reddit
As someone who uses activities and have a clear separation of work and home stuff, even Firefox has distinct windows in distinct activities, kde with x11 remembers everything as expected.
Kde on wayland does not.
Log off and in and all windows and programs of the last session are opened in the first activity. Now I have to go through the pain of manually moving everything to its place. And why is such a thing display server related?? Isn't it plasma's job to record and reload this kinda stuff? Or perhaps kwin?
This is just one of many quality-of-life features, that kde so prides itself with, that just don't work in wayland, and somehow are glossed over by QAers because, well, I can open and close windows now, so it's 100% usable.
Take password manager autotype shortcuts. Apparently, programs can't get the title of the active window?
Enthusedchameleon@reddit
Same as you. I just gave up using activities for the time being. Honestly I did even consider going back to X, but some Wayland niceties kept me this side, like HDR, fractional scaling, it literally being smoother and faster (YMMV, hardware and distro for sure make a difference) and maybe some VRR stuff that I don't even know about.
But "window rules" as a replacement for plasma remembering and setting up my stuff in the same place across reboots isn't ideal, and activities are basically a non feature anymore.
FengLengshun@reddit (OP)
I'm pretty sure you can, but the method is very different. This is why I pulled the trigger a year or two ago - I used to use xbindkeys for my extra mouse buttons, found input-remapper, and realized I'd rather build all my solutions on Wayland over incurring more "tech debts" and needing to fix more later.
illathon@reddit
I had hoped they would talk about multi-monitor VRR.
Mereo110@reddit
It works with an AMD video card—I have a 6700 XT—and NVIDIA recently fixed the VRR Wayland bug that prevented multi-monitor VRR. It now works with NVIDIA, too.
illathon@reddit
It isn't showing up in my display configuration.
primalbluewolf@reddit
Somewhat the reverse of my experience with my hardware at least. I got crashes trying to use Wayland, whereas X11 (mostly) works.
Still, its probably been at least a year now. Maybe I should fire it up again and see if its any more stable...
Maipmc@reddit
It's improving fast. I tried wayland 2 years ago or so and noped the hell out. Whereas when Plasma 6 released it started using wayland by default and i've been using it non-stop ever since. Recently discord window capture FINALLY got fixed too.
primalbluewolf@reddit
Possibly when it hit stable, Im thinking - I was on Plasma 6 for ages before they switched it over to Wayland.
Maipmc@reddit
If by stable you mean "not in beta or pre release", yes.
primalbluewolf@reddit
I meant "available on my distros "stable" branch, rather than the "unstable" branch I was running at the time.
What specific version of the plasma metapackage exactly that was, Im unsure.
Maipmc@reddit
Yeah, that's what i meant. For sure it would run badly, that's why it was unstable. Even the release version had some rough edges.
primalbluewolf@reddit
It ran badly after it hit stable, though.
Im back on it presently actually, for testing. Hit a few snags so far, some fixed, some not.
Mouse cursor way too sensitive: fixed by disabling default mouse acceleration (spent too long trying to figure out why it wasn't working - keyboard presents a "mouse" also which the window was configuring instead of my actual mouse).
Application Dashboard opening on wrong monitor, leftmost instead of primary: no fix identified yet. So far at least, no identified performance issues or crashes, so that's nice. Even if I get a crash, can't safely attribute it to Wayland. I'm on relatively new AMD hardware, and it seems like its not 100% stable with the current kernel drivers.
Misicks0349@reddit
depends on the desktop environment, I've used gnome on wayland for years with basically no issues and every time I touched Wayland on Plasma 5 it was pretty much unusable. Plasma 6 improved that significantly and actually made it usable.
robinei@reddit
Plasma 6 is the only usable HDR implementation I've tried (I only tried that and Hyprland).
Misicks0349@reddit
yeah mutters still working on it as far as I know, Hyprland as well although they're much slower at it.
LowB0b@reddit
What DE + version are you using? Plasma 5 with wayland for example with an nvidia just straight up doesn't work whereas plasma 6 is fine
primalbluewolf@reddit
Plasma 6, AMD. Pretty recent Manjaro install without any big config changes. Multiple monitors, 1080p and 144hz, displayport- one with a different vendorID despite being identical to the other two (Thanks AOC).
LowB0b@reddit
Been running fedora 42 + kde ony 4090 since beta and some quirks have happened but nothing major. Multiple monitor setup as well.
My other machjne on fedora kde with a 9070xt did NOT like hdmi output though, but does fine over displayport
SampleByte@reddit
Personally, have been saying sayonara to the X11 for a quite long time. Just Wayland and look ahead on my openSUSE.
I see no reason to buy new, modern hardware and use it for obsolete stuff doesn't seem logical to me.
Abhigyan_Bose@reddit
Personally, my biggest issue with Wayland has been a memory leak when using with my laptop and hybrid GPU mode. That caused a lot of crashes when my laptop was running for a while.
Luckily, a new Nvidia driver seems to have fixed the issue.
dyshuity@reddit
What laptop? I've been running arch with Hyprland on my G14 with a ryzen 7900x and 4060 for the last year, haven't had any problems.
Abhigyan_Bose@reddit
KDE bug report - This, it's a very specific issue. I have 1660Ti Asus TUF. I use it with an external monitor. When connecting the monitor, the memory leak starts. Which then continues until my RAM is full and the system crashes.
edgan@reddit
What version fixed it?
gmes78@reddit
The bug report says the Nvidia driver v570.153.02 fixes it.
AlexFigas@reddit
I’m unable to log in to any user account when both of my 16:9 1440p monitors are connected. The screen stays black indefinitely unless I unplug one monitor before logging in. Is this a known Wayland issue?
I’m using Ubuntu 24.04 on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5.
Ranma_chan@reddit
yeah that's a major point of beef for me. Also KDE intercepting keystrokes intended for virtual machines / virtual desktops in Wayland but not X11 (so if I try to hit alt+tab in the VM, it switches my app focus on KDE, not the VM)
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
This is 100% a regression under KDE not multiple monitors under X11. Here is what it looks like here. Click a button it comes on immediately. This is how it was in X11 under KDE too.