As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.
Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?
edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:
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remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.
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nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.
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applications in general felt sluggish
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it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.
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lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.
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screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.
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application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.
here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.
so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.
One benefit is it’s the future and my DE is going to drop X soon.
Another is it’s more secure. Not just any window can read the clipboard or the keys you press. Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog whenever I hit them.
Am I doing a good job convincing you? Anyway, I switched to Plasma Wayland and it was fine for me, with a few tweaks needed.
This just sounds bothersome. A clipboard should really be machine-wide, that’s the purpose of it. Although I can understand the reticence there, what with password managers. I would argue that, to achieve that sort of security, there should be a separate, “secure” clipboard that only enrolled applications can access - and enrollment should be left up to the user, not the application developer.
No doubt about that. It’s been “the future” for more than a decade. But even 5 years ago, Wayland was a complete dumpster fire if you strayed outside average use. So yeah, I’ve heard this before.
I understand that this is a real sticking point with some use cases, I hope this is resolved soon. I’m definitely fuzzy on the workings of portals, compositors, input, etc.
This is the overwhelming response to my questions about Wayland, and it’s weird. Wayland isn’t a fancy new car I need to use to stay relevant. I work in terminals and a browser, Xfce is fine.
As I mentioned in another response, I am not trying to use the newest coolest thing, I work every day in Linux and I need my setup to be stable and predictable.
And no one needs to convince me, when xfce is finally discontinued or unusable, I’ll have to find a similar Wayland alternative. Nothing compels me to switch yet.
I am not trying to suggest that the old way is better, we have needed to move on from x11 years ago.