Hacker News Reader

Comment by starlevel003 | Hacker News Reader

I updated my system recently and KDE under X11 started stuttering all the time, especially when opening new windows (which made using IntelliJ unusable, for example). Switched to Wayland and it just works. That's all it really took for me to go from a "I don't care about Wayland" guy to "I am a Wayland truther" guy.

Similar story for Pipewire; Pulseaudio had crackles and Pipewire didn't. Such is the way of life.

View on HN

I have no investment in Linux desktops, but this kind of sounds like "my favorite website stopped working in Firefox, now I'm a Chrome guy." Could this be characterized as it was working before but degraded as development attention shifted to Wayland?

This was my experience as well. On X11 + i3 (with no DE), latency and screen tearing was always an issue I had to fiddle with. Things came to a head when my 2021-release work Thinkpad started tearing driving an external 4K monitor over Thunderbolt. I switched over to Wayland + sway, and it was a night and day difference. Significantly better latency and no tearing, even driving two 4K displays with an Intel iGPU!

The laptop docking story is also significantly better. Waylands libinput lets me assign mouse accel and keyboard repeat rates/rebinds to specific devices, and they always get applied on hotswap, no custom udev rules needed. For audio, Pipewire is sensible and Just Works. Kanshi works sensibly in a way that I was never able to convince dockd to.

Wayland is what brought me from “I like Linux for a work/coding environment, but it’s too fiddly for a daily driver” to finally consistently using Linux in a personal and professional capacity.

And as a counterexample, I've been using KDE (currently 23.08.0) + Plasma and JACKd for ages with xorg (currently 21.1.8) and have had zero troubles.

Having said that, I'm super-duper glad you found a workaround for trouble you were having.

So KDE worked fine, they sabotaged it to force you to switch, and now your conclusion is oh, they were right all along?

> they sabotaged it to force you to switch, and now your conclusion is oh, they were right all along?

Sure, let's go with that!

I'm using X11 here for various reasons, without any stuttering or anything. I'm not running KDE, but i3 with a nice helping of compositing, most notably blurred windows. And this isn't even some kind of absurd machine I'm talking about, but a 3 yo "ultrabook" with integrated graphics. WTH does KDE do to stutter?

I'm using an 8 year old PC with KDE/X and it doesn't stutter. shrug

I have issues on both x11 and Wayland, but the least amount of issues on Wayland.

I think it is mostly because of individual applications, not particularly KDE/Plasma. Some software works better on Wayland, some on x11, some on both.

I use kde x11 for 3/4 years and Linux more and this problem is not related to x11 but to the dependencies it has you system, the updates it makes and the combination of the version of different packages. Changing the bodywork is one way to remove the scratches you make, but it doesn't mean the problem is the body material.

I 100% hope Wayland's story mirrors PipeWire's... When PipeWire became installed by default on my distro, it was flawless.

If, when Wayland becomes default, it is as faultless as PipeWire is right now, it will join the pantheon of successful open source software, alongside the kernel, git, gcc, clang, etc.

I hope Wayland's story mirror's Pulseaudio's, in that it limps along until something actually good shows up to replace it (ie. Pipewire) and everyone, relieved, jumps on it at once.

A while back, a colleague updated their system and screensharing broke. I went "ah I know this", switched their session back to X11, and the issues went away.

There is nothing inherent in Wayland that makes the it work better as opposed to X11. It is all about developer focus. If KDE developers spend the majority of their resources on the one thing it obviously gets better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com