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Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

Will this help KDE-Plasma finally move from pre-alpha more towards something that can be used daily, or will we still need another decade or two ?

Asking this as a user who really would love to move away from X11, but everytime I try anything Wayland related it's just alpha or pre-alpha, endless graphics glitches, windows going black or flickering, (double the glitches after turning display off/on),multiple rendering issues with Firefox, Clion etc..

I think I'm mentally preparing to use X11 until retirement....

The thing is the first 90% of software is the easy part. Once you've done that you still need to do the other 90%. And the latter 90% is what separates little hobbyist weekend projects from products. It's a relentless boring grind of testing, fixing bugs and sharp edges and adding workarounds.

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When did you last try it? It's been rock solid for me since Plasma 6, and I use things like fractional scaling.

A week ago, KDE-Plasma 6 whatever is the latest on Arch.

Using NVIDIA proprietary.. glitching like MOFO. Looks slick but just way too buggy to be used.

Some things to try:

  * Try turning your display on/off
  * Try using several virtual displays and spread graphics apps on each one (I use 4 normally)
  * Try opening 20 firefox windows with ~50 tabs each
  * Try opening a 8k png in firefox tab (or in some other image viewer)

So yeah... pre-alpha.

P.s. I also tried XFCE and Enlightenment.. and those are not any better (not that claim to be anything but pre-alpha).

Honestly.. on Windows11 the experience is just so damn smooth and slick. Nothing glitches or hangs. The Linux graphics stack just lags behind decade after decade... never catches up...

> Using NVIDIA proprietary

Ah, I haven't tried it on NVIDIA drivers in a while.

I'm doing a reinstall on my gaming PC soon, so I'll give it a shot then. I've been using it on Intel and AMD systems, and haven't had issues. But you know, they actually have drivers that are designed for the modern linux graphics stack.

> P.s. I also tried XFCE and Enlightenment.. and those are not any better (not that claim to be anything but pre-alpha).

So... maybe the NVIDIA drivers then? And not KDE Plasma?

> The Linux graphics stack just lags behind decade after decade... never catches up...

Come on, you can't really blame NVIDIA's dogshit drivers that refuse to integrate into the rest of the stack on the KDE devs.

No, what I mean with XFCE and Englightenment is that they admit being alpha.

Yeah, well the reality is that NVIDIA drivers are the drivers one wants to use on NVIDIA hardware (which many of us have.

And somehow they work fine on X11.

It's always nice to blame the driver vendor, but what has the Linux community the kernel team, the graphics team done to promote Linux and make it simple to write correct performant drivers for the platform? How many graphics memory allocations are there? How many buffer sharing APIs, are the kernel driver interfaces stable?

When other driver vendors have been able to work with the kernel team quite successfully, I think it starts to become fair to blame the other vendor.

I've been using KDE-Plasma on Wayland (Debian 13) since release as a daily driver, and I'm happy to report that it is super stable, has no problems with waking up from suspend and hibernate, and is a superb all-around shredder. I didn't notice any glitches, or flickering, or bugs so far, despite intensive daily abuse.

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