KDE going all-in on a Wayland future
blogs.kde.org
blogs.kde.org
What is the way forward for the retro community to run a modern Wayland system on older hardware?
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in or correct me
That being said, your bigger problem is trying to view modern websites on 1080p displays on that ancient hardware...
The reason is that Mesa includes "software rendering" drivers for both OpenGL ("llvmpipe") and Vulkan ("lavapipe"). As the name(s) might suggest, they use LLVM to JIT shaders for your CPU (supporting SIMD up to AVX2, last I checked - although typical compositing shaders tend to get pattern-matched and replaced with plain `memcpy`s etc.).
So you should always be able to run a fully-featured Wayland desktop (albeit limited in performance by your CPU), on any unaccelerated framebuffer, nowadays (and I remember doing this even before Plasma 6 launched, it may be older than usable Wayland desktops tbh - the Mesa code sure is, but maybe distros hadn't always built those drivers?).
I'm curious why that's something that should happen. Shouldn't the 'retro community' be happy with retro software and not expect cutting edge software to work on their hardware?
> In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots
In what way is this copy&paste-like staple of general computing some "specialized" task?
Will the new opportunities include reaching "specialized" feature parity?
> In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.
All your monitors are combined into a large canvas where every pixel can be written and read by any X11 client.
Screenshots (and screen sharing) could be silently performed with zero user feedback (or any good way to even detect when apps might be doing this maliciously, AFAIK).
This is one of the big "security implications" that motivated Wayland (and somewhat similarly, the Flatpak sandbox and the XDG Portal infrastructure that has by now outgrown it).
The infrastructure is already there, for 3rd party apps to request these abilities (with the user getting the choice of following through, or denying the request), e.g.:
- https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
- https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
Keep in mind that any action which doesn't require interactivity every time (e.g. restarting the screensharing of a previously-chosen window/display) could have "user gave permission" be remembered, but that seamless case still only applies to that combination (so that client can't peek at anything else than what it was offered).
Anyway, what the blog post is talking about is really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated (and e.g. might already not function properly inside Flatpak).
> feature parity
If we are being honest, screenshots/screensharing was never a "feature" of X11, it was a big security hole abused as a feature.
Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
> really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated
What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
> screenshots/screensharing was never a "feature" of X11, it was a big security hole abused as a feature.
So what was the screenshot feature of X11? Also classifying use as abuse isn't that honest, only the lack of security is
In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.
> Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (which were the first to support such mechanisms, some of them even using more direct DE-specific private protocols instead of XDG Portals).
But I spent a few seconds googling for general screenshot apps, found Flameshot (which makes sense as a cross-platform app), and it turns out that support for the XDG Portal approach was added to it almost 5 years ago:
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/1272
And if you peek around the diff, you can tell that KDE/GNOME-specific support, on Wayland - using DBus but not the XDG Portals protocol - already existed, in early 2021, in fact...
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/commit/a5df852268...
That's the commit that added KDE/GNOME-specific Wayland screenshot support.
8 years ago, in a 3rd-party app!
> Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
I'd forgotten that this happened, but for screensharing from a X11 client, someone already went through the trouble of emulating it (on top of the XDG Portals + PipeWire infrastructure):
https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/
It's only a temporary hack, and it only matters for X11 clients running under XWayland - if an app can run as a native Wayland client, it should have XDG Portals-based implementations of relevant features.
> What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
Am I downplaying, or are you describing a vague category of "the best or more popular apps" without giving examples?
I feel like it's too easy for some of this stuff to end up in FUD-like arguments without considering the objective reality (of how far we've come in the past few years etc.).
Anyway, my subjective take is that X11 took a decade or two too long to die, and most (if not all) gripes users might have with Wayland can be traced back to X11 outliving its UNIX Workstation origins and having never been designed as a Personal Computing graphical environment.
Which is a load of FUD, the X11 security extensions from (checks google) 1996, restrict this.
Wait, what ? X11 has extensions ? As in can be "extended" ? And has the same thing since ( for the sake of dialogue) 1996 ? That't why it must die. We need a monolith window system, with clear versions, all incompatible with each other. Only then, real progress can be made. /s
And its not like actual flaws people found couldn't be fixed.
There is a word for this.
The flaws were not limited to the 1996 poor security extensions. These kind of half broken extensions are everywhere in X11. At some point, if the tweaks you have to do is basically rewriting the whole rendering pipeline and adding new APIs for the most significant systems, what you are doing is strictly équivalent to writing a new piece of software which is exactly what the people behind Wayland did.
And don't worry, the change adverse people you see here complaining about limitations fixed years ago would be complaining the same if the effort was on rewriting part of X11. That's life. Armchair complainers and keyboard warriors will complain while actual doers push things forward.
Heh. I learned this hard way when trying to set up multiple monitors with different refresh rates
KDE is merely saying that some applications will have to be updated to use it so all of the current screenshot applications won't work out of the box.
No idea of why some commenters here are implying screenshots don't work in Wayland. It seems their knowledge is somehow stuck at the first proof of concept ten years ago.
Global hotkeys are also supported perfectly fine. Applications just need to register with the compositor, which will transfer the key press to them. That's the feature working at it should. It prevents applications from hijacking keys when that's not what you want.
The issue is that Discord takes ages to ship anything on Linux and barely supports anything and the Linux community does it's best to keep supporting everything. Other plateformes would have just mandated the new way ages ago and be done with the transition by now.
It's a huge hairball with no easy fixes, but at the same time, that's of significant benefit to some specific players. You can have a very usable X11 desktop with positively pre-Cambrian software. But to keep up with Wayland's ever evolving omnishambles, you basically have to run KDE or GNOME, or maybe Sway.
If all the expected stuff was there, Sway (chosen because it's not tied to a desktop environmen) could be your X server equivalent.
They copied from the masters: Google and Microsoft. Gone are the days when KDE was years before Windows.
And they're not saying that no third party applications will work either, it is just that old screenshot applications that were created for X11 will need to be ported.
In the end that is not really much different from macOS dropping Rosetta in the next release of macOS (yes, I know there is a difference of effort). Old applications will stop working, applications that still get support will eventually support it (if they don't support Wayland already).
The theme settings is also confusing because of gtk apps, global theme etc. Feels everything around theming could be made nicer.
Prob some more nitpicks but overall it is a really great desktop environment.
I have that too, on Wayland. I also had a bug I mentioned recently in another comment with transparent terminals flickering, but that seems to depend on what is behind them and I think is a bug specific to Konsole.
Overall, its very close compared to a few years ago when several things were problematic with Wayland, but I do slightly feel its not quite there yet.
> i wish they merged the virtual desktops and activities into one concept and allowed different wallpapers on each.
> Prob some more nitpicks but overall it is a really great desktop environment.
I agree with both those.
> This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.
Wayland truly saves me so much time at work. It's forced me to re-up my ctrl+s reflex. Now I never lose work when it randomly crashes!
We've also been playing a fun new game. Every morning when I walk into the office my giant 5Kx1K monitor might be reset to literally any imaginable resolution and I have to figure out how to navigate to the display configuration menu to manually reset it because of course replugging the screen doesn't work.
I love Wayland. It's so easy to use and reliable. But MOST IMPORTANT it's newer than X11. Thank god I don't have to use gross old software written in uncool languages. God for-fucking-bid we have to run old software that works instead of new software that-- while not as good as the old software-- is still new
What's that? Wayland is almost 20 years old and still not to feature parity with any other OS? Well, it's newer than X11!
It's just that Wayland is newer, it's that x.org is a dead end and has been for many decades. If other people want to develop it, then by all means. But they're not, and ultimately I can't put a gun to someone's head and force them to work on a codebase. So here we are.
What do you guys use/recommend?
Intel HD630 graphics in Kaby Lake Core i5 7500T & Core i7 7700T. CachyOS.
A very basic functional test, with NVidia drivers 580.95:
Gnome and Xorg - Minecraft with a heavyish shader gives 60fps, Kerbal Space Program gives 60fps, DaVinci Resolve works
KDE and Wayland - Minecraft with the same shader gives 4fps, KSP gives 2fps, DaVinci Resolve does not work
Gnome and Wayland: Minecraft gives 3fps, KSP gives 3fps, DaVinci Resolve does not work.
So, acceleration is not supported, it seems. Bummer.
Maybe next year Wayland will be relevant.
Angry Linus noises...