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Comment by alyandon | Hacker News Reader

I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11.

I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.

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I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.

Still no support for high resolution monitors though?

Well, there's SonicDE, but like many such projects it's probably maintained by reactionaries which introduces its own suite of issues around security, code quality, and "will this be maintained in a year, 5 years?"

Is that "reactionaries" in the "we object to certain technology decisions" sense, like the anti-systemd crowd, or in the "software compatible with our political views" like the xlibre project?

A quick search (in which I found no evidence of heated controversy) suggests to me that it's the first one.

As far as I know right now, the first, but there's significant overlap. The suckless folks, for instance, have documented fash tendencies. The fact that SonicDE's stated mission is to preserve X11 support is itself a warning sign.

>The fact that SonicDE's stated mission is to preserve X11 support is itself a warning sign.

Why is it a warning sign? Sounds very useful to keep X11 support for machines that have no good video acceleration like office computers or stuff relying on VNC protocols.

" anti-systemd crowd "?

I suppose you're from the " hop onto the bandwagon no questions asked crowd " then.

When was the last time you tried? What compositor?

I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system.

What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides?

Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.

Just works out of the box without problems in Debian 13.

The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.

Out of the box for you, doesn't necessarily mean it does for everyone else.

They've made major strides in the last two years. Give the next LTS a shot and I think you'll agree.

You are using a 3 year old Plasma release (5.27). Give the latest Plasma a try and you should hopefully be positively surprised.

> but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11.

The risk in that in this age of AI-assisted bughunting, X11 security vulnerabilities are more numerous and as nasty as they've ever been. And that says a lot.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTU1NzA

https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-9-Vulnerabilities-AI

I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.

X11 is not and has never been a security boundary.

Thank goodness I never jumped back on the KDE bandwagon once KDE4 stopped sucking donkey balls. I just went with xmonad and the few apps I actually use.

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