this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • applications in general felt sluggish

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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[–] doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.

People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.

Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.

I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.

Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.

The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.

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[–] anelephant@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Checkout the Wayback project on fdo

[–] stuner@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Personally, I'm quite happy with Plasma Wayland on multiple machines and distros. However, Plasma has already been forked to create Sonic DE: https://github.com/Sonic-DE/sonic-win No idea if this will gain any traction once Plasma drops X11. For now, the activity seems to focus on the readme file...

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[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There's already Trinity.

Don't know what their stance is on Wayland but it exists.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

I will bet the full dollar that Trinity never gets ported to Wayland.

They would have to port it to a version of Qt that supports Wayland. If they were ever going to do that, they would have done it by now.

MATE (GNOME2) ported from GTK2 to GTK3 so most of MATE works on Wayland today. You can use all the bits with a different Wayland compositor. And I think they are making their own.

But Trinity maintains their own fork of Qt3. Bringing that up to Qt6 or adding Wayland to Qt3 would be a big project. I do not see either happening.

[–] nyan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

To my knowledge, no one is actively working on Wayland support in TDE at the moment. That could change if it becomes vital for the project's survival, or someone whose particular itch it is joins the development team. The TQT toolkit would probably have to be ported first.

So for the time being, Trinity is X11-only, and I'd expect it to remain X11-supporting for a long, long time.

[–] notagoblin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

KDE on Manjaro - The Wayland update caused issues with programs that I used and had depended on for years. I struggled to find suitable replacements or workarounds for the features I was comfortable with on X11.

I experienced random lockups and sound issues, displayport would reset now and again. I worked with these issues until I got fed up and reverted to X11 in the login screen after installing plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11. Everything works as it used to, for now.

This experience made me want to look for alternatives to KDE, I'm not ready for Wayland.

Incidentally, does Wayland have an alternative to X2GO apart from RDP?

[–] Cryxtalix@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

What exactly isn't ready? All I know is the lack of trackpad gestures and fractional scaling(even though I don't use it) in x11. X11 is the one that feels more janky while wayland has been smooth sailing.

I'm even developing a gtk4 program, I assume if there were problems with wayland I've would've noticed it by now. On the other hand, testing my program on debian 13 with x11 did make the experience a little jankier.

Given such huge differences in reported experiences, I can only assume it's a difference in hardware compatibility? Are some machines just better in x11 and others in wayland? Is that why everyone has such different experiences?

[–] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't notice any difference in performance between x11 and Wayland, but there are some things I just haven't been able to get working right in Wayland. Changing font DPI. Screenshots, when I want to capture a selected area and not the entire screen. Color pickers. I've tried several that supposedly work with Wayland, but they don't. Screensavers. Alt-tabbing between a fullscreen game and the desktop or another window. I should mess around with it some more. I know my own distro is getting rid of x11 at some point.

[–] Cryxtalix@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

Have you used a different machine? None of your issues are what I experience(on both x11 and waland). My issues on x11 are to do with general lags and unreliable sleep/wake. It's weird how there's no consistency, everyone seems to have a different set of issues. If even the issues are different, I wonder how the devs can even fix it.

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works -2 points 1 month ago

this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.

The wayland team simply doesn't give a shit about that. They're locked in an ivory tower debating the perfect protocol for allowing applications to position their own windows near 15 years after starting their project.

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