CDE
Used CDE in a previous life on Sparcs. It worked pretty good.
KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates
The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up. The team behind the KDE Plasma desktop announced it is going all-in on a Wayland future. The Plasma version 6.8, "which we expect will be sometime in early 2027," will completely …
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Saturday 29th November 2025 04:19 GMT coredump
Re: CDE
My NetBSD systems are currently headless, but I just checked pkgs and saw:
cde-2.5.2nb2 Common Desktop Environment
and a web search found some folks claiming success running it in NetBSD 10.0 last year or thereabouts, presumably mostly amd64 systems.
As a nostalgia bonus, I do see binary packages for NetBSD sparc64 so in theory we could run CDE in a current life on SPARCs. ;-)
Wouldn't be surprised if CDE builds from pkgsrc on 32-bit sparc too, though it likely takes quite a while. Almost makes me wish I still had some Sun kit to try it.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 06:43 GMT IvyKing
Re: CDE
I've also used CDE on Sparcs as well as X86 (Solaris). Before CDE, I used HP's VUE, which was the original desktop environment based on Motif. I also have a copy of a book on the design of Motif, written when Motif was an HP project. FWIW, my favorite background for VUE and CDE was Ankh.
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Friday 28th November 2025 16:17 GMT NewModelArmy
CDE Is An Interest
I just looked at a screenshot of CDE, and recall Motif in the 1990's.
The benefit of KDE is the themes that can be downloaded. So i just downloaded and installed Commonality Sol, which is the magenta version.
The dark windows with white writing, and in general, web pages are white really focuses in on the web page. The best bit is the 3D border. There is no mistaking where the window starts/ends etc.
The icons on the taskbar look retro, but they look like what they action, as opposed to "symbols".
If Fedora provide this as a desktop, then it may be one i will use.
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Friday 28th November 2025 16:27 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Man o man
There is some hypocrisy in the world.
>> GNOME developer Jordan Petridis predicted X11's removal from the code back in June, and the code change was merged earlier this month.
For your convenience, we have cancelled the train you used to use. The newer shinier train has less carriages, less seats, and a driver called Bob.
>> We still often see reports of significant issues with Wayland.
Despite quotes elsewhere that Wayland as a "protocol is more straightforward and easier to understand [than X11]", it still has a shedload of bugs. If it is so much easier, why so many bugs?
>> Some distros are making Wayland the default, leading to more people filing bugs and this helps to isolate the issues.
Yet noisy voices in the Linux world yell loudly about Windows users being bug testers. (Quite rightly). Those same voices are remarkably quiet when it happens in Linuxland.
I'll add my own two cents: If Wayland is to replace X11, let it be rewritten in Rust.
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Friday 28th November 2025 16:44 GMT theOtherJT
Re: Man o man
This is true, but for the sake of taking 5 minutes to fill out a bug report, I'll take that as an acceptable price to pay for getting a free operating system that doesn't advertise at me or report on everything I do.
...also linux bug hunting is kinda my day-job, so a lot of the time it's a twofer.
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Friday 28th November 2025 23:57 GMT HereIAmJH
Re: Man o man
This is true, but for the sake of taking 5 minutes to fill out a bug report,
5 minutes to fill out a bug report? You aren't spending time diagnosing the problem to determine if it's truly a bug and not your configuration? You aren't documenting steps to reproduce it? Not to criticize, but are you sure you are creating useful bug reports? While it may be time well spent, I suspect reporting a bug is taking much more than 5 minutes of your time.
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Friday 28th November 2025 16:59 GMT TVU
Re: Man o man
Your comment reminds me of a quote from another forum:
You failed to read the fine print at the bottom of all the wayland promises over the past 12 years:
"It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house."
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Friday 28th November 2025 17:39 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Man o man
"Those same voices are remarkably quiet when it happens in Linuxland."
It's not surprising. In Windowsland there's no option but to use whatever bugs Microsoft provide.
In Linuxland if I don't want to use X11 I don't have to, at least not at present, which is why I'm typing this on an X11 plasma session with a UI that has crisp boundaries to everything, no wondering where one on-screen entity stops and another starts.
If I waned something bleeding edge I could easily find it but it's my choice. Those last two words make a world of difference.
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Sunday 30th November 2025 01:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Man o man
X11 is broken though, in many ways...and the team refuses to fix it...there was a guy recently that went absolutely bonkers submitting fixes to the X11 repo that was submitting them at such a colossal rate they banned him from the repo...so he attempted to fork X11, which initially got banned...but is actually alive and well now. You can find it here: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver what you'll find there is a massively less gimped version of X11 with fixes for modern issues, like mixed refresh rates on multiple monitors and so on.
Thing is though, you don't see a lot of the X11 problems because some distros ship their own builds of X11 with patches merged in which masks the problem...some desktop environments even include workarounds for known long standing X11 bugs...so you see X11 isn't what you think it is, it's just been fucked for so long that everyone has accounted for it.
Usually when an alternative or a fork spawns in Linux land it's not arbitrary, it's usually because of underlying project politics, bugs that just never get fixed, changes in license, changes in ownership etc etc...
I took have used Linux since the mid 90s and almost all of that time was spent with X11 lurking somewhere...I really like X11 and I have come to understand it very well, I've learned to live with some of it's shortcomings and I've even gone as far as rolling out my own custom builds of it with certain patches merged in that I need...but I'll never kid myself into thinking it's the way forward, it just isn't...there are things that will never happen in X11 and some things that will never work properly...like fractional scaling, mixed refresh rates, HDR etc etc...and a lot of software will never be ported to X11 because it sucks to work with as a software developer...Wayland solves a lot of these issues and provides a much simpler API for developers to work with...more stuff will work with Wayland eventually, that's just a fact...not because it's necessarily a better solution, but because it's so much easier to plug software into it...Wayland is to X11 what Vulkan is to OpenGL...we'll reach a tipping point with Wayland pretty soon and doors will open up for some pretty cool shit that would likely never be possible with X11...just like Vulkan opened the door for things like Proton...Wayland will open the door for some pretty exciting stuff too...
There is nothing wrong with sticking with X11 for the real reason you stick with it...familiarity, but don't kid yourself into thinking that X11 is superior in some way, because it ain't...both have major problems, but only one has any kind of interesting future beyond just existing.
If the fork I linked above goes as far as it suggests, then maybe there is life in X11 in the future...but their roadmap etc is pretty damned ambitious, and given that they are a fork...contrarian purists like yourself will always be suspicious of it, so it may not gather enough momentum to carry on long term...especially since this fork will likely not resemble X11 at some point and will be as radically different as Wayland is.
The bottom line is, the original X11 project hasn't made any real progress in a very long time, there is a huge list of bugs they will never fix, and the team is so toxic that it bans people that want to put the work in as a result it has been forked...it's a fucking mess. Wayland has made more progress in refinement, bug fixes and general effort in one year than X11 has managed in a decade...love it or hate it, Wayland is objectively the better project. It's very active and things will improve at a very rapid pace. X11 is essentially dead at this point. It's lost the will to live.
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Monday 1st December 2025 10:59 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Man o man
You mention that Xorg has been largely static for a number of years. What you missed is that the maintainers of Xorg are mostly the developers of Wayland/Weston. They've been refusing to accept patches to Xorg from anybody, especially Enrico Weigelt, who seemed honestly interested in fixing some long standing problems.
The issue with Enrico is that he is pretty unpopular for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with his non-IT related online posts, which have offended a lot of people. He does not fit the woke mindset, nosiree.
So it's difficult to say whether his patches were refused because the maintainers did not want fixes at all, or whether they disagreed with what the fixes were changing, or whether they just did not like the person. And of course, they do not seem interested in generating their own modifications to address issues, something that has been suggested as their way of making X11 less attractive. It's an interesting side to the Open Source mentality, which obviously led to the inevitable fork, which is the ultimate recourse.
I am resigned to Wayland, just as long as XWayland remains an option and does not break too badly. There's just too much legacy stuff in my life that will never get Wayland support. I would like to see other implementations of compositors for comparison though. I guess I must have seen Mutter, and Weston, of course, but I wonder how things like Sway and Wayfire change the experience.
There is another side to this, however. There is a critical mass issue. At some point in the future when the major distros are Wayland by default, new applications will be written Wayland only. There may well need to be some work by people wanting to keep X11 alive to allow these applications to work on X11, otherwise it will naturally atrophy. Maybe a reverse XWayland, embedding a Wayland understanding compositor into the X server, or running as an X11 client.
Hmm. Interesting thought. WaylandX anybody?
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Friday 28th November 2025 18:08 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Man o man
> Despite quotes elsewhere that Wayland as a "protocol is more straightforward and easier to understand [than X11]", it still has a shedload of bugs. If it is so much easier, why so many bugs?
Valid point. However, some of this stuff isn't bugs. It is 100% intentional.
* It won't let one app snoop on what another app is displaying -- for _security_. Makes screenshots and screen sharing harder.
* It is local only. No remote sessions. Need to tunnel that over waypipe or something. Who needs network displays in the 21t century, granddad?
Also breaks VNC. But they have a sort of replacement with the Microsoft protocol!
* Apps can't control where windows appear. This is so it can work in VR and on headsets and things. You don't have VR? Sucks to be you, granddad. Don't want VR? What's the matter with you? We do! And 600 Hz HDR screens with VRR!
If you a thinking to yourself that this sounds like mostly a load of bollocks...
Well, I can't sit here and tell you you're wrong.
> I'll add my own two cents: If Wayland is to replace X11, let it be rewritten in Rust.
Excellent. That'll put if off for another few years. Let's do it!
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Friday 28th November 2025 19:02 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: Man o man
This is it. They have broken by design functionality that a major program I regularly use - Kicad - relies on. To the extent that Kicad can't fix the issues: it runs but the user interface is degraded. (Their words).
Why the fsck do people keep doing this? Design a worse product and somehow persuade the major Linux distributions to use it by default? I hope Clement LeFebre is taking notes and sticking to X11...
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Friday 28th November 2025 19:16 GMT TVU
Re: Man o man
Indeed, and here is the link: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
Regrettably, there are still significant incompatibilities that really do need to addressed. I wish that the wealthy Linux Foundation would provide multi-year grants to developers and organisations to improve the necessary performance of Linux generally and including these particular problems.
Some open source projects do already use donations to hire full time developers to improve their software.
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Sunday 30th November 2025 18:53 GMT David 132
Re: Man o man
"Why the fsck do people keep doing this? Design a worse product and somehow persuade the major Linux distributions to use it by default? I hope Clement LeFebre is taking notes and sticking to X11..."
This process is to be honoured (!) with the inaugural Lennart Poettering Prize For Progressive Sabotage; the trophy is in the shape of a triangular wheel & tyre...
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 17:56 GMT gosand
Re: Man o man
Clem is surely taking notes... and taking the exact same stance he did with systemd - "I didn't have a choice in the matter".
In essence, that was his response to me via the Mint blog when Mint adopted systemd. I thought I was having a hardware failure because my machine was taking forever to start and stop. That's when I learned what systemd was. My historically stable computer was unstable, and after sufficient hours of troubleshooting I ended about 10 years of Mint use and found Devuan.
Related to Wayland, I've been using XFCE since I left KDE around 2010. I really hope XFCE will figure out how to run on Wayland. Like my init system, I just want my display system to work and be stable.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 08:52 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Man o man
*) Screen shots: I do not use them often but I do use them enough that this blocks Wayland for me.
*) At least over 70% of what I do is over a network. When I tried Wayland, this did not work out of the box or on the first attempt to fix it. Other problems caused me to switch back to X11 before I worked out what was going wrong.
*) Don't want VR or 600Hz.
*) Killer: the compositer lacked XFCE features I use every minute. There is a port of XFCE in progress. I will check again when it is working.
*) Put it off for another few year? Fine with me.
My priorities are not the same Wayland supporter priorities. They are welcome to do their own thing up to the point of removing X11 before Wayland catches up with basic X11 functionality. On that day they will think the systemd supporters got off easy.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 13:56 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Man o man
I agree, but for clarity...
> Screen shots: I do not use them often but I do use them enough that this blocks Wayland for me.
There are ways to do it, but they are new ways and old tools won't work until updated. I am not wedded to any screenshot tool. I don't care. I use whatever is the default or is in the hypervisor or whatever. But if you _are_ strongly attached to one and it's not been updated, that could be a problem.
It does _NOT_ mean "you can't take screenshots".
> At least over 70% of what I do is over a network. When I tried Wayland, this did not work out of the box or on the first attempt to fix it. Other problems caused me to switch back to X11 before I worked out what was going wrong.
No, it doesn't, not at all, never will. But there are other ways, such as Waypipe or an RDP server app.
This one I don't care about personally: it's something I've never ever done in production in nearly 40 years on Unix-like systems.
> Don't want VR or 600Hz.
Me either.
> Killer: the compositer lacked XFCE features I use every minute. There is a port of XFCE in progress. I will check again when it is working.
Xfce works. You can't control window sizes with the keyboard any more, though. Labwc works fine and has window-control menus but you need the mouse or the cursor keys. Otherwise it looks the same.
For me, it's broken. I do Alt+Space, X dozens of times a day without thinking. The GNOME kiddies don't know it exists. I've asked.
> My priorities are not the same Wayland supporter priorities. They are welcome to do their own thing up to the point of removing X11 before Wayland catches up with basic X11 functionality. On that day they will think the systemd supporters got off easy.
Well, I am with you, but I am willing to accept compromises for a total clean break, like Arcan or something.
Wayland is a half-assed effort by kids who don't understand the tools they got the job of maintaining. It's taken nigh on 20 years to start to take over because it doesn't do the stuff the grownups want that the kids don't even know is there.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 12:45 GMT James Marten
Re: Man o man
> Valid point. However, some of this stuff isn't bugs. It is 100% intentional.
Including not only screenshots and screen sharing, but also global hotkeys and window-specific icons.
Actually, these are not impossible in Wayland. But, since only the compositor has access to the screen and peripherals, only the compositor can implement them. So a compositor has to provide an extension to the core Wayland protocol which means that, unless all the other compositors agree that the extension is worthwhile and implement it in exactly the same way, an application needing it will only work with that particular compositor.
Old X11 hands will remember the days when an application would require an X server extension, but it was touch and go as to whether the particular server that you were using (or wanted to access via a network) supported that extension. Welcome to the same with Wayland.
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Sunday 30th November 2025 02:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Man o man
VNC has been generally broken for a while. It stopped being a good solution for me long before I moved to Wayland. I think the current meta for video playback etc is MPV for a lot of folks...MPV is what VLC used to be...as in "it just opens any video file".
Apps not being able to snoop etc is annoying for remote control apps etc, but I understand why they've implemented this...but screenshots are not harder...there is baked in functionality for that, but a lot of classic screenshot front end tools and cli tools haven't caught up yet, the Gnome default one has though, that works flawlessly on Wayland, no issues..Gnome has supported Wayland for a long time now though, I don't know about KDE...they seem to have got stuck in limbo with Wayland for aaages...I have absolutely no problem with screenshots on Hyprland...it's the best screenshot functionality I've ever had, it even exceeds the annotation and customisation ability of my phone, which has awesome screenshot management tools...the tool I use is Flameshot (https://flameshot.org/)...it'll even work on your grandads X11 box.
VRR and HDR is very much a desired set of features for a lot of folks...X11 has had huge amounts of time to get this implemented / fixed...but some stuff related to this will just never be fixed...patches exist, but upstream won't pull them in...for a long time I had to roll custom builds to get this sort of stuff working...and that was a ballache. I don't really care about VR headsets...at least not the way they're designed to be used...all in one media/gaming augmented reality bullshit...VR should essentially be just a display. If they removed the fucking built in computer that you absolutely don't need, they can put more money into the display tech and lenses and make a more compelling display device...I already have a machine with masses of processing power and GPU grunt, I don't need a Qualcomm SoC in the headset to drive it and make it objectively shittier...I don't want to run anything *on* the headset...I just want to send a video signal to it...I don't even need motion capture on it, I have 35 years of first person shooter experience, I can move around 3D space with a keyboard and mouse just fine. People older than me that might benefit from that won't ever buy a VR headset...and people younger than me that would want that sort of experience don't have the money for it, everyone else just wants to watch POV VR porn or tugging off furries on VR Chat, I'm not interested in any of that, I just want a big fucking display that I can see through a tiny fucking headset...so VR companies, if you're listening, make my fucking headset. Good lenses, good displays, high refresh, displayport connection over USB-C, make a decent API for it that uses Vulkan so we can extend it and hook it into shit...done.
The thing you also have to bear in mind is that a lot of incoming Linux users are doing so on gaming handheld devices...not shitty old desktops from 10 years ago...one of the things we need to shake off from the way people think about Linux that don't already use it is the "it even works on a 10 year old piece of shit relic"...it's obviously something that is important, but over highlighting that fact makes Linux sound backwards if you know what I mean...like it somehow lags behind Windows etc...which it really doesn't and never really has...especially these days.
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Sunday 30th November 2025 18:58 GMT David 132
Re: Man o man
Wasn't me that downvoted you - there's clearly a member of the Wayland Cult been lurking around here - but I query your opening paragraph:
VNC has been generally broken for a while. It stopped being a good solution for me long before I moved to Wayland. I think the current meta for video playback etc is MPV for a lot of folks...MPV is what VLC used to be...as in "it just opens any video file".
Are you perhaps confusing VNC (the remote keyboard/video/mouse redirection app, and what people above were discussing) with VLC, the media player?
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Monday 1st December 2025 11:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Man o man
I meant VLC...I don't know why I "fruedianed" VNC...that's a tool I haven't cared about for at least 20 years...I'd be surprised if anyone cares about it when far better solutions exist. In 2025, VNC is anachronistic.
Also I think you're confusing me for someone that is against Wayland...I am not. I am very much for Wayland...after 30 years using Linux and fighting X11 bugs, some of which will never be fixed, I just haven't got time for X11 anymore. Wayland is better in so many ways, that I'm willing to overlook areas where it is currently weak because it is that much better in so many wyas. X11 has problems that cannot be overlooked because there is no hope that they will ever be fixed. It's dead.
VLC is definitely not fine...I remember sweeter, care free days when I could use VLC and didn't have to think about the codec being used, even with broken / incomplete files, VLC would still have a damned good crack at playing it. Whenever I see H265 or HEVC now, I wonder what oddity I'm going to witness in VLC...is the video going to be purple? Is it just not going to load? Will it hang 15 minutes in? Will it fallback to software decoding? These problems are more common under X11 than Wayland though to be fair. Also, to be fair, VLC has not transformed into a wholly awful application, it's still very, very good and it is still the tool that can "just work" in a lot of cases...but it has become noticeably less reliable over the years...that doesn't mean I think it's shit though, I don't...I just think there are more options out there and some are better...we're kind of spoiled for choice now for "VLC like" video players...the days of videos players being generally shit and VLC being a standout are long gone. VLC is now one of many.
Anything up to H264 still works just fine in VLC...but newer codecs...they've become a bit unpredictable...it's not just on Linux either...sometimes, it's worse on Windows.
I am an engineer (with 30 years experience) in a hardware test lab that works with video files of all shapes and sizes, transport streams, video files you name it...across the board it has been noted in recent years that VLC has become so much less reliable...particularly with larger files. If you're well beyond the standard sub 2GB 1080p torrent download, you stray into some weird territory...particularly when you try and use hardware acceleration. MPV does not have the same problems somehow...yet it relies on the same codec libraries etc.
We switched a bunch of lab machines over to Wayland about a year ago now (Gnome) and it has been largely trouble free...except for Anydesk...which we resolved by cancelling the Anydesk license and rolling out Rustdesk...if anything, Wayland has improved some older machines we have (we have some older machines that we have to keep around for PCI support because some of the lab tests require equipment that is PCI based)...noticeably more responsive, snappier...
You can bet your ass that we thoroughly tested X11 against Wayland for our use cases, and use cases beyond those we expect (some things that just weren't possible on X11, due to performance, latency and various other factors at play)...we're a test lab after all...there was no area where Wayland wasn't at least identical or better than X11...except for Anydesk...the area where Wayland massively exceeded X11 was latency...nobody can deny that...even using a subjective test, two identical machines side by side and dragging windows around, it's blatantly obvious that Wayland has much less latency.
Essentially, Wayland gave our older lab machines a breath of fresh air and new life...they're no longer machines that people dread to use.
Subjectively, Wayland might not be a choice some people make, but objectively, Wayland is far better. Not least because the project is very active where X11 isn't.
I have nothing against X11, it has served us well for decades and I'll never downplay its importance in the Linux space...but it's time is done. This isn't another systemd situation, Wayland exists for a reason, X11 has had too many long standing bugs that they just won't fix, the team has become too toxic and I can't see X11 improving at all, ever.
Wayland is buggy for some folks, sure...and some things don't work...but there is at least hope that these bugs will be ironed out and things that don't currently work will eventually work. There are bugs in X11 that have existed for over a decade that will never get fixed, it's not possible to know that and stand by X11. To put your trust in it.
Also, imagine how many people have tried Linux that went back to Windows because of X11...I'd wager it's massive and probably one of the biggest reasons Linux sometimes cannot retain Windows converts. I have known many people over the years that have tried Linux but ultimately gone back to Windows and in a lot of cases, probably most of them, the problem they experienced can be attributed to an X11 bug.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 17:54 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Man o man
Comments about remote sessions has been niggling at me for a while. There is something missing from how most people represent it.
Yes, it's true that X11 is network enabled by default (in fact, you can take it further than that, it's really pretty independent of any transport layer, however implemented). It was one of it's primary design aims, if you read the history. And Wayland isn't, by design.
But....
Nobody has used the raw cross-network awareness of X11 for decades. Let me explain.
Even with the X11-magic-cookie support, X11 working over the network is very, very insecure. So people have still been using it, but they've been putting it through SSH tunnels (mostly) although there are other ways providing secure network tunnels. This works well, so nobody has really put serious effort into making the actual X11 protocol itself more secure.
When you look at Waypipe, at a conceptual level, this is not really working any differently. There is a proxy on the remote system which wraps up the protocol in a network stream (often carried over an SSH tunnel, but again other methods are possible), which appears at the local end which then issues the requests to the compositor as if it were the client. And traffic traverses the network in the other direction in a similar manner.
The difference is that with X11, SSH is tunneling the raw X11 protocol through a TCP/IP tunnel, whereas with Waypipe, there is additional proxy work going at a higher point in the network stack, encapsulating the Wayland protocol, providing the unimplemented network features in a way that the compositor knows little or nothing about. It does not even know that the client is remote.
For the casual user, there is no real difference, and I would not be surprised if rather than using something like Waypipe, we don't get an SSH extension that has the Wayland proxy built-in at some point. Something like that will be far preferable to the whole-session method that building RDP into a compositor provides, which is the other method that people seem to be thinking about.
So Waypipe is a kludge, and a work-around for the 'missing' Wayland features, but it is really still comparing apples to apples, rather than to oranges. So it really becomes a moot point that X11 is network knowledgeable and Wayland isn't. That is not the comparison.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 10:16 GMT vogon00
Re: Man o man
"Windows users being bug testers"
There have been more and more occurrences of serious bugs making it out into normal user-land, something that would not have happened in 'The good old days' (How the F did you and whatever testing is left not notice 'broken' loopback functionality!). The complexity of Windows has increased massively since those 'Good old days', and we all know the more complex the software, the more chance of bugs.
I just wish Microsoft realised the impact on people who just want their computer/laptop to work and lack the ability to locate the fault and fix it themselves. I have seen several people become really frustrated when things stop working after an update... they range from the young-but-not-technical to the elderly.
I'm lucky as I can (1) act on or work around a known windows issue, and (2) avoid item #1 by using Linux:-
The last time I suffered from a Linux update breaking something was when openssh deprecated some of the key exchange methods and ciphers used by some of the elderly Cisco gear in my home lab...and that was my fault, not openssh's!
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Saturday 29th November 2025 18:06 GMT steviator
Re: Man o man
>>> For your convenience, we have cancelled the train you used to use. The newer shinier train has less carriages, less seats, and a driver called Bob.
You could call me a Wayland skeptic, I think the design principles will lead to massive fragmentation and incompatibility, the security model leads to end-runs around the protocol to bypass it, and the paralysis-by-committee approach is the management style least equipped to deal with the problems.
That being said, I've finally been able to switch over to Wayland without being unable to do swathes of things like in the past, so things *are* improving very slowly. The carriages are still smaller but they packed in more seats so more people can get to their destination, if a bit less comfortably than before. Bob is slowly learning how to stop the train at the correct station and hardly ever overshoots now.
>>> Despite quotes elsewhere that Wayland as a "protocol is more straightforward and easier to understand [than X11]", it still has a shedload of bugs. If it is so much easier, why so many bugs?
The bugs in Wayland are because every single project has their own Wayland compositor, many of which share no code, so there's massive duplication of effort. Not only does each compositor have their own implementation of the protocol, they're all implementing different versions of the protocol depending on how much resources they have to keep up with changes, and when they started. On top of that each compositor has its own subset of "extensions" which address things that the various groups at FreeDesktop.org which manage the protocol have not yet gotten around to addressing and have been added outside of the official standard. And this is all how it's supposed to work.
You could say the bugs are feature of the protocol - many bugs in Wayland software are not in fact bugs, but implementation differences that were not accounted for manifesting as misbehaviour. It's a subtle but important distinction, bugs are what happens when an individual developer makes mistakes, but these are a different animal, they can happen even when all the developers up and down the stack do everything right, just because the protocol itself was sufficiently vague as to allow two different sets of developers to interpret the same rule differently. In the web sphere they call them quirks. Normal code defects are still happening as well, but this extra set of quirks is piled on top. It's inherent to the design of Wayland and one of the elephants in the room that Wayland promoters like to hand-wave away.
>>> Yet noisy voices in the Linux world yell loudly about Windows users being bug testers. (Quite rightly). Those same voices are remarkably quiet when it happens in Linuxland.
I see plenty of people complaining about replacing things that came before with stuff that doesn't work as well, they get shouted down as "haters" who are just resistant to change, and stop complaining. It's a persistent problem in the Linux community, I'm not the type to stop arguing and have the technical chops to foot-it with just about anyone when it comes to these things. Generally it goes like this - I point out some regression in quality due to some new-fangled thing like Wayland, and some 15 year old "Noisy voice" pipes up to tell me that if I don't like Wayland I must be too dumb to understand how awesome it is, or in some kind of mutual dick-sucking love affair with X11, or maybe both. When I clearly articulate to them what the problems are, the cowards silently slither back under whatever rock they came from under.
I'll add my own two cents: If Wayland is to replace X11, let it be rewritten in Rust.
As for rewriting Wayland in rust... Wayland is written in English, its just a protocol, a set of documents that describe how a Wayland compositor should talk to applications.
There probably is a Wayland compositor written in Rust somewhere, there's nothing stopping anyone, but I think another compositor splitting resources and bimbling along doing its own thing at its it own pace would just be adding to the problem. The problems with Wayland start at the top and snowball down the development slope to us users at the bottom.
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Monday 1st December 2025 09:34 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Man o man
> There probably is a Wayland compositor written in Rust somewhere
COSMIC.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/cosmic_1_before_xmas/
I rather like it, TBH.
I wish it had proper menu bars with standard keyboard controls. But it's blazing fast and works well. It is still in beta and crashes occasionally, though.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 17:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Man o man
Totally agree, the difference between Windows users being bug testers and Linux users being bug testers is choice. Microsoft is a 3 trillion dollar business...it's not unfair to expect them to thoroughly test things before they release them...Open source Linux projects are not multi trillion dollar organisations, so the expectation is different...also, how well tested a package is depends a lot on the distro you pick...if someone wants to ensure that they never get untested bleeding edge packages, they can use an LTS distro...something like Debian, Fedora etc...if someone chooses to use something like Arch, Gentoo or a respin of a respin like Mint, Omarchy, Manjaro etc...they should expect it to be a bit dodgy from time to time...it's part and parcel of being at the bleeding edge. It's not possible to have both in the open source world...nothing would ever get released.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 18:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Man o man
Lets be honest here...a lot of Wayland bugs are due to distros having to be on both sides of the fence and software vendors not knowing which way to flop and thus not being able to commit to supporting Wayland.
I've seen Wayland improve massively over the last 12 months...it's gone from being decent but fairly buggy to being basically rock solid at this point...for me it's just a couple of hold outs that are problematic...like Anydesk for example...but I've switched to using a self hosted Rustdesk setup and it's not longer a problem...if anything Rustdesk is leaps and bounds better than Anydesk these days.
Around a year ago, Electron based apps were a bit of a problem (laggy, crashy etc), but those bugs have evaporated now...long gone.
Wayland, as it stands today, for the vast majority of people is fine.
In the last year, I've made the switch from Gnome to Hyprland...mostly out of morbid curiosity, I didn't really have a problem with Gnome at all...and I'm probably never switching back. Hyprland is a Wayland specific window manager and thus does not come with the same baggage that a fence sitter like Gnome or KDE comes with and it has been way less problematic for me in my subjective experience...it's not likely to be everyones cup of tea though...it is an acquired taste. It sits somewhere between Gnome and i3 in my opinion...it's a tiling WM, but less spartan than other offerings...if you're the kind of person that uses Gnome, and you mostly use your keyboard to navigate around it...Hyprland will feel natural to you. If you're the kind of person that likes the stiffness of a traditional tiling wm, Hyprland is going to feel a bit loosy goosy to you.
Gnome added Wayland support quite a while ago now and the improvements in it have been noticeable and fast paced, I switched to the Wayland option for two key reasons, firstly multi display multi refresh support, X11 for as long as I can remember has had a problem with mixed refresh rate setups, if you have one 60hz screen and one high refresh screen, the high refresh screen will render at the framerate of the lowest refresh display, fixes have been submitted over and over again for this, and manually patching it is possible, but X11 just never committed any of the fixes into the mainline repo for some reason, secondly performance, no bones about it, Wayland is faster than X11, there is no comparison there...Overall, since Wayland was introduced in Gnome, it was never in a state where it was "unusable" for me...it was just held back by a few apps not working quite the way they should or just not at all...which really isn't a fault of Gnome at all...or Wayland for that matter...I still can't fathom why Anydesk still hasn't implemented Wayland support...it just seems really lazy...which is a shame, because I dumped Teamviewer for being lazy and behind the curve for Anydesk...I guess all of these solutions will at some point spoil the soup and become complacent.
As for KDE...the same stuff probably applies to bugs to a certain extent, but KDE will always have it's "not quite finished" look and feel to it. It's just shit. It's a DE designed to be fiddled with to make nice screenshots...when you actually use it, it all feels like it's held together with pritt stick. It has similar UI inconsistencies that Windows has when you start getting beneath the surface. Window scaling doesn't feel fluid, and when you resize things, the wrong elements react...it feels like the era it came from...before responsive design was a thing...especially at high resolutions...KDE feels like it was built for 1080p and 1080p alone...if you dare to go beyond 1080p, shit gets weird...you start seeing loads of dead space in panels, font scaling is whacky...it's crap...yeah you can have your waifu anime theme with the wallpaper that has comically massive tits on it...but who cares?
Open the network panel in KDE settings, then drag the window edge to make it wider...watch what happens...the wrong parts scale, and one part of it shrinks...it doesn't scale the way you would expect it to. It's the same all over the place...I'm well aware of the argument "well, who spends ages in the network settings?" and you're right, not many people do...but if the designers operate on that kind of logic, where else are they not applying attention to detail because they think it doesn't matter? Probably all over I expect, which is why KDE feels like a disjointed mess to me.
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Sunday 30th November 2025 15:48 GMT Zolko
Re: Man o man
Lets be honest here...
yes please "lets" : are you the same Anonymous Coward that posts lengthy messages here – 3 so far – saying so many bad things about the current X11 ?
X11 is broken though, in many ways
X11 has had huge amounts of time to get this implemented / fixed...but some stuff related to this will just never be fixed...patches exist, but upstream won't pull them in
Wayland is faster than X11, there is no comparison there
this stinks of a RedHat manager trying his (or her, I don't care) propaganda : lets be honest, are you a RedHat manager ? How come you are so passionate and knowledgeable, and yet anonymous, on this subject ?
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Friday 28th November 2025 18:12 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Desktop-TUI
> I love it.
Me too.
Frankly, if this had support for a usable web browser, a text editor, some kind of word processor and spreadsheet, all with CUA style interfaces, it's probably all I'd need.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/12ddd1f23802c36f02687ef7d4a98cb4/tumblr_nandmofadB1tjd7wfo2_r1_1280.png
Observer: Cool desktop! X11 or Wayland?
Me: Console.
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Monday 1st December 2025 11:39 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Desktop-TUI
But here you have a problem. I don't know whether you are making any distinction between text only session and a console session, and that makes a difference.
On one hand, and In theory, the console could do decent graphics, and I do remember when Word first came out as a DOS application. It did render to a bit-mapped console session, but it was pretty crap.
But on the other hand the vary nature of a text only session makes it not possible to do anything other than plain text. This rules things out like decent web browsers and WYSIWYG word processors (but please remember that we managed text preparation using ASCII sessions in things like troff, WordPerfect and even things like Uniplex [a text-only office suite for UNIX systems] before graphical sessions were available). I do remember when Word first came out as a DOS application. It did render to a bit-mapped console session, but it was pretty crap. And non-DOS micros did all sorts of tricks to render text and pictures to a screen.
On the gripping hand, if you do add capable graphics and variable fonts to console sessions, you've effectively re-invented a compositor, so why not just use Sway?
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Friday 28th November 2025 22:46 GMT Vocational Vagabond
KDE Plasma - Acessability Failure
I'm able bodied (mostly) .. but if you think KDE Plasma can do a simple onscreen keyboard you're sorely mistaken.. I tried on my Debian flavored KDE box for a day and gave up, sure it's slick looking, and even snappy, but if can't do simple things X11 could do why trust they'll do anything else correctly. This was a dawdle under X11.
Seems leaving the functionality for those in need, unplanned and plain downright forgotten, while pursuing shiny shiny is the new norm for most software projects.
https://discuss.kde.org/t/plasma-6-and-wayland-no-on-screen-keyboard-working/17799
If they can't make a simple on screen keyboard work then they're clearly not doing it right, note how old the post is.. it is still not resolved. Meeting need with less pointless dev hours on 'bling' won't be out of fashion in my books.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 04:30 GMT Jeff3171351982
The link to the KDE announcement is appreciated. The statements in it (https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ ) are devoid of citation, attribution and quantification (e.g., [it works] "outside of rare special cases"). I didn't realize that Autokey was so rare and special. (Heck, depending on where one stands, one might consider KDE itself to be rare and special.)
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Saturday 29th November 2025 05:48 GMT W.S.Gosset
Whiteanting
The OSS self-destruction continues apace, eh?
As ElReg itself quoted just recently:
[...problems with toolbars, multiple window management, dragging things between windows, and much more...]
These problems exist because Wayland's design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows, and macOS have relied on for decades – things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor.
This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 14:01 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Whiteanting
> Wayland, Gnome, KDE - they are all the enemy, funded by deep pockets.
You know what, while I have some sympathy, I think we *MUST* to apply Hanlon's razor here.
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/hanlons-razor
If someone malicious was paying, they could do it better.
E.g. Support half a dozen alternatives and subtly quietly sponsor allegiances and alliances, 1 company or project each.
The candidates are there...
* MGR
* Microwindows / MicroX
* Reimplement or revive NeWS
* Arcan
* Port Rio from 9front
* Foster X12
_And_ Wayland.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 18:07 GMT GWGill
And the bugaboo Wayland doesn't want to think about
Colour Management. Both Wayland's basic design and the development culture around it clashes with what's needed for competent colour management, so it's been relegated to a "too hard, fix later" issue. Very hard to fix when there are clashes on such fundamental issues such as whether a user should be allowed to configure their own display, or whether an applications can know which display it is rendering to.
Bottom line is that if you need accurate, managed color, and that means being able to calibrate and profile your display, as well as giving colour managed applications access to the needed information to manage their rendering, then your current choices are: X11, MSWindows or Mac. Although there are a small number of developers doing some work in this area, there is no timeline for Wayland to make good on this.
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Saturday 29th November 2025 18:07 GMT wk_
Effectively a degradation
I was a happy user of KDE 20 years ago. It was version 2. Since then, I never had so smooth experience with it. I don't use Linux on bare metal anymore, so VMs are adding a potentially problematic layer, but KDE on VirtualBox is de-facto unusable. At the same time, Mint works like a charm. My short investigation confirmed that Vayland + KDE + VirtualBox combo is well known to work poorly. That's why I say this is a degradation - two technologies that were supposed to *improve* things + two decades of KDE development, yet we somehow cannot reproduce the user experience from 2003. I find it a bit sad.
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Sunday 30th November 2025 09:42 GMT Sitaram Chamarty
Sigh... back to XFCE then I guess
I *just* recently moved one of my laptops to KDE, and it had started looking good enough for me to recommend to a particular non-geek friend as a daily driver.
I'd hate to have to switch him out *again* in 2 years so I guess I won't give him KDE, and stick with XFCE.
Here's hoping those guys don't make a unilateral jump before the problems are solved!
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Wednesday 3rd December 2025 10:27 GMT Will Godfrey
It's destructive
The software I work with, by necessity, uses multiple windows which have title bars that give real information such as which instance and subsection you are looking at. It also allows you to resize these to suit your workflow while keeping them completely in scale. The windows also remember their size and position on the screen when last seen. Optionally, the most significant ones will reopen at the same size and position next time the program is run.
I don't have a spare machine to try wayland here, but the information I've been given is that it breaks most of this catastrophically.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
