KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

KDE Plasma 6.6.6 is here, along with a beastly long list of bugfixes, so if you have Plasma 6.6.5 – for instance, if you are using KDE on FreeBSD 15.1 – then it's an update well worth having. KDE Plasma 6.6.6 is a release that really is just about bug-fixes, but while there are no headline-grabbing features coming out for this …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wayland, by design, blocks the window manager from restoring window sizes and positions: they’ll all open heaped on top of one another, in the centre of the screen."

WHY(land)????????

[Will Godfrey]

It also doesn't allow the window manager to position popup message windows. It seems to be the complete antithesis of user friendly.

I need to have multiple windows open at positions and dimensions of my choosing, so I'll stick to X11. It's not without faults, but it's vastly better than wayland.

[ChoHag]

One could even say it's ... way better?

I'll see myself out.

[Someone Else]

Wayland, by design, blocks the window manager from restoring window sizes and positions: they’ll all open heaped on top of one another, in the centre of the screen.

And this is considered a good design?!? What user, anywhere, ever said," Yeah, when I log back in, I want all my windows scattered randomly across my screen" (or screens, as a rather large number of installations use multiple screens nowadays)?

There is, however form for this malfeasance. Micros~1, our favorite ol' debbil, fucked up RDC about a year-and-a-half ago in the same way. One day, you could log off and come back the next day with all the windows adorning their same places (on multiple screens) as they were when you logged off. These days, please spend your first 5 minutes after logging on putting some 10-15 windows back where you want them.

I always thought one of the driving forces of Linux was to not replicate the brazen, brain-dead foolishness that Windows imposed upon its victims. Starting to find out I was wrong....

[jake]

"And this is considered a good design?"

No. No, it's not. Not even if you squint.

Which tells you how far out of touch with reality the Wayland folks really are. And why I will not ever use it in production. Or on my desktops.

[drankinatty]

When the distros and desktops bend-the-knee to freedesktop and gnome, you end up with enshittified software. Sure, let X11 and wayland compete, may the best design win, but it's a damn shame when the lamer of the two is force-fed to everyone, like it or not. So much for Linux built on the cornerstone of user-choice.

What sane person would say "Sure, I want to reopen my session to a steaming pile of resized windows dumped on the desktop."

We've been able to restore window-size and position since at least KDE3 and Gnome2, two decades plus. Change is fine, loss of functionality isn't.

[Liam Proven]

> And this is considered a good design?!? What user, anywhere, ever said," Yeah, when I log back in, I want all my windows scattered randomly across my screen

Loath as I am to defend the thing, because I don't like it, but...

No, you have the wrong end of the stick. You are confusing the effect with the cause.

The real reason is: Wayland, by design, does not let the compositor choose where a window appears. Wayland is meant to be a generic display server protocol that could run on phones or tablets or watches or VR headsets or AR glasses. Desktops are a shrinking niche. Chromebooks outsell Macs, and phones outsell PCs+Macs+ChromeBooks put together by something like 10x over. We old people with big external keyboards and mice on the end of a wire are an edge case. Even laptops are an edge case.

The idea is -- as far as I can tell -- that on a fondleslab or something, the device and the OS control where things appear on screen, not the app. So windows can't pop up wherever they want, obscuring important stuff, presumably.

To the Wayland team _this is a feature not a bug_. They talk about security a lot, which is of course BS. A sign of that is that for the first 15Y or so of Wayland development, the section of the docs headed "Security" said "TBC later". I am not kidding.

The fact that it doesn't let one app capture another app's output or input is in their heads a _security bonus_ and the fact that it breaks all screen capture apps and accessibility tools is just Somebody Else's Problem.

Brief and not very accurate summary:

Wayland stops [the thing that replaced what used to be called] the window manager from setting the position of windows. So, "old style" desktops with handy features like "reopen all your windows from the previous session" can't recall the placements: the compositor stops them.

Context:

KDE is an attempt to implement a poor replica of the Windows *98* desktop on top of modern FOSS-ish underpinnings: Qt and C++. It supports Wayland but Wayland is fighting against the kind of desktop UI that KDE strives to implement.

Even more inaccurate biased summary:

Wayland is led by the GNOME folks who regard "UI people know how to use" as legacy, to be eliminated.

They don't know how to drive a 20th century desktop with a keyboard, therefore to them all this is unimportant baggage.

[Havin_it]

>The real reason is: Wayland, by design, does not let the compositor choose where a window appears.

Well this is not correct at all so, good start. Wayland (the protocol) does not have a say at all, unlike in the X11 model. It's actually left *entirely* up to the compositor. *Not* the apps themselves, which is the cause of the bother, because apps have been used to putting their windows where they want. And yes, funnily enough, that doesn't wash on platforms outside the conventional desktop model where your window is not necessarily a rectangle somewhere within another rectangle.

What's intended is that it be the user, via the compositor, that decides where windows go. Apps being opinionated about this themselves is what got the chop (although, as mentioned, there are mechanisms for them to make polite requests to the user/compositor in that regard).

The compositor can and should provide tooling to put the user in control; in KDE this is called KWin rules, and they have been around since long before Wayland and are building on a rich vein of knowledge built-up over time on how to wrangle multifarious windows by the identifying info they provide through X11, and now through Wayland (Wayland has had further work recently to improve how windows are defined to make this capability more controllable).

As for the "pile of windows" problem, no denying this has been a pain point. There is now a session-restore protocol recently finalised for managing this, but it took serious blood and tears to get it there and the bikeshedding it endured was certainly not one of Wayland's finest hours. Worse yet (in the eyes of many app developers, I should imagine) - getting your windows put back where they were when you restart is no longer something apps can simply rely on the X11 environment to do for them; it requires them to write code to buy into the aforementioned protocol, so that what they want done is understood with as little ambiguity as possible. (X11 DEs had this issue too; they just spent long years learning the quirks and finding reasonable solutions.)

KDE devs have commented that that buy-in will likely take years, and some apps will never bother. I hesitate to exceed their optimism, but I do think that before long the needed code will have the status of well-known, drop-in boilerplate that takes negligible effort for an app to implement. Toolkits can likely play a part too. I think the adoption curve will be very slow for a spell, then very fast until it gets as good as it's gonna get.

So that's where it's at. I know it won't be sufficient or satisfactory for a lot of people, but surprisingly it seems like neither you nor the august commentariat in these parts seem to have, or be willing to share for whatever reason, the full picture, so I thought I'd do my best.

[Liam Proven]

> Well this is not correct at all so, good start.

1. It was an intentional oversimplification.

2. We're in the comments. I'm off work. What you get here is the rants. :-D

[Someone Else]

Hey there, Liam. You state:

To the Wayland team _this is a feature not a bug_

I understand and accept that, but it is also a shit-fer-brains design. As many other commentards have declared, it is a reduction in functionality from the current status quo. There is a word that describes this process of forced replacing stuff that works just fine, thankyewverymutch, with a new shiny that does less: enshittification (or e14n).

So please explain to me what benefits this Wayland is supposed to provide, then, at the cost of properly handling multiple windows. Is it faster? Does it use less resources on a GPU (or processor)? Or is it just the new shiny-du-jour?

KDE is an attempt to implement a poor replica of the Windows *98* desktop on top of modern FOSS-ish underpinnings: Qt and C++.

So I guess that Wayland is an attempt to implement a poor replica of Windows *Vista*, perhaps as a member-measuring exercise against X11? We all know how that's gonna turn out.

You may be right that I "confusing the effect with the cause". But I'm looking at it from this perspective -- that of the poor benighted user who couldn't possibly understand the brilliance of this New World Order, which appears as a degradation of my "user experience" (gad, I hate that phrase), and as such, confusion or not...I'm just not interested.

[tinpinion]

> But I'm looking at it from this perspective -- that of the poor benighted user who couldn't possibly understand the brilliance of this New World Order, which appears as a degradation of my "user experience" (gad, I hate that phrase), and as such, confusion or not...I'm just not interested.

As always, I recommend chapter 7 of the UNIX Hater's Handbook. At least some of the poor benighted users upon whom X was originally foisted correctly considered it a turd sandwich.

> it is a reduction in functionality from the current status quo.

Choosing to not use systemd is also a reduction in functionality from the current status quo. The newfangled gewgaw is more functional than the things that it set out to replace because those things followed the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. Wayland is the opposite: it's less functional because it follows that philosophy while X11 has a massive scope, does tons of things just well enough, relies on impenetrable configuration files and esoteric management commands that feel almost Poettering-y, and hasn't ever been able to learn from its own design mistakes for the sake of maintaining backwards compatibility with applications that rely on those flaws.

> So please explain to me what benefits this Wayland is supposed to provide, then ... . Is it faster? Does it use less resources on a GPU (or processor)? Or is it just the new shiny-du-jour?

Wayland can only be compared to the networked part of X11 that's responsible for buffer exchange and input handling, since that's what it replaces. The primary benefit of Wayland over X11 is that applications are able to drop their buffers into a region of memory that is shared between that application and the compositor, so the application can change what its window looks like without needing to actively communicate the change to the thing responsible for outputting it. The kernel doesn't need to get involved in that transaction beyond the initial sharing of the memory region.

> at the cost of properly handling multiple windows

There is a Wayland compositor called River (Liam has written about it before) which includes an extension to the Wayland protocol which allows applications to request the window manager to put windows in specific places. KDE's unwillingness to do the same in KWin is a design defect in KDE, not in Wayland.

> I understand and accept that, but it is also a shit-fer-brains design.

Arbitrary window positioning and sizing is entirely out-of-scope for Wayland. It's no more a design than a Slinky's inability to continue operating once it reaches the bottom of a flight of stairs is.

[tinpinion]

Oh, I also hate freedesktop.org and Xorg and Wayland. And systemd's utility creep, for good measure.

[Liam Proven]

> it is a reduction in functionality

Sure, yes. But as I said elsewhere, they don't need or know about or care about the old functionality.

> what benefits this Wayland is supposed to provide

Smooth, non-flickering screen updates.

Tear-free video even when moving the player.

Variable refresh rate displays.

High dynamic range displays.

Heterogenous DPI displays with on-the-fly changing.

Different display formats, such as desktops, laptops, TVs, tablets, phones, watches, VR headsets, Displays you look at from 10cm away to ones you look at from 3m away.

All stuff I don't personally care about, but they do.

[jake]

IBM closed the deal to purchase RedHat in July of 2019 after announcing they were going to do so in September of 2018.

In October of 2018, the only distros that were even thinking about fiddling about with Wayland were RedHat/Fedora based.

Everybody else had dropped it like the hot rock that it wasis.

Even Ubuntu 18.10 had ignored Wayland in .favo(u)r of x.org in October of '94 release of Cosmic Cuttlefish.

Then IBM made the purchase, and suddenly everybody was clamo(u)ring for Wayland despite all of it's obvious engineering short comings, which hadn't changed![0] What the actual fuck? Has the collective Linux mind-set finally reached the point where the GreatUnwashed are making engineering decisions from sheer weight of numbers? If so, it's probably time to pick a different OS, because Linux is about to be just as enshitified as everything else on this original user's Internet. And that would be sad.

The only question I have remaining is why on Earth is IBM allowing it to happen? Because as the owner of RedHat, they are ultimately responsible for this travesty.

_{[0] And still haven't ...}

[coredump]

> Wayland is led by the GNOME folks ....

Enough said.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

I experimented a bit with Linux recently and that was one of the things that frustrated me.

"WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!" So, Wayland, apparently. I liked almost everything else about KDE Plasma.

[Michael Hoffmann]

If there was ever a time you would have been justified to use all caps, this was it!

I almost spit out my coffee when I came to that line.

BY DESIGN?! Who runs the Wayland project? Poettering?!

[jake]

Poetthead is now at Microsoft. A match made in heaven. Hopefully they are happy together.

However, it is RedHat that "owns" Wayland. And the systemd-cancer. And GNOME. And PulseAudio.

Now, why on earth would RedHat want to inflict this shit, en masse, on the Linux community?

I dunno. Ask IBM. Ultimately, they own RedHat and are responsible for their output.

Might want to ask yourself "Why would IBM want to contribute to the mass enshitification of Desktop Linux?"

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Took me a moment to persuade ElReg's unpredictable search function to cough it up, & was beginning to think that I was hallucinating, but Poettering left MS at the beginning of the year "to prove that SystemD is trustworthy" according to the article:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/29/systemd-daddy-departs-microsoft-for-linux-startup/4437009

You're right about the rest though.

[jake]

I missed that article. Ta. Have a cold one.

[Liam Proven]

> ElReg's unpredictable search function to cough it up

Google:

site:theregister.com poettering microsoft

1st hit.

[Liam Proven]

> However, it is RedHat that "owns" Wayland. And the systemd-cancer. And GNOME. And PulseAudio.

> Now, why on earth would RedHat want to inflict this shit, en masse, on the Linux community?

Again, mixing cause with effect.

RH sells server software. It does not regard _itself_ as a Linux vendor. Source: my own training when I started there. I am ex-RH.

RH makes lots of money selling server OSes, cloud provisioning & management tools, virtualisation, storage, etc.

The desktop is an accidental and unimportant byproduct.

RH makes $$$ and so RH employs lots of people. It hires young developers and pays thousands of them to write this stuff, and write the docs. (That was me.)

They are young. At least when I was there a decade ago it was a company of mainly 20somethings.

(I was in the 2nd half of my 40s. There was 1 other 40something in my entire department, and we became good friends and still are.)

These kids didn't grow up with Windows. They grew up with Playstations and iPads.

They don't know how to drive Windows and they don't care.

In 2006-2007 Microsoft said it would sue the Linux world for copying the Windows 95 desktop. The Linux world _absolutely DID_ copy the Win95 desktop. It dominated the industry.

SUSE employed a lot of the KDE people. KDE is a naked blatant Windows ripoff. SUSE caved instantly and signed a patent-sharing deal.

So did several other KDE-centric distro vendors, and the others packed up and shut down.

The other 2 big players used GNOME: Canonical and Red Hat. They said "FU, MS" and didn't sign... but both promptly developed non-Windows like desktops.

Canonical turned its Netbook Launcher into Unity, a better OS X desktop than OS X.

RH went the other way and designed a desktop as *un*-Windows like as they could design.

The result is GNOME 3 and what was called GNOME 4 but instead, in the grand Sun tradition, they just dropped the leading version number: GNOME went 3.37, 3.38, 3.39... 40!

It's designed by youngsters who don't know how to use Windows and don't care.

They all live in terminal windows anyway. RH is a nest of Vim fans.

All they want is easy rapid terminal windows and a bunch of phone-style apps.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Red Hat and the desktop

> It's designed by youngsters who don't know how to use Windows and don't care.

> They all live in terminal windows anyway. RH is a nest of Vim fans.

> All they want is easy rapid terminal windows and a bunch of phone-style apps.

Given this, it's frightening how much power and influence Red Hat has over the desktop. They acquired this not by accident, but by forcing software such as systemd on people who didn't really want it. Software such as pulseaudio, Wayland, and what Gnome has become (compared with what it once was). Most, if not all "controversial" GNU/Linux software seems to stem from RH.

It is currently not too difficult to avoid all this Red Hat SW. But I get the feeling RH is consciously aiming to make it more difficult as time goes by. I can't think of any examples of RH expanding choice and configurability, and quite a few of them restricting these things.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Red Hat and the desktop

> They acquired this not by accident, but by

Nah.

They acquired it by making sh1tloads of money and spending lots of it on hiring tons of developers.

They made the big $ by finding a way to sell "enterprise Linux" that finance directors understood:

"Here, have a free OS! It does all the stuff those 1990s corporate ones did, and it does it on cheap commodity PCs!"

"Free? Worth what you pay. Must be junk then. We'll buy this expensive corporate OS instead."

"Here, *our* Linux meets all these government certification standards, and we promise to fix it for you if it breaks."

"Where do I sign?"

It was a stroke of genius and I totally missed it at the time.

Result: thousands of full-time paid developers flood volunteer communities.

But... those kids they hired don't even have the concept of there being a culture of how to do this stuff. All they know is, Unix culture means using the shell not a GUI, and learning Vi, and writing stuff in languages with curly braces to mark blocks.

Always remember Hanlon's Razor.

[ianbetteridge]

Re: Red Hat and the desktop

I'm not sure that "don't know how to use Windows and don't care" is actually any kind of criticism. Why should the rest of computing history be dominated by a paradigm from the 1970s? You and I might find WIMP efficient, but if you've grown up with smartphones -- and if you're under 40, you have grown up with smartphones -- why would you not expect computers to work that way? Rather than what oldies like me prefer.

I still remember impossibly old people (perhaps in their 50s) in the late 1980s claiming that any kind of windowing system was inefficient and humans needed to work "the way computers work, with a command line". Times change, and it's the young 'uns that make the world which works for them. It was ever thus.

[coredump]

> [Red Hat] does not regard _itself_ as a Linux vendor.

Unsurprising in some ways. It may explain some of what they've done since they ended Red Hat Linux. E.g. neglect for some parts of Linux, apathy for others, so Red Hat could take things in other directions which they control.

Perhaps because Red Hat don't consider itself a steward of Linux, they presumably don't value it as much as the "server OSes, cloud provisioning & management tools, virtualisation, storage", at least, not beyond Linux as an underpinning to Red Hat's other products. Makes sense, what with corporate profits and all that.

I do think you've noted a core Red Hat behavior, with "RH went the other way". Red Hat wants to create (or buy?) the New Shiny, different and separate from others. They control it, develop it, declare it the standard, and because they're the 800lb gorilla (even moreso now with IBM) they can inflict their wares on everyone, who can either play along or get shut out. Doesn't matter whether the thing follows The Unix Way, or even The Linux Way, as long as Red Hat controls it.

[Michael Hoffmann]

"They don't know how to drive Windows and they don't care."

They live with massively reduced functionality and the don't care.

They live with constant ads shoved in their face and they don't care.

They live with all their personal data being siphoned off and they don't care.

They live with the fact they they will rent forever and never own - from homes to devices - and they don't care.

I'll stop before I get too political - or misanthropic.

[jake]

"RH sells server software. It does not regard _itself_ as a Linux vendor."

RedHat doesn't exist anymore. Except as one of IBM's myriad departments.

IBM is the root cause of all this kerfuffle, and has been for over half a decade. They are the only ones with veto power. I'm just trying to figure out what is in it for them, because they sure as shit aren't going to make a buck out of it!

[DrXym]

It doesn't take much effort to find out how Wayland (which is a protocol) proposes to allow window positioning & grouping without allowing clients to dictate it.

[DrXym]

Why? Because instead it allows software to hint where it wants to go, and any special groupings and leaves it up to the compositor as to how to apply those hints. The compositor can also remember the last place the window was and restore to that place without the client asking for it it or having special knowing. That means kwin remembers where windows were and where windows would like to be and allows for more consistent behaviour on multi monitor displays where somebody might be plugging or unplugging a machine from a dock, rotating screens or whatever.

i.e. it's a feature, not a bug.

[Martin J Hooper]

Why are we getting so interested in this version of Plasma when the released version is 6.7.x ?

[Liam Proven]

> Why are we getting so interested in this version of Plasma when the released version is 6.7.x ?

A few hours after the article was published, 6.7.1 came out. Augh!

Well, 2 reasons.

One is that the number 666 is funny. I should have tried to squeeze an Iron Maiden gag in there too.

The other is that 6.6 is now EOL. This is the final release. This means KDE users are now on a bit of an upgrade treadmill. There are no long-term or stable releases of KDE 6.x. Debian 13 users are stuck on 6.3.5 until Debian 14 and then they get no choice.

The Wayland thing is contentious. A lot of people don't like it. 6.6 only came out in February and now it's at its final version. KDE 5 lived for about a decade so for even quite long-time users this rapid life cycle is new and strange and unwelcome.

[jake]

The latest Stable release of KDE-Plasma is 6.7.2, which came out on June 30th (from Wiki ... kde.org as a website is worse than useless).

It is shipping with Slackware-current, should anyone want to eyeball it.

At the moment, on Slackware-current, KDE-Plasma 6.7.2 is running on X11. This is subject to change without notice.

[DJV]

"Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

As long as it doesn't get confused with 611, which, of course, is the emergency number in American Hades (it's just 666 in UK Hades, which is just across the pond puddle of molten lava from American Hades).

[jake]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

The Emergency number in North America is (generally) 911. That's in both the US and Canada, Mexico uses something else for historical reasons.

The 611 number is used to report issues and request repairs within the telephone system itself.

For more, look up "n11 code" in the search engine of your choice.

For more than you ever wanted to know about telco numbering in North America, look up NANP, "North American Numbering Plan".

[Someone Else]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

...that whooshing sound as the joke whizzes over his head...

[jake]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

The so-called "joke" didn't fit the premise, and as such it wasn't particularly funny.

Worse, it *might* cause a person visiting from a foreign country to dial the wrong number in an emergency when seconds count.

_{I know it's true ... I read it on the InternetElReg forums!}

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

I'm not sure a single post on The Register is going to be the place anyone learns about emergency services phone numbers for the first time...

[jake]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably not.

But if it helps even one person, ever, don'tcha think it'll have been worth what it cost you?

[Ken Hagan]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

A proper joke would have used 116 as the inverted form of 911.

[David 132]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

As a child in the UK, I was always told that dialling 666 would summon an upside-down policeman.

[ttlanhil]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

Well, Australia hires some UK police, so summoning one back occasionally doesn't seem too unreasonable

[Bill Gray]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

As a child in the US, I was told that if you played a country music record backward, you'd quit drinking, your wife would come back, and your dog would return to life.

[Havin_it]

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

Earth-616 happens to be what passes for "our" world in the Marvel Comics multiverse. Can't possibly be coincidental.

Inb4 Konqi gets ret-conned as an Omega-level mutant and gets freaky with Fin Fang Foom...

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Any desktop which "mandates" Wayland instead of X-11 for the sake of my gaming performance and CUDA stacks is welcome to take a leap off the cliff of complete and utter irrelevance due to the absolutely abysmal performance and support Wayland has for my game catalogue. Screw "waiting for the next release"; x.org works now!

[retiredFool]

Am confused. I thought the whole point of wayland was gaming. If it is not good for gaming, then what is the reason it is being shoved up everyone's arse? I'm in EDA, and I cannot think of any possible reason to use wayland in EDA. X11 has been the standard for at least 35 years now. I was at cadence when it was adopted in 1989, on 8MB memory sun machines no less.

[David 132]

Out of interest, which EDA tools do you use? Cadence Virtuoso, Siemens Calibre, Tessent, or other...?

[retiredFool]

Was at cadence in the late 80's when they first moved to X11, right after the merger, then to a startup, then my own co doing IC layout software. I've "used" cadence, mentor, caeco, edge, symbad, Avanti, Calma, and probably a few I've forgotten. These days, I just write EDA software, not a consumer. Haven't done contract work in quite awhile.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

The problem is most Wayland drivers render the initial image to a software buffer and then push the whole thing to the display. That slows down rendering performance dramatically compared to having the card do direct rendering as OpenGL does with X11 displays.

[Liam Proven]

> . That slows down rendering performance dramatically

You keep commenting to this effect.

[[citation needed]]

I don't care about benchmarks. (This is because I have _implemented_ benchmarks.)

Please provide evidence for your statement, because most of the numbers I see maintain it's as fast or faster. Even the Steam Deck uses it now.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

I'm not citing SHIT to prove SQUAT to you when I'm talking about real-world personal experience with Debian 13!

[retiredFool]

I don't use wayland, but from what he says is true, then consider

Program drawing complex IC polygon data, takes a very long time if user sets to draw all polygons, even if one pixel total size.

User starts redraw

User notices immediately the screen is being drawn slowly because of tiny poly's being drawn

User hits ^C

Program aborts redraw

User resets the min size drawn to something like 5 pixels or more

User redraws again and this time instead of minutes, seconds to draw.

In IC design there are several, maybe even dozens depending on how you count, options to speed redraw because to draw literally billions of polygons is to slow.

This problem was solved in X11 30 years ago by drawing to the screen immediately and polling for interrupt in the redraw loop. Heck CALMA in the early 80's solved the problem on DG minicomputers.

So if in wayland it waits until the entire redraw is done to flash what was in the sw buffer onto the screen, well a huge problem.

[Liam Proven]

> I thought the whole point of wayland was gaming.

What? No. Never.

The point of Wayland is "we don't need any of that fancy network stuff X.org does and we're tired of fixing it".

Need = understand, IYSWIM.

[tinpinion]

Mind, Wayland's original designer is also the person who did AIGLX so a remote X client (application) can make GLX calls on the X server's machine instead of having to those calculations on the application's machine then transmit the resulting pixel buffer over the network. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a forty-year old incomprehensible spaghetti monster that must not ever be touched flopping about in the mangled remains of Xorg's heart.

It's also "we don't need any of that fancy I/O stuff that X.org does when we can just wrap DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) and evdev".

I think X11 should have been replaced with a competing concept that was more similar to it than not back in the mid-to-late '00s. Split the ecosystem by forsaking the relics kept around for backwards compatibility and let applications fix themselves, then keep the networking because it's really cool and both VNC and RDP are awful in their own special ways. I dunno. Wayland and X11 being the only competitors feels like a worst-of-both-worlds situation.

[Liam Proven]

> the person who did AIGLX

A clever but horrendously ugly hack IMHO.

The rival project, Xgl, was a better way to do it: a whole new X server that sent output to OpenGL.

(AIUI -- it's a long time ago and I never had much use for these toys myself.)

> I think X11 should have been replaced with a competing concept that was more similar to it

Bring back X12 and make it happen.

[retiredFool]

X11 offers polygon primitives. Why would you send pixels? I recall in the early 2000's working across the country remotely at 64K ISDN link doing exactly that. Polygons/rects/segments were being shipped back and forth not pixels. And text is even more compact with just the string/position/font into being transmitted. You can send pixmaps back and forth but not if you want speed.

[cjcox]

Belongs to man.

While the antichrist uses the number, 666 is man's number. So, this version of KDE could be more properly interpreted as the KDE Plasma of man.

[jake]

Re: Belongs to man.

"666 is man's number"

Would that be octal? Decimal? Hexadecimal? Or perhaps Sexagesimal?

[Eecahmap]

Tried KDE. Removed it.

I tried KDE on both Devuan and LMDE. It's over a gigabyte and task-kde-desktop wants to install 604(!) packages.

It's okay with X11, but didn't work at all with Wayland on any of my machines. Every time I tried to login with Wayland, the UI crashed and went back to the login manager.