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:
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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.
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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.
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applications in general felt sluggish
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work
People complaining about Wayland always like to say that, but usually don’t give any specific examples.
If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn’t be actively working to switch.
For what it’s worth, since a few years Wayland works better on my PC than X11 ever did, and with more features.
I’ve used Wayland exclusively for years, but here’s an example: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/
tl;Dr the Wayland ecosystem has still not caught up in all edge cases, the weirder setup you have the more likely you’re affected
Ubuntu, which is all-in on Wayland, does not wake up from sleep with our nvidia 3060. We have to reset the machine. So, no, it’s not an edge case, we have a very, very popular Asus motherboard (the one everyone recommended on youtube 3 years ago), and still nothing. Even with newer versions of the driver, newer versions of ubuntu, same problem occurs.
i use x11 termux with xreal glasses for my travel rig. as far as i know, there is no wayland support for termux.
also when i use steam link from wayland it is very buggy. i tried again a couple months ago and had the same issue.
are these niche use cases? absolutely. but i have 2 different niche use cases that exclude using wayland. its a shame if ill have to quit using gnome (i know this thread is about kde) over this.
and with more features.
Look, if you’re gonna tell x11 folks to provide examples of how Wayland is not meeting their needs, you need to meet the same bar and give a few examples of what these features are.
This is honestly what is holding me back from going all in on wayland… I don’t see any benefit.
Fractional scaling w/ HiDPI displays, especially when the monitors are different resolutions, works so much better in Wayland than X11
That is a good point, fair enough. I don’t really need this, so it doesn’t cross my radar.
One benefit is it’s the future and my DE is going to drop X soon.
Another is it’s more secure. Not just any window can read the clipboard or the keys you press. Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog whenever I hit them.
Am I doing a good job convincing you? Anyway, I switched to Plasma Wayland and it was fine for me, with a few tweaks needed.
it’s the future
No doubt about that. It’s been “the future” for more than a decade. But even 5 years ago, Wayland was a complete dumpster fire if you strayed outside average use. So yeah, I’ve heard this before.
Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog
I understand that this is a real sticking point with some use cases, I hope this is resolved soon. I’m definitely fuzzy on the workings of portals, compositors, input, etc.
Am I doing a good job convincing you?
This is the overwhelming response to my questions about Wayland, and it’s weird. Wayland isn’t a fancy new car I need to use to stay relevant. I work in terminals and a browser, Xfce is fine.
As I mentioned in another response, I am not trying to use the newest coolest thing, I work every day in Linux and I need my setup to be stable and predictable.
And no one needs to convince me, when xfce is finally discontinued or unusable, I’ll have to find a similar Wayland alternative. Nothing compels me to switch yet.
I am not trying to suggest that the old way is better, we have needed to move on from x11 years ago.
clipboard…
This just sounds bothersome. A clipboard should really be machine-wide, that’s the purpose of it. Although I can understand the reticence there, what with password managers. I would argue that, to achieve that sort of security, there should be a separate, “secure” clipboard that only enrolled applications can access - and enrollment should be left up to the user, not the application developer.
For me it’s been such a night and day experience it’s hard to imagine needing to explain why Wayland has been better. But I’ll try.
The big thing that got me to switch was actual multi-monitor support. X has a bunch of hacks that “work” but it’s a mess and constantly broke for me. I’d just randomly log in and it was broken and I’d spend a day in xrand a x11 conf files re-building it from scratch for no apparent reason. Wayland multi-monitor has just worked for years now. It’s also real mutlidisplay support and really quite good.
Ive seen complaints about Nvidia but even with them dragging their heels I’ve had a better experience with their drivers on Wayland. Probably tied again to multi monitor bit it’s just been smoother and I notice if I accidentally log in to an X session even on a single monitor setup because things are clunky and features missing.
Anecdotally DEs feel like they start faster and work smoother. I saw fewer crashes after switching as well. The crashing might be better these days then but I don’t see a reason to test it.
For the sake transparency, it’s not perfect. Compatibility really has been great and I struggle to tell what’s not native. But I mean this is Linux desktop and there are challenges regardless of your choices.
I enjoyed guake terminal. It’s a bit troublesome to make work well.
The one other thing that’s been troublesome is some screen capture stuff. Honestly the screen sharing in Wayland lovely and so much better when it work.
But some programs do their own thing and want full desktop control and that’s a struggle. For example moonlight/sunshine require what seems to be some extra tinkering. Similarly screen collaboration apps that try to do the full control thing tend to not work well or at all.
Thanks for the response!
it’s hard to imagine needing to explain why Wayland has been better
I don’t really understand what you mean here, sounds like you’re describing a vibe, but that’s valid.
I have a multi-monitor setup with xfce and while it’s nothing to write home about, it works. Of course, I don’t need HDR. I guess my use case isn’t very demanding that way.
I have a wayland/gnome tablet because touchscreen, and I don’t see an appreciable difference in startup time, bit I have no empirical data on this.
If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn’t be actively working to switch.
I’m laughing in Systemd.
You lost years ago. Time to come in from the cold.
As someone who likes X11, Wayland works fine. To say it has so many things wrong is a self report. People like you make shit up about Wayland because you had some unrelated issue years ago. Just give a rest.
Seems like it would take less effort to improve Wayland than maintain a forked DE for X11.
Wayland development continues to push forward. Currently it works better than X11 in 95% or setups, and it won’t be long before it covers 99.5%. X11 is legacy now, and Wayland works perfectly for the vast majority of users and is only improving. The time to move on is coming.
For legacy use cases there will be an alternative X11 DE you can use for a long time yet.
You can just stay with the last plasma version that supports x11 as long as it doesnt start to bit rot. Btw, try wayland and see if YOUR workflow works
None of the x11 sessions in any DE were as smooth video output-wise as the Wayland sessions I tried, especially with multiple monitors, they always had various problems and stutter.
That is why I switched to Wayland in the end.
I imagine that some graphical environments will always support X11. I’d suggest you switch to one of those. If someone forked Plasma, it’d have far fewer eyes on it than something like i3. I assume XFCE will continue to support X11 for a while too since it’s only just working on Wayland support. Maybe some of the less common DEs like MATE are worth looking into?
we should get some “it isnt ready yet” t-shirts made for the legacy folks.
Remote access is the one pain point. There is very little for RMM or remote software that works on wayland. KDE has that in the works already.
Everybody says Rustdesk but it is a bad joke regardless of wayland.
Personally I host a simplehelp server(paid) and it’s really good but wayland support is a no go so far.
Everything else has been categorically better and fixed a lot of issues for me that I used to have on X11 which I’ve used for like 15 years.
X11+Gnome until gnome 3 then KDE for me because I’m not using a damn tablet (or workspaces).
It obviously won’t work for everyone, but for remote access I’ve been very impressed with waypipe. I use it to pull windows from headless machines onto my main workstation, like X forwarding.
I’d like something for persistence, like wprs, but it’s not quite there yet.
I switched from x to Wayland eaely/mid last year, prior to that there were quirks. But now: no screen tearing, no nvidia issues when using their driver, steam games play instead of black screen.
The bonus is security.
I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.
Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.
I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.
I habitually use a clean install whenever I move OS - so much so that I’ve been buying new storage drives for the sake thereof. I actually have one ready to go for Trixie, once I finish a current project.
I feel similarly especially about remmina, though as I understand it this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I’m quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).
It’s too bad because on Debian 13 here wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren’t for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.
I would hope plasma’s decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.
I have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.
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…
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.
Pipewire and alsa are completely different things. Pipewire uses pulse/jack which then use alsa, or am I missing something?
People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).
When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.
Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.
I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.
It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.
