KDE going all-in on a Wayland future (opens in new tab)

If your Linux distribution is handling Mesa packages correctly, you will never lack OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

The reason is that Mesa includes "software rendering" drivers for both OpenGL ("llvmpipe") and Vulkan ("lavapipe"). As the name(s) might suggest, they use LLVM to JIT shaders for your CPU (supporting SIMD up to AVX2, last I checked - although typical compositing shaders tend to get pattern-matched and replaced with plain `memcpy`s etc.).

So you should always be able to run a fully-featured Wayland desktop (albeit limited in performance by your CPU), on any unaccelerated framebuffer, nowadays (and I remember doing this even before Plasma 6 launched, it may be older than usable Wayland desktops tbh - the Mesa code sure is, but maybe distros hadn't always built those drivers?).

Software compositing is possible. Wayland doesn't strictly require hardware acceleration or operations that are hopelessly slow without hardware acceleration.

>What is the way forward for the retro community to run a modern Wayland system on older hardware?

I'm curious why that's something that should happen. Shouldn't the 'retro community' be happy with retro software and not expect cutting edge software to work on their hardware?

How old? Im running KDE on 6700k and gtx 960. (I can run on without 960 too). Thats 10 year old at this point

Wayland compositors can use llvmpipe: https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/llvmpipe.html

That being said, your bigger problem is trying to view modern websites on 1080p displays on that ancient hardware...

I don't think they're downplaying. Most users will be perfectly happy with the included KDE application for screenshots/screen capture (it is really fully featured, much better than the default options for Windows or macOS).

And they're not saying that no third party applications will work either, it is just that old screenshot applications that were created for X11 will need to be ported.

In the end that is not really much different from macOS dropping Rosetta in the next release of macOS (yes, I know there is a difference of effort). Old applications will stop working, applications that still get support will eventually support it (if they don't support Wayland already).

It's actually wild that they're trying to sell lack of basic desktop features as "security features". Try explaining to an average person that when they are playing a game and want to capture a cool moment to share on Discord with their friends that by design the window server they are using will not let them do that and it's "for their own good". Like God forbid I want my computer to be actually usable. We had the same situation in the past when Wayland lacked a way to lock in the cursor within a window and it took them like 8 years to develop a "protocol" or whatever they call it. Imagine that for each basic desktop usability/UX feature, we will have to wait another decade. At that rate Linux will never have widespread adoption on desktop. Wayland sometimes feels like an active effort to sabotage Linux on desktop.

If you're not familiar, the way X11 works is comparable to "multiplayer notepad" for your pixels ("multiplayer MSPaint"?).

All your monitors are combined into a large canvas where every pixel can be written and read by any X11 client.

Screenshots (and screen sharing) could be silently performed with zero user feedback (or any good way to even detect when apps might be doing this maliciously, AFAIK).

This is one of the big "security implications" that motivated Wayland (and somewhat similarly, the Flatpak sandbox and the XDG Portal infrastructure that has by now outgrown it).

The infrastructure is already there, for 3rd party apps to request these abilities (with the user getting the choice of following through, or denying the request), e.g.:

- https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...

- https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...

Keep in mind that any action which doesn't require interactivity every time (e.g. restarting the screensharing of a previously-chosen window/display) could have "user gave permission" be remembered, but that seamless case still only applies to that combination (so that client can't peek at anything else than what it was offered).

Anyway, what the blog post is talking about is really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated (and e.g. might already not function properly inside Flatpak).

> feature parity

If we are being honest, screenshots/screensharing was never a "feature" of X11, it was a big security hole abused as a feature.

> I love kde and it is what i use but still having the bug from time to time that the panels dissapear and have to relaunch plasmashell

I have that too, on Wayland. I also had a bug I mentioned recently in another comment with transparent terminals flickering, but that seems to depend on what is behind them and I think is a bug specific to Konsole.

Overall, its very close compared to a few years ago when several things were problematic with Wayland, but I do slightly feel its not quite there yet.

> i wish they merged the virtual desktops and activities into one concept and allowed different wallpapers on each.

> Prob some more nitpicks but overall it is a really great desktop environment.

I agree with both those.

The x11 will be supported for 1.5 more years in latest state. And then there will still be support from LTS distribution for bug fixes. Only new features won't be there. It seems very glacial to me still.

> This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.

Nobody is developing x.org because it's a hot mess. It's just been half-baked solutions smacked on top of each other. That's why hardware acceleration barely works and artifacts are just a fact of life.

It's just that Wayland is newer, it's that x.org is a dead end and has been for many decades. If other people want to develop it, then by all means. But they're not, and ultimately I can't put a gun to someone's head and force them to work on a codebase. So here we are.

KDE project is working on plasma-login-manager (https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-login-manager) but AFAICT there’s no ETÀ for a stable release.

I use lemurs because as far as I can tell there's no good graphical display managers (lightdm may be the closest as SDDM doesn't show battery level and GDM doesn't allow changing the mouse cursor theme).

It works for me, since about two years. Every single time. Feels really stable.

Intel HD630 graphics in Kaby Lake Core i5 7500T & Core i7 7700T. CachyOS.

>NVidia

Angry Linus noises...