Tackling remaining Wayland related issues (was: Re: Remembering Konsole sessions)
Hi Gary, hi.
Gary Dale - 14.03.25, 14:35:00 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit:
> >> Was the behavior changed, or am I missing something?
> >
> > It changed: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461780
>
> I find KDE-Wayland to be a real pain. In addition to this problem, it
> restores all open programs to the centre of virtual desktop 1 no matter
> where they were on shutdown. The sole exception to this seems to be
> GKrellM which keeps its position but still on desktop 1 instead of the
> one it used to be on.
I wonder how about to tackle all those remaining issues.
I look forward to test Plasma on Wayland again. But from reading about all
of the remaining Wayland issues on this list I feel reluctant to do so.
However without testing and reporting remaining issues that are not yet
reported the situation might be unlikely to improve. While upstream as far
as I know intends to keep Plasma on X11 running until the release of
Plasma 7, at one point X11 support is likely to be dropped. Also a certain
Debian Qt/KDE developer likes to nag about X11 support breaking things :).
And I basically agree: Wayland is the more modern approach with way less
legacy issues and baggage. I believe there is a reason for upstream
splitting out X11 parts of kwin into its own compositor, likely to appear
with Plasma 6.4.
However I really get your pain, Gary. Whenever I switched in the past to
see whether things work on Wayland it usually took less than a day and I
was back on X11 again. For my main systems. A ThinkPad X1 Gen 1 tablet and
my music laptop, a ThinkPad X260, are switched over to Wayland since quite
a while. But on my main systems for private and freelance stuff as well as
work I use a lot of different applications including some games and so far
always something did not work on Wayland. I mostly use Debian packages
apps and games, but also some stuff installed in a containerized approach
as Flatpaks which needs further integration to make things work. On X11
all of this works. On Wayland so far not so. Most does… but anyway, my
last test has been a while, so I hope to test again after completing some
other currently more important tasks.
I remember similar cycles with Pulseaudio for example. Or with Network
Manager. It took years over years for those to finally work okay for me.
And it was painful.
The switch to Pipewire was an exception. It mostly works. But currently it
does not seem to detect whether I plugged in head phones or not. Sound
still comes out of laptop speakers when head phones are plugged in. I
remember this worked after switching but got broke by some update.
Off topic part:
I complicate all of this for myself as I run Devuan¹ with Runit. And thus
things like this may also be related to some service that should be run
but is not running. While I took over Alpine Linux approach to start
Pipewire via XDG auto start, it could be I missed something. I doubt it,
but it could still be.
But on the other hand I just love the predictability of a Runit based
system. All of these strange behaviors with policy based decisions and
bugs within Systemd that I encountered on various systems are gone. But on
the other hand, I sometimes need to take care to make things work on my
own. And Debian on Systemd is much better tested than Debian on another
init. Especially for desktop environments. It is a mixed bag. I do not
intend to go deeper into this here as it is off topic. And of course no
offense meant to all of you who run Debian with Systemd :). For me it is
about choice, so choose whatever works best for you!
[1] As most of you probably know: Devuan is based on Debian and most
packages are identical. But due to forking some packages it becomes much
easier to run another init system like Runit. But it is also still
possible to run other init systems in Debian as well. Switching is more
painful though.
Best,
--
Martin
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