What I am uncomfortable with is the inability to run Wayland on older video hardware. X11 will happily run with Vesa driver on older hardware which no longer has functional 3D accelerated drivers.
What is the way forward for the retro community to run a modern Wayland system on older hardware?
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in or correct me
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.
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.:
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.
> 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.:
Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
> really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated
What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
> screenshots/screensharing was never a "feature" of X11, it was a big security hole abused as a feature.
So what was the screenshot feature of X11? Also classifying use as abuse isn't that honest, only the lack of security is
In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.
> Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (which were the first to support such mechanisms, some of them even using more direct DE-specific private protocols instead of XDG Portals).
But I spent a few seconds googling for general screenshot apps, found Flameshot (which makes sense as a cross-platform app), and it turns out that support for the XDG Portal approach was added to it almost 5 years ago:
And if you peek around the diff, you can tell that KDE/GNOME-specific support, on Wayland - using DBus but not the XDG Portals protocol - already existed, in early 2021, in fact...
That's the commit that added KDE/GNOME-specific Wayland screenshot support.
8 years ago, in a 3rd-party app!
> Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
I'd forgotten that this happened, but for screensharing from a X11 client, someone already went through the trouble of emulating it (on top of the XDG Portals + PipeWire infrastructure):
It's only a temporary hack, and it only matters for X11 clients running under XWayland - if an app can run as a native Wayland client, it should have XDG Portals-based implementations of relevant features.
> What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
Am I downplaying, or are you describing a vague category of "the best or more popular apps" without giving examples?
I feel like it's too easy for some of this stuff to end up in FUD-like arguments without considering the objective reality (of how far we've come in the past few years etc.).
Anyway, my subjective take is that X11 took a decade or two too long to die, and most (if not all) gripes users might have with Wayland can be traced back to X11 outliving its UNIX Workstation origins and having never been designed as a Personal Computing graphical environment.
Every Wayland thread is the same. Someone points out how $thing that is possible in Windows, Mac and X11 for literal decades doesn't work, and the gaslighting Wayland proponents come out of the woodwork to tell how you don't want to do that $thing anyway.
Disclaimer: I am now a happy user of Wayland with everything I need working, but clearly many others are not as fortunate.
Interesting, I always heard that x11 was not getting dropped until Plasma 7. While I am now fully on wayland myself, still not sure how to feel about this, feels a bit soon.
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.
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, also i wish they merged the virtual desktops and activities into one concept and allowed different wallpapers on each.
The theme settings is also confusing because of gtk apps, global theme etc. Feels everything around theming could be made nicer.
Prob some more nitpicks but overall it is a really great desktop environment.
> 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.
What I am uncomfortable with is the inability to run Wayland on older video hardware. X11 will happily run with Vesa driver on older hardware which no longer has functional 3D accelerated drivers.
What is the way forward for the retro community to run a modern Wayland system on older hardware?
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in or correct me
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.
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...
Oh the downplaying
> In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots
In what way is this copy&paste-like staple of general computing some "specialized" task?
Will the new opportunities include reaching "specialized" feature parity?
> In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.
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.
> 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.:
Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
> really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated
What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
> screenshots/screensharing was never a "feature" of X11, it was a big security hole abused as a feature.
So what was the screenshot feature of X11? Also classifying use as abuse isn't that honest, only the lack of security is
> So what was the screenshot feature of X11?
In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.
> Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (which were the first to support such mechanisms, some of them even using more direct DE-specific private protocols instead of XDG Portals).
But I spent a few seconds googling for general screenshot apps, found Flameshot (which makes sense as a cross-platform app), and it turns out that support for the XDG Portal approach was added to it almost 5 years ago:
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/1272
And if you peek around the diff, you can tell that KDE/GNOME-specific support, on Wayland - using DBus but not the XDG Portals protocol - already existed, in early 2021, in fact...
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/commit/a5df852268...
That's the commit that added KDE/GNOME-specific Wayland screenshot support.
8 years ago, in a 3rd-party app!
> Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
I'd forgotten that this happened, but for screensharing from a X11 client, someone already went through the trouble of emulating it (on top of the XDG Portals + PipeWire infrastructure):
https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/
It's only a temporary hack, and it only matters for X11 clients running under XWayland - if an app can run as a native Wayland client, it should have XDG Portals-based implementations of relevant features.
> What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
Am I downplaying, or are you describing a vague category of "the best or more popular apps" without giving examples?
I feel like it's too easy for some of this stuff to end up in FUD-like arguments without considering the objective reality (of how far we've come in the past few years etc.).
Anyway, my subjective take is that X11 took a decade or two too long to die, and most (if not all) gripes users might have with Wayland can be traced back to X11 outliving its UNIX Workstation origins and having never been designed as a Personal Computing graphical environment.
Every Wayland thread is the same. Someone points out how $thing that is possible in Windows, Mac and X11 for literal decades doesn't work, and the gaslighting Wayland proponents come out of the woodwork to tell how you don't want to do that $thing anyway.
Disclaimer: I am now a happy user of Wayland with everything I need working, but clearly many others are not as fortunate.
Interesting, I always heard that x11 was not getting dropped until Plasma 7. While I am now fully on wayland myself, still not sure how to feel about this, feels a bit soon.
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.
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, also i wish they merged the virtual desktops and activities into one concept and allowed different wallpapers on each.
The theme settings is also confusing because of gtk apps, global theme etc. Feels everything around theming could be made nicer.
Prob some more nitpicks but overall it is a really great desktop environment.
> 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.
What is the solution regarding the display manager? As SDDMs Wayland support is considered experimental.
What do you guys use/recommend?