Linux

The issue is that maintaining X11, like any large and old software, is a lot of work, even if it does not add features. Probably way more than you think.

And as far as I understand, the people who used to work on X11 are moving to Wayland, too. Unless volunteers pick that work up, X11 will rot and become unusable over time.

The other thing: Replacing and modernizing a very large piece of software which is so much integrated will always be a lot of work, take a lot of time, and be somewhat painful. That's just life. And there will always be early adopters and late movers - which is fine, too.

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.

Seems like it would take less effort to improve Wayland than maintain a forked DE for X11.

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.

I think realistically the best option is to stick with an older version of KDE until your issues get fixed upstream or switch to another DE.

Anyone technically literate enough to port KDE back to X11 is likely also literate enough to fix the blocking bugs.

... Unless they're doing it purely on ideological grounds, which is probably not a healthy way to run a project.

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.

Plasma and Gentoo user here.

The transition has been so uneventful and simple that I didn't even noticed. I run some 15 desktops with different mixed hardware setups and use VNC / RDP sometimes too.

One day I started noticing on some desktops Wayland was now in use, by chance. Then I started taking notice.

I can say the ones moved to Wayland are smoother, but might be aneddotical. Beside that, cannot care less about X11 or Wayland, they both work just fine for all my use cases.

For the sake of future, welcome Wayland!

/smallrant Sorry for X11, have to say I have been in the business since kernel version 2 and I DO NOT miss losing X11, its a bunch of half assed half baked spaghetti tech that has done its own time and would not have kept up with life. /rantover.

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.

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

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?

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 have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.

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).

In fairness, x11 is a bit of a dumpster fire and has been as long as I've used Linux (since 2003).

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 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.

we should get some "it isnt ready yet" t-shirts made for the legacy folks.

Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn't happened yet. I don't think there is anything wrong with this.

There's a couple new things being worked on; namely, Wayback and Phoenix.

Checkout the Wayback project on fdo