diff --git a/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland-small.webp b/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland-small.webp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3119c00 Binary files /dev/null and b/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland-small.webp differ diff --git a/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland.webp b/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland.webp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..86d1f6e Binary files /dev/null and b/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland.webp differ diff --git a/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/index.md b/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f2812bf --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +--- +title: "Plasma & Kate on Wayland end of 2021" +date: 2021-12-18T19:25:00+02:00 +draft: false +categories: [kde] +tags: [kde] +url: /posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/ +author: "Christoph Cullmann" +resources: + - name: "featured-image-preview" + src: "images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland-small.webp" +--- + +## Wayland, the future after X11 + +Since years [Wayland](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/) based compositors are promoted as the successors to the venerable [X.org](https://www.x.org) X11 display server. + +In the embedded space it seems Wayland already has made a lot of progress and some distributions start to use it per default, too. + +## My experience of the past years + +I tried Wayland over the last few years multiple times, but I most often needed to go back to X11 due to random crashes/displaying issues/... (independent of the compositor, I tried a few). +I just had always bad luck with the drivers and Wayland. +On top of that came issues in the remaining stack, too. + +Unfortunately, as long as my setup didn't run Wayland at all in any stable way, I didn't really spend a lot of time to actually debug/fix issues even in Kate or KTextEditor. +It's just easier to scratch your own itch then to invest time in stuff you not use yourself at all. + +## My experience end of 2021 + +Two months ago, I tried Wayland once more on my [Arch Linux](https://archlinux.org) machine after some short journey to FreeBSD ;) + +And great, it worked out of the box. +Not random crashing of the compositor, no strange fractals on my second screen, all fine. + +Now that I can use KDE Plasma & Kate on my normal machine on Wayland every day, I started to get more drive to take a look at remaining Wayland issues. + +Aleix Pol Gonzalez & David Edmundson did a fantastic job to help out with remaining issues. + +Naturally, not all is perfect for Kate on Wayland, e.g. you still get with each start some + +> qt.qpa.wayland: Wayland does not support QWindow::requestActivate() + +indicating not all kinds of window activation work as intended at the moment. + +But the 21.12 release of Kate should at least have the most obvious issues fixed. + +I use now the KDE Plasma Wayland session as my daily driver since two months without any large issues. +I not once had a compositor crash nor any strange displaying issues. + +As mentioned above, still small issues remain to be fixed for Kate (and for sure for other applications, too). + +But beside Chromium & Wine (even sandboxed as extra user) that still run via XWayland all other parts run native. + +Thanks to all people that worked on this to make it happen. +I really was impressed after I gave Wayland a try again how well all parts nowadays work together. +Let's continue to improve that in the next years even more! + +## My current KDE Plasma on Wayland session ;=) + +Even [Wine](https://www.winehq.org/) based gaming in parallel to coding is possible, awesome! + +
+ +## Try it out! + +I can encourage all to give Wayland a try, if you are on some up-to-date distribution like Arch Linux. +At least on my mid-class AMD graphics card Wayland works flawless with the open-source driver. +Naturally the experience can differ for other setups, like it did for me in the past. + +## Help out! + +If you encounter issues, please report them as bug reports to the respective upstream projects. +And naturally, any help in fixing them would be welcome, too. +For Kate/KTextEditor I might be able to at least reproduce and try to fix them now myself, given I use it now daily, thought other projects might rely more on external contributors to get the rough edges fledged out.