plasma & kate & wayland

content/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/index.md

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+---
+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!
+
+<center><a href="/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland.webp" target="_blank"><img width=700 src="/posts/plasma-kate-wayland-2021/images/plasma-kate-diablo-wayland-small.webp"></a></center>
+
+## 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.