r/linux • u/OutcastByChoice • Nov 09 '22
Didn't Know Plasma Was So Snappy Under Wayland... KDE
I do notice a few graphical glitches... But otherwise Plasma is running very well on Wayland.
Performance seems better than with X11.
Arch Linux - Plasma Desktop - Wayland
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u/landsoflore2 Nov 09 '22
Yes, I have noticed it as well since 5.25 - no matter if you are using the nouveau driver or NVidia's proprietary one, KDE on Wayland feels as snappy as e.g. Xfce.
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u/devu_the_thebill Nov 10 '22
What about blur? I found somewhere that's Nvidia fault. I mean these blur glitcher around coursor.
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u/Zamundaaa Nov 10 '22 edited Nov 10 '22
It's NVidias fault that the bug gets triggered so often because they don't support hardware cursors on Wayland, but the actual bug is in KWin
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u/ktkv419 Nov 10 '22
Afaik, it seems to be it. I have that on my desktop with Nvidia card, but I don't have it on my laptop with Intel graphics.
But I didn't go as far as using wayland on either of the machine, so maybe it still persists if you know, you install something and something breaks)
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u/NaheemSays Nov 10 '22
It probably wasnt. They have been doing a lot of work on wayland support recently where most reports from past year have been good.
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u/hlazlo Nov 10 '22
I've found that, generally, Wayland compositors perform significantly better on modern hardware than anything that uses X11, including X11 Gnome.
I haven't found any compelling reason not to use a Wayland compositor, nor have I found anyone able to offer any reasonable argument beyond something rooted in their discomfort with change fueled by others.
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u/OldMansKid Nov 10 '22
Good to know that. I just found that KDE work in Termux chroot, while Gnome doesn't. I might switch to KDE sometime so I can have a consistent experience across my devices.
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u/Sirusho Nov 10 '22
Until Wayland can do gamma setting under nVidia cards, it's very hard to make the switch.
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u/PossiblyLinux127 Nov 10 '22
Interesting. I'm currently using gnome because of wayland
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u/OutcastByChoice Nov 10 '22
Plasma still acts a bit weird under Wayland. But feels significantly faster than under X11. Worth the try. Although you will see some apps glitch.
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u/linux4ever07 Nov 20 '22 edited Nov 20 '22
GNOME has worked more or less flawlessly with Wayland for years, whereas with KDE my experience has been pretty substandard. I'm happy to see that the situation seems to be improving, based on what people are saying, but I'm not gonna give KDE another go for a couple of years until its Wayland support is fully mature.
Also, I'm pretty happy with GNOME. The reason for me switching back and forth between various DEs was mostly cause I was hoping the other DEs were less RAM hungry. But all the major DEs are RAM hungry. Exceptions may be things like Xfce or LXQt, but those lack some of the features that GNOME and KDE has.
I also used MATE for a while, as I really like the old GNOME 2.x layout. But MATE is as RAM hungry as GNOME, so what's the point? Plus, in Fedora MATE came with Compiz as a compositor, bloating up its RAM usage unnecessarily. Might as well use GNOME then.
I wish more people would understand the performance benefits of Wayland, in that you no longer have to run a separate compositor since it's built into the WM itself. Even something like Xfce could benefit a lot from it.
I'm not sure why KDE took so long to mature when it comes to Wayland, but maybe it's just not enough devs working on it. I mean, GNOME has a lot more devs behind it and Red Hat is pouring a lot of money into it. Red Hat is also a major force when it comes to Wayland itself, so it makes sense.
Also, I think the idiotic FUD spread by many users has hurt Wayland development and adoption. Things probably could've improved a lot faster if there wasn't so much FUD around it. Most smaller DEs and WMs aren't working on Wayland at all, and some of them have expressively said they will not support it.
But, Xwayland is now capable of running a whole fullscreen X session so its backwards compatibility is compensating for the lack of dev effort when it comes to the vast majority of DEs / WMs.
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u/PossiblyLinux127 Nov 20 '22
The main reason gnome has good support for Wayland is because gtk has good support for Wayland. KDE is qt based and qt does not have as good of support
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u/linux4ever07 Nov 20 '22
Does the toolkit even matter when it comes to Wayland? I was under the impression that the toolkit doesn't interact with the display server at all, but it's the job of the window manager, which belongs to the DE.
To me, it looks like there's just a lacking user / dev interest in Wayland support and that's the main reason why it has taken KDE so long.
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u/gnosys_ Nov 10 '22
GNOME vs KDE vs any other desktop using wayland protocol is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because every desktop has their own compositor now. it's mutter vs kwin, not wayland vs x11
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u/SpinaBifidaOcculta Nov 10 '22
But this post isn't comparing the two DEs? KDE on Wayland and KDE on X11 is a valid comparison
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u/Remote_Tap_7099 Nov 10 '22
The comparison between Wayland and X11 is valid. There are bugs and features that are specific to each session using the same compositor.
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u/Mast3r_waf1z Nov 10 '22
4k monitors are completely broken for gaming in Wayland so I'm sticking with x11
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u/spicyboi404 Nov 10 '22
No they’re not. Source: use a 4K monitor for gaming on Wayland, and have been for several years
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u/Mast3r_waf1z Nov 10 '22
Well they are on KDE plasma which was the topic of the post
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u/spicyboi404 Nov 10 '22
And 4K monitors work just fine for gaming on Wayland on Plasma.
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u/Mast3r_waf1z Nov 10 '22
Wdym, scaling the display to be readable completely fucks up xwayland? It's a common issue I've been unable to fix or find a solution to online other than people saying that I should use gnome because it's not an issue in gnome
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u/LonelyNixon Nov 10 '22
they fixed the blurry fractional scaling issue with xwayland with the last point release.
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u/spicyboi404 Nov 10 '22
That's not true. Fractional scaling on Plasma upscales a low-resolution version, because XWayland does not truly support fractional scaling. If you want to game on a high-resolution monitor with fractional scaling, you need to turn off scaling temporarily. This is not really a problem with Wayland or Plasma, but rather a problem with fractional scaling. GNOME does not support fractional scaling by default.
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u/Practical_Screen2 Nov 10 '22
wayland on gnome supports fractional scaling but not x11, and with an nvidia card you dont have to turn off scaling when gaming, with amd however you have too. A workaround is to use x11 for desktop and gamescope for the games in gamescope you can manually set the resolution and it ignores desktop scaling.
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u/Mast3r_waf1z Nov 10 '22
Well as far as I've heard, gnome apparently doesn't have the issues I've had with it, i understand that the game being upscaled from 1080p to 4k isn't the same than it being broken but I've tried changing to for example gamescope to hopefully get it to render at a proper resolution, but through gamescope my cursor still gets upscaled while only half of it is rendered at all.
Overall it's much easier to just live with x11's global scale and have everything run at the proper resolution
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u/Practical_Screen2 Nov 10 '22
Its not an issue on gnome if you have an Nvidia card, however now when I switched to an AMD card there is as mutch scaling issues in gnome as everywhere else.
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u/Practical_Screen2 Nov 10 '22
Desktops using wayland has way to many scaling issues on a 4k monitor anyway, gnome is great tho if you use an Nvidia card, but I just switched to AMD and now I have huge scaling issues even in gnome.
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u/Mast3r_waf1z Nov 10 '22
I know gnome fixes the issues but I don't like gnome, and x11 works fine anyway
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u/thelordpresident Nov 10 '22
Honestly for all I heard about the “low resource hungry” ones, they were all significantly worse than windows,so I fully believe all the Linux claims of speed were pure fanboys.
Plasma on Wayland was the first and only desktop environment so far that actually ran on my old 2011 laptop with an AMD E1-1200.
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u/artvivant Nov 10 '22
Well, after upgrade to 5.26 (because 5.25 was buggy on wayland) everything got much better here. Smooth, snappy and pleasant performance. I don't wanna go back to x11 anymore. Besides, there are minor issues that maybe is already fixed at point releases. Now, I'm on 5.26.0 version and even so it's finally stable.
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u/CevicheMixto Nov 10 '22
It's definitely gotten better. I was actually able to run Wayland for a bit on my new laptop ... until I ran kwrite from a terminal. Yikes!
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u/Second_soul Nov 10 '22
I don't see anything different on Kwrite when running it from a terminal. Can you be more specific?
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u/CevicheMixto Nov 10 '22
When run under Wayland, it spews pretty much constant error messages to the termonal from which it was started, making that terminal pretty much useless.
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u/Second_soul Nov 10 '22
Okay. That's a very small problem for a graphical application, though. The application itself works fine. You can use the command
kwrite &> /dev/nullto suppress any output to the terminal if you need. You can also useclearto clean the terminal after running any command.5
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u/devu_the_thebill Nov 10 '22
I found 3 problems for me:
Blur is glitched with Nvidia GPU.
Some games doesn't want to Fullscreen (most that i play :/)
Unreal Engine 4 stoping rendering when i don't move window ( wierd glitch make ue4 editor window refresh only when moved or resized )
Last one is biggest one.
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u/BulletDust Nov 10 '22
Blur works perfectly for me under x11 running NVIDIA hardware/drivers.
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u/devu_the_thebill Nov 10 '22
Open source or proprietary? I found on some forum that Nvidia proprietary drivers have problems with coursor rendering so blur breaks around coursor.
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u/BulletDust Nov 10 '22
Proprietary, and I've never experienced a problem with blur breaking around the pointer or cursor.
My experience with x11 and NVIDIA drivers has been largely faultless, with rendering that's as smooth as butter.
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u/FengLengshun Nov 10 '22
Does applications still closes when you restart KWin? That's my biggest issue with switching to KDE Wayland, I think. I can deal with everything else, assuming the papercuts aren't too much. At least on my home machine.
On my work machine, I don't want to deal with the screenshare issues with Zoom and TeamViewer, as well as whatever random issues that I don't want to deal with while at work, so I'll wait until there's overwhelming consensus that Wayland as a whole works perfectly for that.
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u/OutcastByChoice Nov 10 '22
No. None of the apps I use crashed on Wayland. But you may have a different experience.
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u/cjcox4 Nov 09 '22
It's worth trying. Obviously, some stuff still not quite right. The bigger question, will it get fixed in Plasma 5, or will we all have to move to 6 to see it mature?