Going all-in on a Wayland future
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
12 replies
X11 is already dead IMO, if you didn't move yet (still on i3wmfor example), it's time to upgrade.
I'm proudly retro computing then. X serves me well.
@idriss
Some things just don't work properly on Wayland. For example, #NoMachine remote #Plasma desktop sessions connect, show a white screen, then disconnect. Switching to an X11 session solves the problem. This is a showstopper, so I'm sticking with X.Org.
@ashleythorne
If things work for the user then I don't see the need to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. Future is with Wayland for sure but if things are okay for them right now, not that much reason to switch
@idriss @Saapas It's still an upgrade we've known for over two decades that we needed. The X protocol is inherently insecure by design - showing its age. If Wayland manages to nudge us a little closer to the reality of today, that's a good thing - even if it comes bundled with some diaper rash.
We are at a weird place right now. The original problem solved by x11 is more relevant than ever. The security model, however, is not.
What is that problem? I'm not knowledgeable about those protocols.
Basically X11 lets everything it does talk to everything else it does. There’s minimal isolation and there’s not a clean way to do that in x11 without fundamentally changing how it works and breaking compatibility. There were also other issues to were too messy to solve without breaking things. So it was better to just start over. And now we have Wayland.
One example of this is you could have Firefox and a terminal window up in an x11 environment and Firefox could theoretically see everything you are typing in the terminal window.
I think they wanted to know about the original problem solved by X11
Well we used to need a way for work to be done centrally because powerful matches were expensive. So X11s idea was just do everything remotely and draw the results locally. Then machines go cheaper so X11 was modified to render more locally processed stuff.
Now, we have thin clients, Citrix, and Remote Desktop what are much less efficient than the old X11 approach.
I wish I could be excited for this, but there are still many things missing or buggy in Wayland.
I assumed this stage had already happened.