Re: Wayland vs X11

[Bernhard Rosenkränzer]

On Thursday, October 31, 2024 03:24 CET, Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> wrote:

> Hello distro folks!
> 
> Today I have an open-ended question for you. As you're aware, Plasma 6.0 
> switched to Wayland by default. Those of you who switched your 
> distribution back to X11, what were the reasons?

Hi,
in OpenMandriva, we still switch back to X11 - while wayland works for most of us, every time we try to default to wayland, we get lots of bug reports that essentially come down to 3 issues (all of which seem to be problems with wayland itself, not so much Plasma's use of it):

1. It's unstable in VirtualBox (not that much of a surprise given VBox has no working GPU acceleration, but no matter how often we ask reviewers to use qemu and virtio, they keep using VBox)
2. Power consumption goes up quite a bit on some hardware. In particular one guy keeps complaining about this - when he starts a Wayland session, his laptop heats up noticably and battery life is half of what it used to be. I gather he is using an older AMD integrated GPU [but one that works well in general, he can play 3D games]. Some other people are seeing this too, just not to the same extent.
3. Some Windows applications that are supposed to run full screen run full screen in wine on X11, but become a small window in the top left corner in wine on Wayland

When those are fixed (or the users complaining about 1. can be "fixed" to use qemu ;) ), we'll make another attempt.

FWIW we package both sessions, so users can use the Wayland session already, it's just not the default after installation.

ttyl
bero