Wayland vs X11

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

Nate Graham - 31.10.24, 03:24:19 MEZ:
> 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? And what changes would
> be sufficient for you to switch back?
> 
> The reason I'm asking is because Plasma and KWin devs are pretty much
> all-in on Wayland now, and I'd like to know what still needs improvement
> to get us 100% distro coverage.
> 
> Private replies are fine if you're not comfortable sharing publicly.

The default for Plasma 6 in Debian is Wayland. Plasma 6 is still in Debian 
experimental. Transition to unstable to make sure it lands in next stable 
is being planned and can hopefully happen soon, depending on coordination 
with the release team. I am not aware of any plans to change the Wayland 
default and I would stick to the Wayland default unless we know anything 
better.

The following is with the my user hat on, thus I am not speaking for the 
Debian Qt/KDE team:

I like to share a showstopper that caused me to switch back to X11 on my 
laptop for work. I am using Devuan with KDE Plasma 6 from Debian 
experimental.

In Firefox on Wayland with Nextcloud WebRTC video chat during someone else 
sharing a screen once I enabled full screen display I got a black display 
instead of the screen contents. Switching back to windowed display made 
the screen contents from the sharing reappear again.

Before Firefox did not support fractional scaling on Wayland, but that 
apparently has been solved meanwhile.

I try from time to time to switch to Wayland and while it works on limited 
use systems like a laptop for playing music and a ThinkPad X1 Gen 1 tablet 
I rarely use, I got little issues like this on my heavy use laptops. I 
switched to X11 on my main private and freelance use laptop. Might be for 
the same reason as with the work laptop, but I do not remember clearly at 
the moment.

I intend to switch to Wayland once again after Plasma 6 transitioned to 
Debian Unstable and during a time I have enough time to then actually 
report any remaining issues I find in case they are not yet reported. But I 
thought I share the full screen WebRTC chat issue with Nextcloud in 
Firefox as I am not sure you are aware of that. Of cause with the pace of 
Firefox development it might be fixed already since it has been some months 
and another major Firefox update just having been uploaded to the archive 
yesterday.

Best,
-- 
Martin