Wayland vs X11

[A. Wilcox]

On Oct 30, 2024, at 9:24 PM, 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? 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.
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> 
> 
> Nate

Hi Nate!

We’re still working on packaging KDE 6, and we’re quite excited to eventually land Wayland, but right now we have to use X11 because we support systems that don’t have full DRM support (i.e. rage128) and big-endian systems that have issues with GBM formats (i.e. PowerPC 64, SPARC).

Mesa has landed a GBM fix that looks good[1], and I’ve been able to see marked improvements in Weston, so I’m hoping it fixes Plasma’s colour issues as well.  Then it would just be getting DRM support for the chipsets we support.

Again, I’m actually really excited about the improvements Wayland should bring - and looking forward to the simplification of packaging it.  X.Org is a sprawling set of hundreds (literally) of packages, all with separate releases and versions and stuff.  So Wayland is definitely something I would love to see.

Best,
-A. Wilcox (she/her)
Platform Maintainer, Adélie Linux

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/31707
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