Bug #15329 and window positioning

[Albert Vaca Cintora]

I totally share Tobias' pain. Wayland made lots of things harder for app
developers and it brought a lot of desktop fragmentation too.

For example, Yakuake used to be able to place itself on the top of the
screen. Nowadays, I maintain an extension for Gnome [1] to reposition it
because our code is Plasma-only.

On-screen keyboards, color pickers, KDE Connect remote input, screenshot
apps... all of those broke under Wayland.

I'm just an app developer and I'm sure there are good reasons (both
technical and political) for all of this on the server side, but it's a bit
fishy if we haven't solved all those problems in the 18 years that Wayland
exists. They are simple problems.

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4757/yakuake/

On Tue, Oct 20, 2026, 07:35 Tobias Leupold <tl at stonemx.de> wrote:

> E-Mail von Tag Howard vom Montag, 19. Oktober 2026, 21:37:
> >  1. That quite simple code is less simple than you think. What if a
> monitor
> >  is unplugged/rearranged? What if the system scale changes? What if the
> user
> >  doesn't *want* you to restore your window state (preferences, window
> rules,
> >  tilers, etc.). There are reasons the protocol exists.
> >  2. There is no component that is sytemd-specific, don't know where you
> got
> >  that idea
> >  3. xdg_session_management_v1 is supported by kwin and mutter, it is not
> >  experimental
> >  4. There is no such thing as a patched wayland in this context
> >  5. ext-zones is not needed for session restore, only for apps that have
> >  multiple windows which need to be positioned relative to each other. And
> >  again, enabling it just a plugin, not some patched version of kwin
> > There's no big conspiracy to break you apps or kill openrc or whatever.
> > We're all just people trying to make kool stuff happen. Sometimes that
> takes
> > time. Sometimes it has rough edges. But at the end of the day I think it
> > will be well worth the effort.
>
> Thinking about it, I think the core problem here is also a communication
> problem.
>
> I have no doubt that you all are just people trying to make kool stuff
> happen.
> After all, I hope I'm also one of those ;-) But what happens is: People
> like
> me bitch about Wayland, and people like you are pissed like "We put all
> our
> effort in this, and people keep complaining".
>
> It may be that X11 is ancient, flawed, badly designed etc., Wayland is the
> future and so on. But here, we are at said communication problem. From and
> "end-developer"'s view, using X11, I see my desktop, and I can place my
> program where I want. I store where it was, and I move it there on the
> next
> start. Using Wayland, I also see my desktop, but placement is broken.
>
> Same for "the simple code is not as simple as one may think": The code to
> save
> and restore a window position *is* simple. And when somebody uses that, he
> or
> she doesn't care if the other side under the hood is complex. Same for all
> the
> Qt stuff we use: I don't care if some class I use is complex under the
> hood. I
> mean, qstring.cpp has 12,866 lines of code as of now. That is some middle-
> sized project on its own – and I simply use it without thinking about this.
>
> I'd also be totally happy if one said "you can't do this this way anymore,
> if
> you want to also support Wayland, you have to do the following and port
> your
> stuff". But as of now, there simply seems to be no way to do it.
>
> Of course, such a transition is not easy and has rough edges. Only think
> about
> the KDE 3 transition to Qt 4 back then (the older folks here may remember
> it).
> A lot of breakage, a lot of missing functionality – but in the end, it was
> worth it. I hope, the Wayland transition will have the same outcome.
>
> I think the window placement problem is such a central feature and such a
> highly disputed issue that one should improve the communication here.
> Maybe,
> we could add some wiki page simply explaining what's the problem, how we
> want
> to solve it, what's the current state and above all why it's worth it.
> Both
> for end-users and also for devs.
>
> After all, we're the Flagship Linux Desktop, no?!
>
> Again, thanks a lot for working on this!
>
>
>
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