Trying to run KDE 6 Plasma with Wayland....

[MG]

Sometimes, correctly understanding the dependency graph and specifying what should be a dependency and what should NOT be a dependency is in fact the important thing, the theme of the conversation. But this thread is about something else. Something else is the theme of this thread.

Ports and dependencies were an issue long before anyone knew about Wayland.

This thread is about Wayland. All posts are supposed to revolve around Wayland, and the showstoppers that stand in the way of Wayland.

Dependencies and generally running/compiling KDE are NOT of interest in this thread. Therefore, they are off-topic. Please start another thread if you want to talk about dependencies and generally running KDE.

Participants in this conversation already know about dependencies and running KDE, that stuff is already ironed out, and is of no importance to the crowd. The important part is Wayland - and whatever's getting in the way.

 

[MG]

It's about KDE running on a graphical screen provided by the Wayland display server? I have it installed as dependency of something X-related but never used it specifically. Is it possible to run a Wayland screen without anything else and not depending on X.org?

 

[astyle]

It's about KDE running on a graphical screen provided by the Wayland display server? I have it installed as dependency of something X-related but never used it specifically. Is it possible to run a Wayland screen without anything else and not depending on X.org?

Wayland is a protocol. Weston (a compositor) is a reference implementation of that protocol.

KDE's kwin is KDE's own implementation of a compositor that implements the Wayland protocol. And yes, it's separate from kwin-x11.

In this thread/conversation, even the very term dependency has a somewhat different meaning than in the context of ports/packages.

I'd advise you to catch up on the contents of this thread, play with what's available, and report on what works.

Yeah, the port graphics/wayland is a dependency of a LOT of other ports in the Ports Collection - that is of no importance to this thread.

But to answer your question:

Is it possible to run a Wayland screen without anything else and not depending on X.org?

Yeah, it's possible, the Handbook walks you through installing a few such compositors.

 

[siladi]

What I am interested in is reliably surving a compositor crash, ala x11. To this day, it's not a question of if , it's a matter of when a wayland session will crash.

 

[Maxnix]

What I am interested in is reliably surving a compositor crash, ala x11. To this day, it's not a question of if , it's a matter of when a wayland session will crash.

In my experience I had some sporadic crashes when adding/removing items from a panel, but after few seconds plasmashell just restarted.

 

[siladi]

In my experience I had some sporadic crashes when adding/removing items from a panel, but after few seconds plasmashell just restarted.

And the running apps survive and reconnect to the wayland session? I know that QT_WAYLAND_RECONNECT is a thing in QT6 ... not sure if GTK4 has something for that. Perhaps I should reframe it as a stoic exercise

 

[Maxnix]

And the running apps survive and reconnect to the wayland session?

All running programs where unffected (I wasn't logged out), just Plasma restarted.

I know that QT_WAYLAND_RECONNECT is a thing in QT6

Yes, it's automatically set.

 

[siladi]

This is regarding surviving compositor crash and not loosing app state.
Looked a bit more into the wayland socket handover situation and according to the very dated resources available (link below) it seems that:

- QT6 apps you get the best reliability
- QT5 apps mmmaybe
- GTK4 being worked on (maybe)
- rest of the universe (sdl, xwayland,wine, etc...) not yet

There are apparently also wayland socket handover patches for other compositors as well (sway,labwc,dwm,hyprland) . not merged of course...

Restarting · Wiki · Plasma / KWin · GitLab

Easy to use, but flexible, Wayland Compositor

invent.kde.org

GitHub - Ferdi265/wl-restart: restart your compositor when it crashes

restart your compositor when it crashes. Contribute to Ferdi265/wl-restart development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

That about captures the current state of the union. If someone knows more about this, please chime in.

 

[astyle]

What I am interested in is reliably surving a compositor crash, ala x11. To this day, it's not a question of if , it's a matter of when a wayland session will crash.

The reliability of apps surviving a compositor crash is actually pretty good, and not a showstopper any more, to the best of my knowledge.

What remains a showstopper is the page flip timeout bug that seems to be triggered most often by KDE Plasma Wayland sessions. It's an AMD GPU firmware driver bug, but it is one hell of a showstopper when the driver crashes, and takes the whole system down with it, complete with kernel panics on both Linux and BSDs. There's some noise that NVidia users have similar issues, and that downgrading the NVidia firmwares can help.

I've had apps like Konsole and Firefox get restarted after a GPU driver crash (which took the whole system down and forced me to do a hard reboot). After logging back in, I noticed that Firefox remembered its tabs (default behavior under both Xorg and Wayland). Konsole, OTOH, while it did get restarted with the 5 tabs I had open in a Konsole window, I was logged out of SSH sessions, and root sessions that I had open in a couple tabs. Not that much of a problem there, I'd say, but instead a good practice and graceful handling of the crash.