KDE install defaults to Wayland now(?), how to get X11 instead? (cuz Wayland doesn't work with the rest of my setup yet)

English Install/Boot/Login
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21

@malcolmlewis @deano_ferrari

Thank you both for the links!

And yeah, the problem the first link mentioned,
about session restore being… frankly, not ready yet,
I definitely got hit by that the last time I tried out wayland
(
I lost the way I had, eg, different windows of Dolphin/Gwenview/etc open on different virtual desktops/activities,
with tabs in various locations,
and I think it lost which Firefox windows were supposed to be on which desktops as well,
though thankfully Firefox itself handles restore of the windows and tabs themselves
)

and like, that seems like it should be… obviously a MAJOR problem??

… I mean, don’t the KDE people use their own session-restore feature??
And wouldn’t you obviously need to be able to switch between X11 and Wayland while testing???
And wouldn’t you need to be able to rely on not losing the state of your session with how you had everything you were working on set up???

… I am feeling… very confused at this whole situation.

22

I believe some of that has been solved. For example

Support is still a work in progress for external applications using other toolkits, such as Firefox. With Wayland, session restoration relies on cooperation between the Wayland compositor and individual applications, which need to support the relevant functionality themselves.

23

No no, I lost less important state from Firefox than I did from the KDE stuff like Dolphin/Gwenview/etc!

… I mean, honestly, it’s really not a nice thing to do to people,
to tell them like:

Hey, come try out this shiny new Wayland thing! It’s ready to use, new and improved!

and then when they trust you and give it a try,
it’s like them randomly kicking you in the teeth as you lose all your work setup you had before.

Like, on one hand, yeah yeah, free and open source, no guarantees, whatever, but…

… no, come on, there is a moral responsibility to not freaking lie to people about something being ready for them to use,
and that starts with them not lying to themselves,
and frankly,
it seems like lying to themselves is exactly what they’re doing!

Oh, I guess I should @kairo_at as well, just in case you discovered anything new about this situation? (ie, the KDE session restore thing, with X11 vs Wayland, not the whole thread)
Or like, if you would like to just say something like “yup, that is indeed apparently the situation – I recommend you [do thing X]”?
[Sorry, I… honestly have never been able to feel like I understand how mailing lists are supposed to work vs forums…]

24

I don’t have anything further to add on the session-restoration side. Since this concerns Plasma’s Wayland session management and the restoration of application state, the KDE developers would be better placed to comment on the current limitations and planned improvements. I can only suggest raising it through KDE’s upstream channels.

FWIW, I don’t tend to have multiple applications open when shutting down. I’m using laptops and I tend to use suspend/resume as required, and I only have one external display in addition to the laptop display. I just move windows to the desired screen when needed. (But I do understand that some users have more complex workflows.)

25

Actually, one more thing - consider using Leap 16.1 for your Plasma X11 needs. That will buy you more time for your use case.

Operating System: openSUSE Leap 16.1
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.25.0
Qt Version: 6.11.0

26

Did not know that package, looks nice but I see it is (like X11) unmaintained.

Development has moved to (input-)Leap and that seems to support Wayland (with limitations) but at the same time that projects is also dead.

The latest incarnation:

For Tumbleweed there is a package, install it using sudo zypper install deskflow.

For Deskflow Wayland works but there are Known bugs. KDE support seems to be better that other DE’s.

27

With zero repos added:

knurpht@Lenovo-P16:~> LANG=C zypper se deskflow
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

S  | Name     | Summary                                                      | Type
---+----------+--------------------------------------------------------------+--------
i+ | deskflow | Share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers | package
knurpht@Lenovo-P16:~>
28

Hmmmnn. Why not install Xfce it still has x11 support. Use it until the KDE Plasma problems had been sorted out. :wink:

29

X11 was first released in 1984.

It is only natural that this technology, which has had its day, should be phased out; this is the case with Plasma 6.8, which is Wayland-only

If you’d like to stick with X11 and something resembling KDE, there are

At your own risk.

30

A fork of Plasma 6 for X11