I hope it sticks around and is refined further. I started using KDE maybe six months back, after not having touched it in probably 10ish years. Back then I hated KDE but now it’s absolutely my favorite DE. Having regularly used virtual desktops before my switch to KDE, activities are a pretty big part of what I’m loving about the experience. The feature can be clunky in certain ways (mainly moving apps between activities), and I’d love to see further refinement, but even at its current state of implementation it helps so much with my own workflow.
At the moment I run 6 activities: “Default” which generally has a web browser open to my Proxmox servers’ web panel, as well as a terminal, “Gaming”, “Media”, Work (Primary), Work (Secondary), and then “Other” for random crap that doesn’t fit any of the main activities. I have hotkeys set up to easily switch between them, and each taskbar has different pinned apps.
Unfortunately I’m not really a coder so I can’t contribute directly to maintaining it but I do hope the feature is either refined or merged into virtual desktops in a way that keeps its core benefits.
Exactly (at least in my experience). I have my gaming apps pinned in my gaming activity, and my work apps in my work activities. The only annoyance there is when certain apps open in the “wrong” activity. For instance, I pretty much always have the Kate text editor up in my gaming activity because I play games with a million mods and constantly have to fix things. Because of that, when I need Kate for work it’ll tend to open an instance in the gaming activity and I have to move it in the clunky way stuff gets moved between activities.
I know it has it, but at least for me I find activities to be more beneficial. I really like being able to customize them for each purpose. I’m also not sure if you can set custom hotkeys to go to a specific virtual desktop like you can with activities.
Obviously if activities get removed from KDE I’ll go back to using virtual desktops but until then I’ll make the most of them.
Especially under load, KDE is a freezing mess. Copying back a backup (under 100GB) and I literally cannot move my cursor.
Meanwhile crashing programs make the shell unresponsive too. Like, there is no seperation?
The performance issues literally are so bad I considered moving back to Windows. Or GNOME with some Zorin/Oeron shell modifications. Probably GNOME, but many apps are unusable and they have no fractional scaling??
I am looking so much forward to cosmic, even though I dont see at all how it should be a complete desktop soon. But Wayland only, written in Rust, from scratch exactly for the modern use case… its awesome!
Like, KDE will never be memory safe, they are bound to Qt.
Yeah, Plasma isn’t great under heavy IO and as far as I can tell that’s not really getting fixed in Plasma 6. It’s one of the biggest problems I have with it right now. On faster storage it’s not really a problem, especially on SSDs, but on slower storage it can definitely be. I would recommend trying a different desktop.
GNOME is generally heavier than Plasma, but might indeed perform better in the scenario. You don’t have to use GNOME with GNOME applications if you don’t like them. You can easily use GNOME Shell and Plasma applications. There other desktops worth a try outside of GNOME and Plasma, tho. LXQt should be very fast. Enlightenment even more so.
Also, I don’t think memory safety is among KDE’s biggest concerns. Qt afaik handles a lot of the memory management and it is a professional toolkit which has received a lot of testing. It shouldn’t be too problematic. Writing memory safe code is also much easier in C++ than it is in C. Yeah, Rust is better, but it doesn’t seem to me like this is something that’s causing that many problems in KDE.
For me, yes: Wayland doesn’t work at all and the only answer I can get is that it’s because of Nvidia. That’s stupid because until some update broke it, it worked. Most apps were just very buggy.
For years Nvidia tried pushing an alternative Linux driver called EGL, everyone told them it couldn't support Wayland
Eventually Nvidia tried to implement EGL backends to Gnome and KDE (this resulted in the buggy apps). Nvidia then declared their new cards would support GBM.
This leaves the 10xx-30xx cards stuck on EGL with no one supporting the EGL backends. Nvidia have made it so GBM support can't be added by outsiders to those cards either.
All of Wayland is based on EGL. What you are referring to are EGLStreams vs GBM which are both libraries using EGL. Nvidia drivers now support GBM for all supported GPUs via a support library that comes with the driver (libnvidia-egl-gbm https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/510.39.01/README/gbm.html). There should be no difference in the GPU generation used.
For troubleshooting, I recommend
For trouble shooting recommend https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia, checking whether all kwin backends are installed (kwin-wayland-backend-* on Ubuntu). Sometimes there's also a problem with the missing OpenGL backends of Qt. An easy check to see whether there is a problem with the proprietary driver is to try out whether the problem also exists using nouveau.
The reason I’m speaking up is that I am sick and tired of people buying nvidia and then bitching that it doesn’t work. Not people who already had nvidia hardware or received it secondhand. People who keep buying nvidia laptops and cards and bitching that it doesn’t work all the time, especially with the transition to Wayland.
I stated the reason that this is the case, confirmed by the leader of the kernel, and you’re turning it into “I don’t care what Linus thinks.” It’s not elitism. The fact is that nvidia doesn’t care about Linux as much as Intel and AMD do. That’s just facts. And there’s no hope of this ever changing unless Linux users start boycotting nvidia.
Why do you care so much about those people? Why not just let them live with the consequences of their own actions?
As a Linux user, you will never be able to boycott Nvidia. Linux users make up about 3% of computer users. It won’t matter to Nvidia if 3% of anything boycott their products.
I’ve used Linux long enough to know that refusing to be complacent can lead to positive change. I’ve seen it firsthand.
We didn’t always have such good hardware support on Linux. People refused to accept crappy binary blobs and ndiswrapper for other things, and won. Having the attitude that you don’t want to listen to Linus because you love nvidia so much doesn’t help.
Okay. I’d like to know how a boycott will lead to positive change.
According to Steam’s latest hardware survey in August, Linux systems make up 1.82% of all hardware. I’d prefer to use this over the StatCounter statistic, since Steam’s survey data more accurately represents Nvidia’s target demographic for their graphics cards.
Let’s say all Linux users start boycotting Nvidia. I will assume that 60% of them are already on AMD cards since as you’ve described, they have better Linux support.
So the remaining 40% of those 1.82% (approx. 0.73%) can now start boycotting Nvidia and lose them additional sales.
So of the 98.9% of the gamer demographic (100% - AMD Linux users) that Nvidia could market to, they would lose 0.73 / 98.9 = approx. 0.7% of their sales.
How can a boycott that lowers their sales by up to 0.7% at best improve hardware support? I get that each individual person will be improving their own situation by switching to a card with better support, but I don’t understand how it will incentivize Nvidia to improve their Linux support.
I’ve been using Linux since 2004. Back then, it didn’t even have nearly the marketshare it does today, and Android didn’t exist, but boycotts and protests have worked anyway. Many times. Even nvidia themselves changed their tune with their motherboard chipset drivers.
By your logic, all these hardware manufacturers should just give up and refuse to support Linux at all. It sounds like that’s what you are advocating for.
You said that Linux users should boycott Nvidia. I’m asking you how that will incentivize Nvidia to improve their Linux support. Can you answer that question or can you not?
I’ve said numerous times that this has worked multiple times in the last 20 years I’ve dabbled with Linux. You refuse to listen and throw numbers and “I don’t care what Linus thinks” at me. I’m done here.
Again, you’re not the target of my comments. I’m talking about people who continue to buy nvidia after switching to Linux, and then bitching that it doesn’t work, especially with Wayland.
System76 is a Linux-first hardware OEM, but not open source first. Nvidia’s GPUs using proprietary drivers function almost as well as AMD’s open source drivers and have the added functionality with NVENC and Cuda. It really depends on your use case.
The problem is that those drivers are awful if you plan to keep your computer for more than a year or two. Most Linux-first OEMs are shipping Nvidia, not just System76. I’ve had two computers I got secondhand with Nvidia GPUs, and that damn GPU was the bane of my existence, and from what I’m seeing, that situation hasn’t changed for the better at all.
Ideally, I would love to see things change, but it definitely seems like the majority of Linux users and OEMs are still using Nvidia GPUs, so Nvidia has no incentive to change.
If you can avoid buying Nvidia I’m in favor of it. AMD’s all around a more supportive company when it comes to Linux and Open Source. But some people are stuck relying on Nvidia for their hardware.
Wayland works fine on Nvidia. And as long as NVidia is coddled with Xorg the longer they’ll not bother with Wayland. About time they got their act together
Looks like (according to Nate) we can expect a final release of Plasma 6 around November-December–I for one am excited for the enhanced external display & GPU support!
as long as software I use daily doesn’t work on it as transparently as it did to me as an end user on xorg then yes, to me as the enduser, Wayland does break things and no, Wayland is not ready
I am an enduser. I don’t care about the specifics, I expect things to work and not suddenly break.
For all the “year of the linux desktop” shouting, nobody wants to truly really think about or consider non-dev daily driver endusers who just want things to continue to work like they always have
It looks like the article's answer to the question in the title is essentially "yes, but someday, eventually, it won't."
Personally, I look forward to the day when "Wayland-and-Pipewire-and-Portals" is a mature platform, and I can switch over to it without too much fuss. Until that day comes, though, I'll be sticking with Xorg.
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