I’ve been switched to Wayland by the recent update and it seemingly degraded a lot of Plasma desktop’s functionality.
Any fullscreen launcher just stops visual output and I get black screen; only the menus that take just a part of the screen work properly
GTK applications suddenly have buttons on top of the dialog windows instead of in the bottom
GIMP gets extremely choppy and generally less responsive and its buttons look weird
GIMP loading screen is scaled down compared to X11 and gets window decorations
I’ve since switched back to X11 session and all these problems vanished again. I was under the impression that Wayland is quite mature nowadays. Does this happen to anyone else or is it just a problem with my particular KDE configuration?
Edit: it seems that the most pressing issue with the black screen only happens on my PC which runs the 6.18 kernel; I did not see it on my laptop that still runs 6.17.
That impression is justified. However, some individual applications may or may not (yet) fully support Wayland.
With respect GIMP, I see no indication of it being less responsive, indeed I recall it being more responsive than X11 when I initially switched. I see no obvious weirdness in how buttons are displayed.
I hadn’t noticed any scaling issues with the GIMP splash screen – admittedly, that’s because I had long ago added the --no-splash command-line argument to the GIMP launcher.
Nonetheless, the splash screen does seem smaller in comparison, and yes, it seems to have Windows decorations – perhaps the GIMP team consider this a low-priority item – though I suspect it might have more to do with GTK theming. GTK2 theming support has recently been removed upstream, and Manjaro naturally follows suit.
At face value, I find this hard to explain.
One way to help isolate problems is to create a new User account (for testing) and login to that. The point is to see whether or not these issues persist in a fresh environment – naturally, you must be using Wayland.
If any of the problems mentioned no longer exist in the fresh User account, then that strongly suggests that issue is local.
An obvious test of that theory is to install kernel 6.17 on that machine.
Also installable via the “Kernel” icon in Manjaro Settings Manager.
Though, it’s quite possible something else might be in play.
Anecdotal: I’ve personally used Wayland for at least the past two years without signigicant issue; there were a few annoyances during the first few weeks, however.
Incidentally, this article from Nate Graham (KDE) might interest you.
Wayland is the direction the industry is taking and we, as users, have little resolve than to either adapt or be left behind.
The following, noted in the Update Announcement, is only the more visible part of the initiative, and no doubt there is much more to come.
The gimp buttons for OK, Cancel, and so on, are now indeed at the top of the window, rather than at the bottom, but this has already been the case ever since gimp upgraded to gtk3. Ergo, it’s a gtk thing.
No, the window decorations are put there by the window manager, but considering that Wayland defaults to client-side decorations while kwindefaults to server-side decorations, it is up to the applications to request whether they can use client-side decorations.
chromium and firefox have already supported this for ages, even on X11. Apparently gimp’s implementation of it is buggy — again, because it uses gtk, which comes from the same people as who develop GNOME, and we all know how solipsistic their worldview is…
Manjaro has completely purged gtk2 and everything depending on it from its repositories.
Thank you both for your very comprehensive responses. I’ve been able to verify that the black screen bug must be due to some setting on my part (nothing to do with the kernel), even though I’m still baffled that it only happens on my PC and not on my laptop despite my config being extremely similar on both (including gtk2, see bellow). Nevertheless, I’ll be able to resolve this one on my own now that I understand the cause.
I didn’t know that; it turns out that I still have gtk2 installed through AUR and it apparently gets picked up under X11 and does not work under Wayland: imgur(.)com/GeOrfxO
I’m now a bit ashamed that I’ve been bothering you with this; I didn’t think this could be the case as I use very few AUR packages, mostly binary ones, and neither do I remember specifically installing gtk2. I will presume that the degraded performance of GIMP under Wayland is also caused by this issue.
As for Wayland in general, I’m aware that it is the direction we’re moving in and ever since the recent KDE announcement that they will retire X11 session in a year or so I’ve mentally noted the need to switch at some point, which is also why I’m now eager to understand these issues instead of simply sticking with the X11 session. Even with these issues now resolved, I can’t commit to the switch yet as I still use a few incompatible applications, but I’m making progress (recently switching from xmodmap to keyd for example).
Thank you both again for your help, it’s much appreciated.
Well, gtk2 was normally part of the base installation, because there was a lot that depended on it.
So indeed, you never explicitly installed it, but now that gtk2 has been dropped from the repos, it is in the AUR only, and if you still have anything depending on it, then pamac will pull in the updated gtk2 from the AUR.
No, gimp doesn’t use gtk2 anymore, and wouldn’t experience any issues from gtk2 being on your system.
gimp is entirely gtk3 now — and has already been for a couple of months by now — but not everyone noticed right away that the buttons are now at the top of the window instead of at the bottom.
I’ve since realized that as well, which kind of confuses me since the dialogs really do look different between X11 and Wayland. If I understand you correctly, it shouldn’t be happening.
There might be small differences between them due to the different protocol — Wayland works very differently from X11 — and it is possible that gtk3 adapts to this by choosing a slightly different visual presentation depending on the used windowing system.
