As the title says, I upgraded to Fedora 40 earlier (KDE spin) and everything got wonky afterwards. The main culprit appears to be Wayland. I’m now tired of all the problems and want to rectify this.
Some of my problems are:
Mouse cursor size is all over the place, depending on what I hover over. Often too large.
Running certain things in full screen results in obnoxious flickering.
Screen saver timer is running regardless of activity. Constant interruptions from it activating.
I’ve installed a package that allow me to select the X11 session again in the login manager. However, the desktop crashes shortly after logging in, and the setting doesn’t stick. It always defaults back to the Wayland session. Maybe I have missed something simple?
Perhaps I should reconsider my choice of distribution? I mainly chose Fedora a few years ago as it appear to be a nice middle ground between the latest and stability. I’m not happy with this forced change that borked many things. Maybe it is time to look for something else that allow me to run my own configuration.
Welcome to Linux, where choice is both optional and mandatory
Your alternatives include, but not limited to, Debian, Devuan (Debian sans the systemd cr@p), Linux Mint, Gentoo, Funtoo (Gentoo but more bleeding edge), Arch, Slackware, LFS (Linux from scratch) and of course various BSD flavours. Each has their own pro’s and con’s, but my choices would be Devuan and Funtoo. The latter is a source-based distro, meaning you’re compiling a lot of packages on your machine. Given your hardware, probably not much of a hold-up. I’ve done Funtoo on a dual-core Celeron from 2008-ish. Don’t, just don’t
As mentioned, Devuan is based on Debian, with all the systemd cr@p removed. That means you can hark back on the 20k+ packages in the Debian repo, including X11 and OpenRC (init system superior to systemd and SysV, default for Funtoo btw) but also inherits the stability of the Debian Stable branch.
Testing new distro’s is pretty simple, provided you have a separate disk for /home. Simply swap out the Fedora OS disk for an empty one, install distro of choice and give it a spin.
I’m not opposed to a completely different distro, but the optimal thing would be to “fix” my current Fedora installation. Always a hassle to reinstall… If I make the drastic choice of something completely different, I want to be sure it is the right choice for me. I’m by no means a Linux expert, but I probably fall into the power user category.
Have looked a bit around, and it seems launching an X11 session from a Wayland SDDM doesn’t work great. It appears I should install sddm-x11 with --allowerasing tacked onto it. Though, I’m a bit sceptical. Wouldn’t want to put myself into a crash loop.
Upgraded from the previous version. Can’t recall at what point I installed it, but have done several version upgrades with little problems. The major thing with 40 was the removal of X11, which have caused problems. Have just ignored it for weeks, but thought it was time to try and remedy it.
Much easier to change the config (which is all the -x11 package does anyway).
While I do understand that sentiment, the change was well publicised way ahead of time and it’s not like there’s no way back.
Beaides, it’s really the only way to get the Wayland ball actually rolling after almost 20 years of dev (yeah, think about that…).
Well that and Valve taking the reigns.
When it crashes, do you see anything in the logs (/var/log/Xorg.0.log)? Also try running dmesg and see if there’s anything useful. If you can find an error message, you can usually search for a bug on Fedora’s issue tracker, or create a new one.
I tried Wayland in the past, but quickly moved over to X11 as there was just too much incompatibility and general issues. The remaining problems then was caused by Nvidia. After I got the AMD card, it has worked great. Now a few years later I still find it to have enough problems for me to not want to use it.
Haven’t checked the logs, yet. I’ll change the session to trigger the crash and have another look.
Looks like I have to do some thinking and decide if I go for a more conservative distribution, or spend a lot of time researching alternatives and compromises to make Wayland work.
Making the switch to Linux a few years ago wasn’t an easy task, but eventually got things up and running the way I wanted it. Thought I were past the major roadblocks by now, but have run into another one.
Within a surfeit of exuberance over wayland it’s possible to overlook, I think that Fedora is, to a degree RH experimental, and Plasma 6 itself is still new.
They both pushed aggressively, with justification, for different reasons than only a present day UX. That’s not what everyone wants in their distro, but equally it’s not usally so bumpy.
I’m simply stating this, to suggest that F40/Plasma 6 can work well. If you believe that, it’s worth looking into the issues you see, before changing distro or even trying to clawhammer X11 back into it; it might be the right choice to change, but other distros are going to angle towards wayland too, just in question of emphasis, and control (not everyone wants arch, either).
If you have cursor, crash after login or screen issues, I might try a new clean user account just to see if it behaves the same - and if not, to consider resetting kde's settings, or first reapplying theme.
if you applications themselves have issues - can an alternative meet the need (and as I’m just 2 of 5 wayland myself, will be the first to say - maybe it can’t, but there’s just 1 that’s a hard kill).
I completely understand things are moving towards Wayland sooner or later. I’ve never been opposed to it and always kept it available in order to try it out every now and then. It never seemed to work as well as X11 did in my case.
At least temporarily I’d like to get back to X11. I bit the bullet and swapped out sddm. It worked. Can change the session without it crashing. Night and day difference in my case with regards to the overall user experience. No stuttering animations, no full screen flickering, UI scaling is consistent etc. The only drawback is that it does not retain the last session as default. It falls back to Wayland after a reboot.
EDIT:
Sorted out the Wayland after reboot part. Had to edit /etc/sddm.conf and change to Session=plasmax11.desktop.
Thank you everyone for your replies and suggestions. I’ll spend some time digging deeper into getting Wayland to work properly. Hiding behind a conservative distribution in order to retain X11 probably only causes more headache in the future.
FWIW, I had some Wayland and networking issues with F40 on my laptop. Everything had worked fine on Ubuntu w/ Gnome, so I unfortunately did not get very far into troubleshooting before packing it up and moving it to Arch… not sure what they’ve got going on in their default configurations that just didn’t agree with my machine.
