I've come back to Linux after a lengthy break of not really using my desktop much, and kind of defaulting to Windows for some games my kids like.

Slack's better than ever really.

I'm using AlienBob's Plasma on current and I notice a lot of the graphical issues I had with KDE4 are still present in Plasma, window tearing (dealt with) and poor desktop effect performance in particular. MY GPU is a Nvidia GTX770, ageing but more or less competent.

I'd love to see Plasma do a bit better with the desktop effects and so ask does anyone here use Wayland with Plasma, and is it any better than X for Plasma?

Thanks!

I doubt wayland would make it better for you. Plasma doesn't support Nvidia's way of doing wayland and iirc a solution for that is still a ways out. So you'd have to resort to using nouveau, but given how recent your card is, I'm not sure that would work too well either.

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OK thanks for that. Nouveau's not great with this card and I'll set a couple of games up soon so I'll need to stick with the prop driver.

I'll sit tight!

FWIW Plasma itself is at best a work-in-progress and some say a failed one at that. While I do still think the later versions of KDE 3x were the best overall DEs, I'm not among the crowd that gave up on KDE and I do truly love some of how KDE has evolved in later versions of 4x. I can't say enough good things about Krunner and Dolphin (KDE Settings has finally become reasonable) but I'm highly disappointed with Widgets.

For the past few years I have vacillated between full KDE, and XFCE w/ full KDE support including KWin as the compositor. I was extremely happy with XFCE configured that way until recent changes made XFCE a bit clunkier as well as non-intuitive and arcane. At the same time KDE improved a bit. This is not a "distro thing" but a "Desktop thing" and Slackware is still by far the best for people like me who don't want "butlers underfoot" and prefer to "dress myself".

Xorg is a rats nest but I am venturing a wild guess that it will be nearly a decade before Wayland is anywhere near as mature and it remains to be seen if it will manage to maintain simple efficiency and non-conflicting integration in the process.

As for the current state I am of the opinion that KWin is the best compositor available and most importantly eminently tweakable. It solved tearing issues in XFCE and I love the animation speed control. Since I have a similar graphics card (GTX 760) I'm wondering what desktop effects are problematic for you. Could you explain, please?

NOTE BTW FWIW just recently I tested Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Native Linux) from November 2016 and even as clunky as Steam can sometimes be it runs decently with fairly high settings, so there is little need to give in just yet to "the kids" demanding a better Graphics Card.

I'm guessing Wayland will be widely adopted sooner rather than later. Fedora already uses it as a default and I suspect Ubuntu 17.* will too. I was rather surprised in Fedora's case just how usable it is. The fact that X applications work well via Xwayland will surely help adoption.

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My desktop looks pretty good overall so my complaint is minor.

The only real problem I have is that the minimize animation has a very low frame rate and looks poor. It bugs me as it's been like that for as long as I can remember. Maybe it's a feature, not a bug. I have vague memories of it looking great on the open ATI drivers a while back.

The magic lamp works well though so I just use that.

All of the Linux desktops have issues but I think Plasma has the fewest for me and looks good too.

After a long time using primarily Fluxbox and some Enlightenment, I'm back to using KDE. I started using Fluxbox because the computer I had at the time reached a point at which KDE was just too heavy for it (it was a long time ago when home computers with one GB of RAM were still in the future), and I grew to quite like Flux--it was my go-to GUI for a decade.

I've got KDE v. 4 on Slack and Mageia, but the Debian Sid box has Plasma, and I've been quite happy with it also, but I must say that that computer is all Intel inside.

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Although I like the simplicity of XFCE and just the right amount of expansion with KWin as the compositor, since the last "upgrade" it forced me to reconsider full KDE and in both cases Kwin has an amazing amount of control. I'm wondering if you've tried Desktop Effects in KDE Settings? Here's a screenie -

Note: It pains me to see my desktop in such lo-rez but alas trying to meet size requirements is hit and miss for me. Anyone know how to make Gimp reach a predetermined size requirement when exporting? However it does show the animation speed control. Default is slow to avoid old KDE 4 misgivings, I think.

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Didn't read the thread. Just going to drop this here:

The compton compositor. Solved all tearing problems completely in my case. Something trying about every permutation of xorg.conf / Nvidia options could not solve.

I do not use a tightly integrated DE, so this might be slightly complicated. I know it's easy with XFCE to turn of the compositor. Maybe not so with KDE. I like Openbox all the way, so little experience with the current states of the others.

I'm waiting for Waylan on NVIDIA with bated breath as it will let me know which monitors I can buy and how many in future. I'm not a day-to-day Slackware user but it's a distributuon I know I can install and use.
What gives you the impression that any of the new Wayland stuff works with NVIDIA proprietary drivers?

I was strictly talking about X, no experience on Wayland.

Might be a good thing. I'll give it a good long look once everything switches over.

I am slightly averse to Red Hat et al.'s fine contributions to our beloved OS.

Definitely agree that the venerable X API is fairly inelegant. It works, however, and works well.

I am not up-to-date on Wayland, but if it has problems running existing X programs... Yeah, no, thanks.

(Getting further off-topic)

I suppose distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora have been trying hard to create their own ecosystems. I doubt very much that they care about backwards compatibility with anything outside of their approved content.

Slackware, on the other hand, comes with a ridiculously large collection of dev libraries, and friggin' NASM preinstalled. How awesome is that?

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Agreed, Fat Elvis. As time goes on my love for Slackware and respect for Patrick and all the supporting fellas (Alien Bob is a major for sure but he is apparently not without a few peers, some of whom post here regularly) only grows, possibly exponentially I truly do wish either that Pulseaudio hadn't become not an option but a $@*%!***!!! requirement, or that someone like Alien Bob would create a patch to fully eliminated the need for Pulseaudio at all for those of us who don't care about Bluetooth. Therefore it is with high confidence that I can bet that if and when Wayland ever comes to Slackware, it will be decent.

I’ve often wondered what other people’s experiences are with X. So many people say that it works well, but it’s probably my most hated part of Linux. That may be a legacy of struggling with xorg.conf over the years: I've dabbled with Linux since zipslack in the 90’s (admittedly no X) and Redhat in the 90’s, Slackware around version 8, a few distros in the 00’s and became a full time Slackware user (instead of Windows) around '09. I don't think I’ve ever had a computer where I didn’t have problems with X: there’s flickering, memory leaks, crashes (both taking down the kernel and just X crashing). I may stress it more than the average usage with tons of programs running (and for long periods), but I can’t believe my experience is unusual.

For the record, part of the reason I’ve stuck with Slackware is the conservative approach to software: I’m fine without PAM, systemd, pulseaudio (I’ve only got one system on 14.2 and I’ve put off upgrading the rest because of it). But Wayland is the one of the “new generation” software that I have looked forward to: one part of that is that it has been driven by the X developers themselves and seems quite promising. I don’t think it’s ready yet, but once KDE/Qt has solid support for it, I'd love to see Wayland in Slackware.

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I've run Wayland on Fedora and Arch, it's pretty good. This is on Intel Hardware, nothing for Nvidia as yet, but there will be in the near future I presume. It's just a library, it's not a big deal. I haven't done anything remotely complex like multi-head or different resolution monitors but on a simple laptop build there's no drama; you'd be hard-pressed to see the difference to X.

The decent user experience is mostly down to Xwayland as those applications (still a great deal of them) that need the xorg-server use it, the user doesn't really notice unless they go looking.

In theory you could get it running on Slackware (there's a Slackbuild) with KDE Plasma. Also i3 and Sway.

I do have Wayland from SBo installed on 14.2 as it’s a dependency for something else (I forget now what it was). I’m not sure that it does much though as I haven’t done anything to enable it. I suspect I’d have to recompile anything that supported it and I’m happy with KDE4 (and would miss many features going to another WM). I do periodically google KDE wayland support periodically to see what’s going on though.