My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

Manessa · 2025-06-14 17:18

Hello, dear users and developers. I would like to share with you my experience with Q4OS 5 with Wayaland. First, let me tell you about my laptop: it is an MSI Modern 15 with 8 GB of RAM and a 6-core 12th generation Intel processor. So, here's what I want to say. I use Q4OS 5 with KDE. My experience has been fantastic; it works just great. I can say that this is the best OS for my laptop. Recently, I installed Wayland on it. And what I want to say is that with Wayland, the experience has become even better. I often play undemanding games, and my experience has shown that Wayland performs excellently. To be honest, I thought Wayland was unfinished, but it fits perfectly and really works better than x11.
I have Q4OS 5 Full Profile.
I simply advise everyone to install Veilond so that your experience with Q4OS will only bring you joy. I hope Veilond will be included in Q4OS 6. So I also ask the developers to include Veilond by default in their Plasma images.

Last edited by Manessa (2025-06-14 17:18)

Manessa · 2025-06-14 17:22

I would also like to note that I use a regular office laptop, which you could say is budget-friendly, but believe me, friends, the Veylon protocol works wonders.

q4osteam · 2025-06-14 19:31

Yes, Wayland will be the default display server in Q4OS-6.

crosscourt · 2025-06-14 19:38

@Manessa, youre using a 12th gen Intel system so Wayland should perform very well for you, but thats not the case for many others.
Older hardware particularly Intel graphics dont work well with Wayland even with XWayland in use. Some of my hardware prefers X11 to work properly.
Dont know the specs of your regular office laptop, but Im going to guess that they are fairly recent, thus Wayland will perform pretty well.

Manessa · 2025-06-14 19:50

crosscourt wrote:

@Manessa, youre using a 12th gen Intel system so Wayland should perform very well for you, but thats not the case for many others.
Older hardware particularly Intel graphics dont work well with Wayland even with XWayland in use. Some of my hardware prefers X11 to work properly.
Dont know the specs of your regular office laptop, but Im going to guess that they are fairly recent, thus Wayland will perform pretty well.

Let me put it this way: I have a main computer with the Plasma version, which is an AMD A8 8650B, but it has 16 GB of RAM. I must say that Wayland also showed good results there, although the processor is not that modern, but Wayland works well there.

q4osteam · 2025-06-14 19:53

X11 will be an optional, however fixed part of the basic installation, so everyone will be enabled to switch easily.

crosscourt · 2025-06-14 19:57

Its more about what graphics chip you are using as it varies a lot with older systems. In my case Ive got some older Intel IGPS and my HP Elitedesk 705 G4 with a Ryzen 5 2400g(apu) and they despise Wayland., XWayland isnt any help. X11 runs very well with no issues, so its a bit of a mixed bag.
My concern is some systems may not work with Wayland and we end up making thousands of systems obsolete. In the short term it can be handled but over time X11 will simply fall away.

Manessa · 2025-06-14 20:02

crosscourt wrote:

Its more about what graphics chip you are using as it varies a lot with older systems. In my case Ive got some older Intel IGPS and my HP Elitedesk 705 G4 with a Ryzen 5 2400g(apu) and they despise Wayland., XWayland isnt any help. X11 runs very well with no issues, so its a bit of a mixed bag.
My concern is some systems may not work with Wayland and we end up making thousands of systems obsolete. In the short term it can be handled but over time X11 will simply fall away.

That's very strange. I'll say this: my ancient A8 8650в with Wayland works fine with a Radeon R7, but I haven't noticed any problems. As I was told, Wayland is just a protocol, and there are lots of implementations of it. Maybe you should try Mate or LXQT? Because Kwin is heavier than other implementations.

Last edited by Manessa (2025-06-14 20:04)

crosscourt · 2025-06-14 20:03

Interestingly, my Lenovo Thinkcentre M73 Tiny(4th gen Intel cpu) with Intel IGP works very well with Wayland in KDE Neon, go figure.

Manessa · 2025-06-14 20:05

crosscourt wrote:

Interestingly, my Lenovo Thinkcentre M73 Tiny(4th gen Intel cpu) with Intel IGP works very well with Wayland in KDE Neon, go figure.

Where is it optimized well, I heard

crosscourt · 2025-06-14 20:08

I cant really confirm that but yes its possible it is very well optimized in KDE Neon. It may also be that some Intel IGPs with different designs or older versions simply react differently to Wayland.

Manessa · 2025-06-14 20:12

crosscourt wrote:

I cant really confirm that but yes its possible it is very well optimized in KDE Neon. It may also be that some Intel IGPs with different designs or older versions simply react differently to Wayland.

In my case, I am currently writing with an Intel Core i3 1215 U 12th generation with 6 cores, and I can say that Velond works best on it. But I think it all depends on its implementation in a specific distribution.

crosscourt · 2025-06-14 20:17

Im not sure its the implementation as Ive tested my systems with what are considered good Wayland versions in different distros and really nothing has changed. Some hardware works, some hardware doesnt. In this forum youve got people with systems 15 years old and newer so its not surprising that compatibility problems happen. XWayland is suppose to act as a compatibility layer for dependent X11 hardware but thats not always worked very well.

Last edited by crosscourt (2025-06-14 21:02)

seb3773 · 2025-06-26 08:55

Initially, I didn’t want to talk about this—I don’t like controversies—but since Q4OS has started adopting Wayland ?? I’d like to clarify a few points:

In reality, it’s a commercial company that everyone knows—Red Hat (owned by IBM)—that began developing Wayland more than… 15 years ago!! Yes, you read that right. And guess what: it was also Red Hat teams that were supposed to ensure the progressive maintenance of X11 under the auspices of the X.Org Foundation...

At this point, you can see where this is going (IBM and Red Hat): why bother maintaining two competing pieces of software when you’re convinced you’re developing the eighth wonder of the world?

Well, that’s exactly what happened: Red Hat arranged for the core of the X11 source code to be frozen—on the one hand, by assigning most of its developers to Wayland development, and on the other hand (worse), by not releasing any new version that would include nearly 3,000 patches contributed by persistent team developers. Some of these patches were several years old.

Seeing that Red Hat was about to throw the X.Org project into the trash, the dev Enrico Weigelt alias Metux retrieved the project’s source code and migrated it to GitHub on June 5th. Red Hat's reaction was swift: he was immediately banned from their mailing lists and from the X.Org Foundation.

Thus, the XLibre project was born, succeeding X.Org, which the foundation—shame on it—no longer even tries to maintain, under the combined pressure of IBM and Red Hat, who have done everything possible to get rid of X11 in order to make way for their proprietary software turd: Wayland, following the well-known strategy introduced by Microsoft under the name “EEE”: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. This industrial tactic consists of adopting an existing software or standard, then extending it by developing proprietary in-house extensions that make it incompatible with the original, and finally extinguishing it using commercial leverage to impose their own modified version. That’s exactly what’s happening with X11...

Now you may ask: can XLibre and its passionate team stand up to Red Hat?

The question remains open, but it’s worth noting that the first XLibre release, version 25.0.0, was published last weekend, and already the OpenMandriva Linux distribution has integrated XLibre into its code repositories. BSD, a major player in the Unix world, also appears to intend to support XLibre. We can thus hope that others will follow...

This leads me to an important point: the story isn’t over yet, because BSD’s support for XLibre is almost an existential issue. BSD, although primarily used for its server qualities (without graphical windowing), only has X11 as a graphical layer, while the developers of Wayland have recently stated their intention to dedicate Wayland exclusively to Linux—thus rendering all other Unix systems ineligible for its use.

In reality, Wayland brings nothing significantly new compared to X11—at least nothing that couldn’t have been added to X11 through the well-established patch and maintenance process practiced by experienced developers...

In practice, Wayland only introduces two somewhat new features:

HDR support – Patches proposed by X11 maintainers to support HDR have been waiting for months to be merged into the X11 code...

Display security – It’s true that X11, designed in the 1980s, didn’t originally address today’s security concerns. For example: disabling screen capture for certain applications. The XLibre team, in just a few days, has already implemented major fixes to intelligently and reasonably enhance X11’s application security...

So, as you can see, in just a few weeks, XLibre has managed to catch up functionally with Wayland’s new features...

But there’s the flip side: is Wayland truly the marvel it claims to be? Well (speaking as a software architect), not really...

Because in designing Wayland, Red Hat simply stripped X11 of everything that made it unique and powerful—starting with its network support and historical client-server architecture.

Wayland has simply amputated X11 of essential functionality, reducing its sophisticated, modular, and extensible display system to a basic centralized video compositing engine (X11 also had a compositing module, albeit delegated). And after more than 15 years of development, Wayland still hasn’t achieved consensus and shows clear signs of unreliability depending on usage scenarios...

But it doesn’t stop there. Not only did Red Hat strip out X11’s client-server architecture, but they also implemented a botched security model where every Wayland application now runs inside an isolated, sandboxed window—so isolated that more than twenty essential and/or common Linux applications (like screenshot tools, FFmpeg, OBS, etc.) are currently broken or functionally crippled.

You might say: it’ll get better with time… And I might agree—if Wayland were just a two- or three-year-old open source project developed by enthusiasts in their spare time. But in reality, this project has been sponsored by IBM/Red Hat from the start and has existed for over 15 years...

Lastly, let me add that Wayland, for optimal performance, only supports recent graphics cards and is no better than X11 at properly supporting Nvidia GPUs—again offering no added value over its competitor. Meanwhile, X11 continues to run correctly even on older hardware.

So I think it’s clear that if Red Hat tried to kill X.Org by halting its maintenance, it’s primarily because they know full well that the mediocrity of their Wayland won’t allow them to impose it in the medium/long term against a historical software like X11—one that, for better or worse, despite the absence of a proper release (something Red Hat and the X.Org Foundation have done everything to block since 2020), still works and serves millions of users for everyday needs—productivity, multimedia, and even gaming, where Linux is now a serious competitor to Windows.

So, the story is far from over...

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Last edited by seb3773 (2025-06-26 09:01)

bin · 2025-06-26 11:56

It's good to see that whoever wrote the blurb on the github page appreciates the works of Harry Harrison anyway!
Given that GNOME and KDE have already made their decisions to move to Wayland I think it is inevitable that others will follow - albeit at their own pace.
It would help if folks at the level of Mint were willing to adopt Xlibre as opposed to steering Cinnamon to Wayland...........
A lot of big players have all worked hard to adopt Wayland - maybe XFCE would pick up Xlibre and run with it.
Sad day.

seb3773 · 2025-06-26 16:13

Yes, it's really sad, but I don't care, I'll stick with trinity.
But don't forget that wayland is really bad, it's far from mature, and has so much issues...
from linuxiac.com :

"(dev of wayland) don’t understand security abstractions. The endless attempt at integration of a security layer is the sole issue, the whole time. Trying to shoe-horn application privileges and isolation into a compositor is ridiculous and doomed from the beginning.

Which bring us to X11. Wayland user’s famous last words are, “X11 has security problems”.
In order for something to have problems with it, it would have to exist first. X11 doesn’t have security AT ALL, and it’s not an accident either!

What the Wayland team has continually tried to do, relentlessly, is the equivalent of trying to create an abstraction for SSL and trying to integrate it into HTTP. That’s weird, incorrect, and the entire reason that Wayland barely stable and has never achieved compatibility.

I created these .md files (technical breakdowns) to help explain the entirety of what’s going on.

Xorg vs. Wayland: Debate on Security and Flexibility
https://modulate.cc/public/Wayland_vs_Xorg_History.md

A Fork in the Road: The Emergence of XLibre
https://modulate.cc/public/Wayland_vs_XLibre.md

—Jason R. Cravens
(Cross-Platform Systems, Network Admin/Security, Web Dev, Software Debugging. 23 years. Bash, Python, JavaScript, PHP/AJAX, NodeJS) ??

"

Last edited by seb3773 (2025-06-26 16:16)

crosscourt · 2025-06-26 19:57

And yet Debian has been using it since Debian 10 in 2019. Id think that if the issues were serious enough, Debian could and would try to change course. Certainly a different discussion entirely but Systemd versus Sysvinit which still goes on today. Advantages and disadvantages, which many have to weigh and decide whats going to work.
I can say from just a performance standpoint I find Wayland performs better than X11 in a variety of graphically intensive uses.

Appreciate the technical breakdowns, but it appears the course has been chosen and trying to make the best of it, may be the best course of action. Q4OS following Debian, has already been mentioned in another thread, that they intend to move to Wayland.

Ill be curious to see how many try to go the XLibre route, but as long as the larger organizations have already moved to Wayland , its going to end up being a niche market for XLibre.

I live a lot of my day in the Windows ecosystem, and I get almost no choice in how things are done, relying on Microsoft and third parties to dictate where the graphics standards go.

Last edited by crosscourt (2025-06-27 01:11)

q4osteam · 2025-06-26 20:33

crosscourt wrote:

Q4OS following Debian, has already mentioned in another thread, that they intend to move to Wayland.

Yes for Plasma edition, but keep X11 an option as long as possible.

crosscourt · 2025-06-26 21:02

@q4osteam Sorry, I should have been more specific with my comments.

On a side note, OpenMandriva is considering offering XLibre and Wayland both but the decision hasnt been finalized.

Last edited by crosscourt (2025-06-27 00:18)

Midas · 2025-06-28 19:03

From a layman's POV, it looks like the Systemd debacle all over again. Talking of which, has Devuan taken a position regarding this?

crosscourt · 2025-06-28 19:47

Devuan according to rumors and various forum posts, looks to offer Wayland but maintain some X11 support as long as possible,

Last edited by crosscourt (2025-06-28 19:56)

bin · 2025-06-29 06:20

I must admit the main gripe I have with Wayland is that using it on a VM in Virtualbox is a absolute PITA.

crosscourt · 2025-06-29 20:03

@bin, that's a gripe I see in a lot of forums and many are hoping that Wayland will improve more for Virtualbox use. Just reading through a lot of various forums, Wayland/WaylandX seems to be doing pretty well with general use and gaming, and the volume of X11 protests aren't as large as I expected.

seb3773 · 2025-06-30 02:20

crosscourt wrote:

@bin, Wayland/WaylandX seems to be doing pretty well with general use and gaming, and the volume of X11 protests aren't as large as I expected.

Really ?
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7 … 9f2d1f2277
https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCa … d-Support/

(I can find litterally hundred of links if you want about what wayland breaks and about the amount of bugs and things done wrong/the bad way in wayland, but these simple two links can give you at least an idea of the big error it is)

Wayland was intended to replace X11 from the beginning, and now it has taken over a decade, and it still doesn’t have any important advantage over x11 other than “the future”, please let me laugh. But still, it came with a LOT of massive problems, so let’s try to stop denying reality... (no offense ! it's not about you at all, I'm talking about people supporting wayland)

There are very valid concerns about Wayland, and they are taking way too long to be addressed, now that’s the real issue, because the Linux graphic stack needed Wayland yesterday, not tomorrow.

By the way, It breaks a lot of my projects as well, and please understand we are not talking about a project made by some linux enthusiats small team, it's a damn RedHat 15 years old project for godsake... This is unnaceptable. This is wrong. And the fact RedHat did everything they could to kill x11 because they KNOW wayland is bad... Well, this is NOT the linux spirit, not at all.

I can only hope this stupidity won't be integrated in my favorites linux distro, for now, I'll stick with q4os trinity who is working damn well with the good old, stable (and far superior) x11. I need something that works, that is reliable, and the argument "this is the future" is incredibly stupid. They are thousands of components in linux that don't need to be replaced just because they are old, this is irrelevant: Linux is not Windows. We don't need bell and whistles, we need reliable tools.

And no, I dion't think this is like the "systemd" story, systemd has his problems, but hey, it works ! Wayland ? It doesn't.

q4osteam wrote:

Yes for Plasma edition, but keep X11 an option as long as possible.

Thank you so much for that !

Last edited by seb3773 (2025-06-30 02:40)

crosscourt · 2025-06-30 03:02

Most of the forums I travel are distro related, as well as tech sites, as Ive moderated at quite a few over the years. I'm only talking about average distro users who are doing productivity, multimedia, general use and gaming. In that regard Ive been using Wayland for quite some time and haven't had any issues. I've been running Wayland with KDE Neon for quite awhile, and its been fine.

I cant speak to your situation seb3773 ,nor the issues developers in general are having to the change to Wayland.
I do hope things work out from your standpoint.

Systemd went thru similar growing pains, issues and complaints, with many screaming for Sysvinit to be left alone.

Last edited by crosscourt (2025-06-30 03:06)

Q4OS Forum

#1 2025-06-14 17:18

My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#2 2025-06-14 17:22

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#3 2025-06-14 19:31

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#4 2025-06-14 19:38

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#5 2025-06-14 19:50

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#6 2025-06-14 19:53

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#7 2025-06-14 19:57

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#8 2025-06-14 20:02

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#9 2025-06-14 20:03

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#10 2025-06-14 20:05

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#11 2025-06-14 20:08

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#12 2025-06-14 20:12

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#13 2025-06-14 20:17

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#14 2025-06-26 08:55

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#15 2025-06-26 11:56

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#16 2025-06-26 16:13

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#17 2025-06-26 19:57

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#18 2025-06-26 20:33

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#19 2025-06-26 21:02

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#20 2025-06-28 19:03

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#21 2025-06-28 19:47

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#22 2025-06-29 06:20

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#23 2025-06-29 20:03

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#24 2025-06-30 02:20

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

#25 2025-06-30 03:02

Re: My thoughts on Q4OS with Wayland

Board footer