Wayland Desktops

[Clarity]

Hyprland has been a premier for awhile in stably exploiting the Wayland technology for user use.

Now, KDE has come along and has taken on a new level of advancing WAyland with additional user friendliness. KDE is also freeing developers needs for some-any-many additional desktop Wayland usability add-ons as it is built-in for user uses. Pipewire needs are built-in as well.

I do not see these 2 products as a battle; rather I see them as a choice. This choice is similar to what is in the PUP community with Openbox and others in the OOTB builds for X11 over the years.

A major difference between Hyprland and KDE is the way hot-keys are provided according to mouse location for 'in-focus' versus 'out-of-focus' when hit. KDE's implementation could be viewed as a better hot-key solution depending...

FYI

[wiak]

Hyprland has been a premier for awhile in stably exploiting the Wayland technology for user use.

Now, KDE has come along and has taken on a new level of advancing WAyland with additional user friendliness. KDE is also freeing developers needs for some-any-many additional desktop Wayland usability add-ons as it is built-in for user uses. Pipewire needs are built-in as well.

I do not see these 2 products as a battle; rather I see them as a choice. This choice is similar to what is in the PUP community with Openbox and others in the OOTB builds for X11 over the years.

A major difference between Hyprland and KDE is the way hot-keys are provided according to mouse location for 'in-focus' versus 'out-of-focus' when hit. KDE's implementation could be viewed as a better hot-key solution depending...

FYI

I suppose it depends if we are at least partly searching for a distro that is relatively lean in terms of consuming resources. In my relatively recent experience KDE remains quite resource intensive (compared to xfce at least on X11). Whether KDE on Wayland is suddenly less-resource intensive or not I don't know, but doubt it. I haven't myself had time to try Hyprland so again I don't know how resource intensive that is either; I expect more so than the likes of Sway, though I do read that user can configure Hyprland to use less resources at the expense of losing some 'special effects'.

I don't myself care too much about media storage space occupied by a distro (though relatively small remains nice), but I certainly like to keep RAM and CPU resource usage down and especially if likely to be used on virtual machines. KDE certainly runs fine on my main laptop since that is pretty modern and has plenty of RAM, reasonably fast processor and quite a lot of disk storage space.

For various reasons, I continue to enjoy using full install of latest Linux Mint xfce version. It doesn't use Wayland, but does use pipewire. I particularly like that, unlike Ubuntu, it doesn't force snaps down your throat whatsoever, or flatpaks as it happens. I do tend to use AppImages for one or two special apps though since these prove to be very convenient no matter which distro I'm working in.

When it comes to Wayland, I'm certainly interested in it, and no doubt it is the likely continued direction for future distro desktops, but I remain in no overall hurry so when I do ditch X entirely a lot about Wayland usage should be well sorted out, which suits me!

[moplop]

Hyprland has been a premier for awhile in stably exploiting the Wayland technology for user use.

Now, KDE has come along and has taken on a new level of advancing WAyland with additional user friendliness. KDE is also freeing developers needs for some-any-many additional desktop Wayland usability add-ons as it is built-in for user uses. Pipewire needs are built-in as well.

I do not see these 2 products as a battle; rather I see them as a choice. This choice is similar to what is in the PUP community with Openbox and others in the OOTB builds for X11 over the years.

A major difference between Hyprland and KDE is the way hot-keys are provided according to mouse location for 'in-focus' versus 'out-of-focus' when hit. KDE's implementation could be viewed as a better hot-key solution depending...

FYI

KDE's KWin will definitely always be a solid option simply because of the amount of organizational strength behind it. Hyprland is cool and I enjoy using it within a lot of distributions, but it's 85% written by one college kid who seems to be on a mission to piss off half of the adult Linux world, including OpenDesktop.

Two alternatives that might be worth considering for the PUP community, especially with recent developments are labwc and wayfire, with my gut feeling being that labwc is the stronger choice.

Labwc is designed to be completely compatible with Openbox theming/configurations, which are already in play with a lot of the different variants running around here. It's very lightweight and is mature enough that the LXQt team has been using it as the baseline compositor for their upcoming 2.0 release, which is the first to offer Wayland support. Wayland is obviously weird, since you can drop in *any* compositor into an LXQt session, from labwc to Hyprland to Kwin, etc. Just like you could technically run Kwin-LXQt, OB-LXQt.

One thing that might make labwc more interesting than KWin is the fact that there are no Plasma dependencies or tie-ins. You could theoretically drop in labwc into Sofiya's Hyprland configs with relatively few changes, and have the same bar/panel/keys but now have a stacking window manager instead. It just makes things a bit simpler for experimentation.

As to Wayfire, it doesn't get a lot of attention but it is basically the Picom+OB/i3 of compositors, meaning it adds the flashy effects like blur and all that that can make Hyprland fun, but can also be used as a primarily stacking manager.

But you can search labwc dotfiles on Github for some pretty decent examples of what's already out there. And, it probably won't even be the most popular stacking compositor (after KWin). That'll probably be Mir, which Ubuntu developers are playing around with and I believe would be set to be the baseline compositor for MATE wayland sessions, of all things. There's a tiling version of that, Miracle, which is already working decently well.

[Clarity]

Bsed upon these survey results, KLs are ahead of the curve in assessing Linux users.