Yes, Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop; unlike other Wayland complaints, this one fundamentally will never be fixed. This is unlike X11, where it was very common to recover from the inevitable single-component crashes.
On the Qt side, it looks like Qt clients are able to survive a compositor crash since Qt 6.6. I haven't personally tried this, as I don't recall experiencing any kwin crashes in the last few years.
As I understand it, in Wayland all the necessary state lives client side, so a client is free to wait around and connect to a new compositor. The compositor might not place the windows exactly where they were before, but there is nothing architecturally that forces clients to crash if the compositor crashes.
> Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop
A single crash of what? I have used a Wayland only system for a long time and application-level crashes certainly don't bring down other applications much less the whole desktop.
Crashes of the now-merged display server / window manager / whatever. Why does everybody keep talking about "applications" like they're the problem people have with Wayland? Our problem is the Wayland server itself.
Both window manager and shell were historically extremely likely to crash, whereas the display server was very resilient (and the session script would restart the WM and shell as needed). I'm not sure how separate the shell is nowadays, but more than just the traditional duties of a WM have been embugged into the display server.
Crash resilient Wayland compositing exists since 2017, it just isn't implemented in mainstream Wayland implementations. You have to go to Arcan for full resilience. KDE does have some crash resistance, thanks to some changes in toolkits, but it doesn't go as far as Arcan does.
> That's okay since X11 is stable and not very crash prone for the last few decades.
I've been using wayland on three computers for the last two or three years and haven't had a crash that could be attributed to wayland in like.. more than a year?
I've had mesa driver crash when running a particular game a few months ago that eventually got resolved by... updating mesa. I bet many people wrongly attribute that to wayland.
I found Xorg crashyness depends on how shitty your drivers are. Agreed that merging the components is a bad idea. Under KDE, there is more of a split, kwin does compositing and WM stuff, and plasmashell does the shell and other UI bits. In theory they don't need to all be in one process either. I also found that kwin crashing doesn't bring down apps these days, haven't tested that theory with X11 Xwayland apps though. Also see my other comment about Arcan for proper crash resilience.
applications can reconnect to the compositor, KDE already supports this, and Qt does too. They also contributed code to gtk/gnome to do the same, which they are slowpoking on..
you are talking about things you do not know enough about
its not true though, when a wayland compositor dies, the clients can simply reconnect once the compositor has started again. this is already implemented in KDE and Qt, and KDE contributed patches to GTK/Gnome(which they havenot merged yet i think).
A crash of the wayland compositor does NOT mean a crash of your entire session, in fact it is more resilient than X11 in this way
It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.
I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
> What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.
This! I didn't realize how much I wanted this. FreeBSD release base packages are stable but all the regular packages are super up to date. Plasma looks very updated and stable.
I've tried rolling distros like Opensuse Tumble and Manjaro but eventually if you don't update them regularly you get a huge change and often many things change/break. Had your bluetooth speakers working finally? Now that's gone!
On the other hand stable releases in linux distros also seem to fail. Didn't update your random Ubuntu server in the corner of the office for the last year? Well now the apt links are broken and down for the release so you can't update the current release so you can upgrade.
> I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
It's nice, many of the same basics I learned on freebsd 6 years ago all still magically work. ifconfig works even with ipv6. You learn two files and you can do most anything.
I'm definitely gonna consider Freebsd for embedded devices if I can as well. You dint need buildroot or yocto as it's already part of the BSDs.
I said 'most' :) and it goes for most of the mainstream distros. I wouldn't consider nix that, due to the complex configuration. As a corporate admin I do like declarative management at work but for home no. Even though FreeBSD has some aspects of it (you can turn stuff on and off in rc.conf)
Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.