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Posted in Debian, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 2:10 am by Guest Editorial Team
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
I have been using Debian 12 with KDE for a couple of days and decided to give Wayland another chance since they made it the default session for Plasma.
I ran into troubles with it on openSUSE Leap 15.5 with KDE and switched to Plasma on X11 (Xorg) to make the problems stop.
Here’s what Plasma on Wayland suffers from in Debian 12 KDE.
On first login you get messages that ibus and fcitx don’t work with Wayland. The message only happens once, but the ibus program runs even though it doesn’t work.
This appears to cause applications to sometimes refuse to accept input from the keyboard until you restart the program.
(Also, probably inconvenient for people who use non-Latin alphabets for their native language.)
The Plasma shell randomly crashes. Seems like maybe once every 7-8 hours. It comes right back up without any programs dying, but my….how very Windows of them.
> “This appears to cause applications to sometimes refuse to accept input from the keyboard until you restart the program.”
X11 programs (including Windows applications in Wine) look weird when scaled by the system in Wayland, but also don’t scale themselves correctly if you use that option, so you end up with really tiny GUI widgets or really smudgy text. Your choice.
To fix all of this, log out and select “Plasma on X11” and log back in.
Wayland simply isn’t ready and it isn’t clear it ever will be.
My opinion of it has not improved.
It still strikes me as beta software that has now become the default in Long Term Support distributions and, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Brought to you by the IBM, GNOME, GTK people who close bug reports with:
“You need to justify your use case.” Also, *ignores use case*.
“This feature isn’t important enough to most users.”
“That’s broken because something something Security.”
“We are divesting from the Linux desktop to try to get Wayland to work and do things X11 already does. So enjoy us pulling resources away from Bluetooth and GNOME.”
“You’re not being very nice. Being very nice is mandated by the Code of Conduct, unless someone in the Fedora project that’s immune from the CoC says you’re on meth, and crazy, then the CoC doesn’t apply. Also, we’re deleting your bug report comments because you weren’t nice. Nice is a registered trademark of IBM.”
> “It still strikes me as beta software that has now become the default in Long Term Support distributions and, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
More Flatpak Observations. (Hiding Proprietary Software)
Maybe you’re like me and don’t like seeing proprietary software in your Package Manager or having it made available at all.
It turns out you can force it to show only Free Software in Plasma Discover and on the console! But they did not make it easy and nobody on Flathub seems to have documented this command.
flatpak remote-modify –subset=floss flathub
Technically, the possible values for the subset are “floss” for Free Software, “verified_floss” for Free Software and only Free Software that’s been packaged by the developer themselves, and “verified”, which would list both Proprietary and Free Software, but only if they are packaged by the developer themselves.
It seems like they just don’t want to make it widely known you can do this.
There are so many commands in Flatpak that are undocumented, badly documented, and barely documented, that when I tried this out and logged out and back in, all I could see in Plasma Discover were Free Software Flatpaks, which is what I asked for, but…
How to undo it if you want to?
I was unable to find a specific command. I figured “Delete the flathub repo and install it again.” but was told I couldn’t uninstall it with Flatpaks from Flathub.
When I told it –force, it removed it, then I added the Flathub repo again and waited for it to refresh, and sure enough proprietary software reappeared in my Plasma Discover.
Specifically, the commands I used to remove and reinstall the Flathub remote were:
sudo flatpak remote-delete flathub –force && sudo flatpak remote-add –if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
It seems sort of dumb that there’s no obvious way to reset Flathub to the defaults if you want to short of doing this. Probably, nobody documented the process to put it back because they figure everyone uses GNOME Software anyway.
Literally the only thing that makes this “better” is that there is a toggle to hide and unhide proprietary software from Flathub.
> “It turns out you can force it to show only Free Software in Plasma Discover and on the console! But they did not make it easy and nobody on Flathub seems to have documented this command.”
Now I know I’ll look at the license and if it says Proprietary, I’m almost certainly not going to install it, because frankly a lot of it is useless junk that has alternatives with all of the same features anyway.
Like Microsoft Edge is crappy spyware full of garbage, and all of the features that Alan Pope recently praised it for are in Brave anyway, and he just apparently didn’t look at Brave. (Including Vertical Tabs, the Memory Saver).
A lot of the rest of the proprietary garbage are things I could open in a Web browser tab, but they’ve packaged them in Electron (Chromium) as a “desktop” app full of baloney. (And who knows what they’ve put in it?).
It is frightening that Flathub has managed to put almost 600 pieces of proprietary software in there. So maybe you should just give it an enema and not look back.
> “It is frightening that Flathub has managed to put almost 600 pieces of proprietary software in there. So maybe you should just give it an enema and not look back.”
Having looked it over, I’ll almost certainly just set the subset of “floss” back anyway, I just wanted to make sure “something” would reset it for this blog post.
I don’t like having to stop and read licenses, and Flathub has a lot of good Free Software programs, but it feels like they really want proprietary software in your face by default, and don’t want to document a way out.
According to the bug reports I was reading, this filter wasn’t even an option until maybe a year or a year and a half ago. I guess it’s something they “put out there” to silence critics. █
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