Bonum Certa Men Certa

Reasons Why Debian 12 KDE Should Not Default to Wayland



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.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Someone Expiring Certificates on the Day of the 9/11 Attacks is Not Someone I Would Want Controlling My PC (or Deciding What's Authorised for Booting)
"social justice warriors"
More Microsoft-Red Hat Cross-Pollination as the Company Loses a Managing Director
some people move from Microsoft to Red Hat and some do the opposite
 
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part II - UK SLAPPs for Americans, SLAPPs for Profit
Brett Wilson LLP has a track record of this kind
Cloudflare Gives Us All Another Reason to Boycott Cloudflare
If Cloudflare wants to use its vast surveillance network (which is what it does as a CDN) to foist paywalls and maybe something worse (like DRM on top), then Cloudflare should be more widely rejected as a company
Links 24/09/2025: "NASA Moving Out of Entire Buildings as It's Gutted" and Purge of Online Critics (Opposing Fascism Becomes Unlawful)
Links for the day
Science is Under Attack
Oligarchy prefers a dumbed-down population
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has Reportedly Failed People With Wrong Advice
At the moment the SRA has a PR blunder
The Man Suing Brett Wilson LLP and Gervase de Wilde (5RB)
Now he's probably using the (almost) 200,000 pounds he's supposed to receive to sue Brett Wilson LLP and former colleagues/partners
Slopwatch: A World Wide Web That's Rotting for Companies That Won't Even Exist in a Few Years
some of the junk Google News is promoting
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 23, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Links 24/09/2025: Qt Creator 18 Beta, Microsoft Cannot Bail Out "ChatGPT" Anymore, China and US Intensify Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/09/2025: Gemlogs and Politics
Links for the day
Links 23/09/2025: Japan Limits Uses of Skinnerboxes ('Smartphones') With Toxic "Apps", Fentanylware (TikTok) Tapped by "MAGAts"
Links for the day
Brett Wilson LLP Has Just Been Sued (by Their Own Clients!)
Vladimir and Alla Yanpolsky sued Brett Wilson LLP in BL-2025-001167 at the end of last week
Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 23/09/2025: Massive Data Breach, Slop Versus Productivity, and Vista 11 Update Breaks Things Again
Links for the day
Code of Censorship
Extortion is peace
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Un-cancelled the Best People, Just in Time for the Big 4-0
Mr. Oliva should have been there all along (since 2019)
Most "Modern" Technology Makes You Slower and Dumber
Because proprietary software makes you worse off
"What Comes After Free Software?" Wrongly Insinuates We've Reached the Goal (Prison is Not the Goal)
The oil tycoons use similar tactics against environmentalists, giving them fake "wins"
Making More Work Space
I learned the hard way that less is more in circumstances where more means distraction
MAHA is a Lie, Public Officials Never Valued Citizens' Health (They Still Value Private Businesses, Their Sponsors)
Reject demagogues
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Press Kit for the Weekend After Next Weekend (40th Anniversary)
miles better than social [sic] media [sic] quips, moderated by narcissists and oil tycoons.
Microsoft Had Two Waves of Mass Layoffs This Month (That We Know of) and It'll Get Worse for Microsoft Soon
Will the axe fall again by month's end?
Gemini Links 23/09/2025: Happy Equinox, Photronic Arts, and Perception Cognition
Links for the day
Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda"
Back to Normal Now, We Plan to Do More In-Depth Series (or Multi-part Stories)
Articles (or series thereof) that contain philosophy are important to us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 22, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 22, 2025
Microsoft Media is Panicking Amid Mass Layoffs Every Month, H-1B Fees, and "Seattle’s Tech Scene in Trouble"
In "late stage Microsoft", copyleft becomes proprietary
The Next Wave of IBM/Red Hat Layoffs Being Discussed Already
Red Hat is sort of disappearing the way Tivoli did
New Techrights Turns 2
Today starts the third year of the SSG-based Techrights
What Scares Them the Most is Independent News Sites That They Cannot Control and Censor
Wikileaks was a good example of this
If You Don't Control Your Online Platform, Then Someone Else is Controlling You
be (or become) independent
Oracle Started This Year With Slop. Then It Stopped.
Passing fads are like this
Distros That Run on PCs Made 20 Years Ago and Don't Use Systemd
Betas for now
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has a Policy on Racism and Sexism
In then future we'll show the misogyny and racial slurs
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part I - Abusing British Women on Behalf of American Men Who Abuse American Women
Transparency is important to us, so we've decided to make this series
Slopwatch: Google News and the Evident Slopfarm Infestation
This is what people get about Linux when they query Google for Linux
Links 22/09/2025: Murdochs Might Join Fentanylware (TikTok) 'Investors' (Masters), United Kingdom Recognises Palestinian Statehood
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Esperanto Music History and Apps For Android
Links for the day
Links 22/09/2025: More American 'Censorship' (Retaliation for Journalism), Cheeto "Might Be Losing His Race Against Time"
Links for the day
The Blob Slop
Give me more words, give me some text
The 50-Pound Note Experiment and the "War on Cash"
Britain is actually seeing a rebound in cash payments, and it's not a temporary phenomenon
Slopwatch: Blaming the Victims for Microsoft's Failures and Plagiarising Phoronix
That's what Google has been reduced to: slop and slopfarms
Links 22/09/2025: Breaches, Windows TCO, and Arrests
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Rabbit Hole and DeGoogling Fairphone
Links for the day
Links 22/09/2025: Russian War Planes Invade NATO Airspace While Dihydroxyacetone Man Escalates Attack on Free Speech Because of Critics
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 21, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 21, 2025