As for why KDE Plasma? I've used plenty of X11 DEs and WMs in the past mostly on my laptop, but I wanted to go for Wayland slop for futureproofing. I also wanted to see if Wayland was still as shit as people had claimed, and so far I haven't run into any issues.
So... I totally understand wanting to give Wayland a fair shake. As horrifying as it may be to say... I'm pretty sure that GNOME outmatches Plasma 6 in terms of Wayland functionality. Mutter is simply far more mature than KWin ever was on Wayland, and Mutter itself is a
terrible compositor (even as an X11 window manager for GNOME Shell, Mutter fucking sucked). My experience with the Plasma Wayland session, even on a 9070 XT back in December when I was trialing Fedora versions to run on this PC I built, was
awful. Maybe it was a 2025 thing and there were regressions that ultimately got fixed... but Plasma 6 was a total shitshow on launch and even to this day, regressions continue to pile on while the Plasma team tells us "Look! Shiny new feature!"
Specific issues I had on Plasma Wayland that I
did not have under GNOME Shell (on bare metal; no QEMU bullshit)
- My mouse hanging briefly for like 2-3 seconds whenever I'm moving my cursor between monitors (i.e. dragging a Firefox window from my right monitor over to my left one)
- Slight lag (1-2 seconds) in between new application windows firing up.
-
MORE graphical artifacting on Plasma than I had on GNOME Shell; GNOME Shell still looked like a glitchy nightmare, but I saw artifacts like once every 2-3 minutes of substantial activity and Plasma was like every 30 seconds
- Plasma Discover just... never firing up. At all. As in I could click on the "Discover" icon, have the icon bounce under my cursor for a while, and the window doesn't pop up whatsoever.
- The segfault on login (persistent on Fedora 42 and 43; have not tried with Fedora 44 and I don't plan to).
Wayland-specific issues I had with vidya gaemz across both GNOME Shell and Plasma. The same issue persisting for both games, btw.
- On The Witcher: Enhanced Edition and The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, the in-game launcher
does not allow you to click on "launch game," and instead, you
must bypass the launcher EXE and go straight to the game executable. On Xorg, the launcher works as expected. Not particularly important for Witcher 1, but Witcher 2's launcher actually lets you toy with the graphical settings.
I haven't hit any segfaults at all, and so far multi-monitor performance seems to be fine. My setup isn't anything special, I have an 165hz 1440p panel from some no-name Chinese brand I found on Amazon a few years ago, flanked by two Dell U2415s running at 60hz 1200p. Thus far, no issues with refresh rates or tearing or anything.
I mean hey, you're having a good time on Fedora Plasma (much to my own surprise), and I'm
assuming you're running the latest Fedora anyway. I have primitive monitors; two 75Hz 1080p enterprise panels @ 5ms response times. You have fancier stuff to work with. Maybe that's a difference too? I dunno, but you're still a stronger man than I am for putting up with multimonitor on Wayland.
The most annoying thing I've run into is sometimes games in WINE will try to default to the leftmost monitor which is in portrait mode, but sometimes that happened on Windows for me too
Yeah, primary monitor detection is an invalid use case for Wayland apparently, and every fucking compositor has to do shit ever so slightly differently which makes troubleshooting a goddamn nightmare. I've had that problem on Windows too, but never under a Xorg-forward Linux distro. My primary monitor is my left-hand one, that's what gets all my vidya.
I've installed all the RPM Fusion codecs, haven't tried out DVD or Blu-ray playback but I do need to see if my LG reader/writer can still rip 4K UHD Blu-rays
JFYI:
ArchWiki article, and this thing was such a friggin lifesaver. The rundown is "install
libbluray,
libaacs, and
libbdplus, download that KEYDB.cfg file and place it in the proper directory, plug in your BD drive, and be blown away at how Evangelion 1.11's Blu-ray disc plays flawlessly. Totem was my video player of choice for years, but GNOME Video deprecated disc playback (insert Emmanuele_Bassi_UHMUSECASE_Soyjak.jpg here). Celluloid worked, but I ultimately settled on VLC because it still plays discs with menus well enough. I can't speak about proper 4K UHD discs, but basic bitch 1080p blu-rays should be the least of your worries. Just don't be a fucking retard like me and key in
pacman -Syu libaacs libbdplus libbluray on your Fedora console.
Ollama might be a fun project for the desktop, but I leave all my hosted services to my dumpy little home server and its NUC cousin
I specifically gave Ollama a whirl with the Podman container for Open WebUI to give me a GUI in Firefox. Protip: make
damn sure your Ollama instance is pointing to 0.0.0.0 and
not 127.0.0.1. I don't know why, but Podamn really fucking hates the normal fucking localhost IP address. I'm not gonna lie, Ollama is more of a novelty than it is something well and truly useful... but it was certainly quite handy to have a local chatbot sanity check my bash scripts instead of wasting ChatGPT or Claude tokens. I honestly felt compelled to give Ollama a fair shake on my desktop precisely because the 9070 XT was AMD's first graphics card where they
didn't neglect the self-hosted LLM crowd. Just don't expect Llama3.1, Qwen2.5-coder:14b, or deepseek-r1:14b to diagnose why your Steam game crashed via the Proton logs. You're gonna get a ton of "oi m8 did u update ur shit?"
So far every single game I've thrown at it runs at least as well as on Windows after the AMD card switch, and before that it was still at least as good as long as it used Vulkan. Most of my stuff runs through Steam, but I have EVE Online set up through Bottles. I know, Bottles sucks, but I have it working and I don't want to set it back up in Heroic Launcher.
Ironically, I've had more issues getting irksome Windows Media Framework titles to work properly. Y'know, 32-bit suboptimal PC ports like Catherine Classic and DMC HD Collection where the
gameplay is fine, all the in-game cutscenes render perfectly, but then all the FMVs are fucking borked to hell and back. That's more of an issue on the Wine/Proton end than it is on the hardware or operating system stack. Also kudos to you for getting EVE Online up and running; I play tons of Master Duel, Dark Souls III co-op, and Warframe these days. Multiplayer works pretty damn good. I think with multiplayer titles, Proton Experimental works better than GE-Proton but that's more of a hazy supposition than anything backed iwth hard and fast data.
Trust me, I know I'm using one of the most corposlop options for Linux and Wayland is trannysoft, but so far I haven't had a need to jump to anything more exotic or anything flashier. The issues I've had have all been KDE, and it's usually stupid shit like plasmashell freezing. And I wouldn't have finally wiped the last Windows holdout in my household if I wasn't experiencing that and worse on Windows 11. Overall, Fedora... Just Werks.
I appreciate your candour, your rationale and experiences align closely to my own, but I still can't believe that you're having a seamless experience on Fedora Plasma of all things. I mean hey, you ain't me, our biases are probably directionally similar but we might end up taking different forks in the road. I get all of that. More power to ya. It's just... the Cinnamon spin is pretty damn ace stuff all things considered. Strip away the Fedora branding and you'd be hard-pressed to tell if you're on Linux Mint or not. That's how "it just works" it is.
