After nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release (due early 2027) will be Wayland-exclusive.
Read the FAQ in the link to find out what this means for you and the future of KDE.
After nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release (due early 2027) will be Wayland-exclusive.
Read the FAQ in the link to find out what this means for you and the future of KDE.
Too soon, IMHO. This is going to be disruptive to people who rely on X11 functionality that’s unsupported or broken on Wayland and XWayland.
I can only hope that the fallout leads the wayland-protocols maintainers to finally address more of their project’s deficiencies.
Current Plasma is still aupported until 2032 or so, so there are still a few years to close the gaps.
Is there anything in particular that you miss?
Yes, but I don’t want to dox myself here by pointing out specific issues that affect me, and I already have a plan to address my particular needs (although it will require significant work and still leave me with a worse Plasma experience).
I’m more concerned with the impact on the community as a whole. This will push some people into migrating to the ghetto of a very-long-term-support distribution, costing them time and making them second-class citizens, and is likely to push others into giving up Plasma entirely. I don’t think we will hear from many of them, since most people either do not participate in software discourse on social media, or will realize that there’s not much point in shouting when you’ve been deliberately left behind.
Most, likely 95+% of users will never even realise. Hell, they didn’t realise when we switched them over to Wayland by default in Plasma 6. Even less so now with NVIDIA at last getting their act together, and devs having spent many human-hours in figuring out support for graphic tablets and so on. And even less a year from now when we have full feature-parity with X11.
You may be underestimating the competency and speed of KDE devs. These people are the effing top.
Will there be people who still need X11 a year+ from now? Maybe, it will be for really niche reasons though: very specific hardware (most most common tablets and drawing pads are already supported) or really old legacy software their company requires them to use.
Either way, there will be compatibility layers, distros and maybe even forks of Plasma with X11 support, so this is all a non-issue.
I promise, my view of KDE developers is well informed. But it doesn’t matter, because KDE development alone isn’t going to fix deficiencies in the Wayland protocol.
I think that view is overly optimistic. We shall see.