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.
Was nice that they mentioned some of their terminal utilities for scripting/automation. I ported my own scripts over just before Plasma 6 released and haven’t looked back. And having those utilities made my own move to Wayland a lot easier.
There are still occasional things I miss from X11, like Barrier for example, that made using a single mouse/keyboard across multiple systems work like you were just on an extended monitor. But my move was very smooth, and I’m sure it will only get easier between now and the actual end of X11 support.
Bad news
It was inevitable, but my nVidia GTX770 stuck on the legacy 470 drivers is still very sad.
Hopefully by that point the nouvou driver will have good enough performance for Moonlight streaming (client-side)
the future is now old man
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.
You may be underestimating the competency and speed of KDE devs. These people are the effing top.
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.
so this is all a non-issue.
I think that view is overly optimistic. We shall see.
Boooooh
Why?
Many things still don’t have a XDG portal like reading absolute cursor position (useful for some accessibility and productivity apps) and things who do have an XDG portal like screenshoting are usually not implemented in popular OS-agnostic libraries
Those things aren’t supported in XWayland either for security reasons iirc and require X11 but I could be wrong
Among other things, yeah. I know it’s coming, but windows having no idea where they were last time they were launched is a major annoyance. Not to mention a few games that crash on Wayland, and not on X11
Those are all perfectly valid reasons.
Sometimes I feel the Linux community is too eager to jump on the latest shiny new thing, even when it’s not finished or lacking important features, or has bugs.
Counterpoint, the Linux community is also happy to keep old and ancient things alive as well.
Just look at how many 32 bit dedicated distros are out there. There’s even 16 bit ones.
That’s the thing, I’m really not against Wayland. It 100% is smoother than X11, feels more premium in a way. And code-wise, it’s far easier to maintain.
But so many missing features make it tough to leave x11 behind. Even if just to switch to it once a week when needed.
Some things just don’t work properly on Wayland. For example, #NoMachine remote #Plasma desktop sessions connect, show a white screen, then disconnect. Switching to an X11 session solves the problem.
This is a showstopper, so I’m sticking with X.Org.
Things like this needed to be ironed out before making it a permanent and exclusive replacement.
Yeah the remote desktop stuff isn’t quite there yet eh? And I was wondering how they were going to replace X over ssh as well.
Isn’t waypipe meant to replace X over SSH?
I don’t know enough about Wayland, so maybe?
