KDE Plasma going all-in on Wayland and will drop the X11 session completely

Wayland needs a secure and backward compatible (which, unfortunately, rules out secure) way to manage global shortcuts and keypresses and viewport/video memory sharing.

These are two sore points of still incomplete feature parity with X11.

Yes, there are workarounds. Yes, the old ways were insecure by design. Yes, it's damn hard to provide these features to unmaintained software that expects stuff to work in a certain way.

But removing used/useful features is not exactly progress, no matter in name of what is being done.

I think this is good news and definitely the right call by the developers. It still leaves over a year for the last remaining issues (or whatever justifies keeping X11 around) to be ironed out, and means that developer time can be freed up to making a better desktop overall, and even beyond that LTS distributions will no doubt still offer it for a few more years.

Wayland has some interesting issues, and most of them can be resolved by switching to x11, but the most important thing in life is to have the Wayland Plasma Wiggle Mouse feature enabled.

Quoting: syylkWayland needs a secure and backward compatible (which, unfortunately, rules out secure) way to manage global shortcuts and keypresses and viewport/video memory sharing.

These are two sore points of still incomplete feature parity with X11.

Yes, there are workarounds. Yes, the old ways were insecure by design. Yes, it's damn hard to provide these features to unmaintained software that expects stuff to work in a certain way.

But removing used/useful features is not exactly progress, no matter in name of what is being done.

I feel like there are so many ways to do this that could be fully backwards compatible.

The way KDE is mostly handling it right now is that XWayland apps can just fully listen to everything if you allow it, just like they could on X11.

No app changes necessary.

This could go further... give me a dashboard for the portal that allows me to pick specific apps. Discord can listen to all my keypresses, so i can use PTT. Now discord doesnt have to know if its in focus, or change any code to request anything, It just needs to know "when I see the keybind, i respond". No app changes necesary.

Then they could make that dashboard allow specific keys to pass to specific apps. Now instead of passing all my keys to discord, only my PTT key needs to go. Again, they dont need to know that they arent seeing global keypresses, they just need to know to respond to the keybind, which they will see without understanding why. No app changes necessary. Still fully backwards compatible.

And then all apps need is some sort of way to interact with this dashboard, so users don't need to go to a KDE dashboard to configure discord (or OBS, or etc), the app can say "oh my PTT keybind is now X, and I see the user is on wayland, I should make sure X is a keybind I can see globally"

And then taking it _even further_ it would be neat to allow the sharing to not be global. "This app overlay can only listen to my keybinds when the app it is an overlay for is focused." Steam gets around this by being the one who launches the game as a child process, so it can listen to the game keybinds in its overlay, but I have other apps that have 3rd party overlays that I _want_ to allow to listen to my keypresses when Im using the app, but not globally.

I believe for the most part, these things are sort of what KDE is currently doing... It has a way of requesting global shortcuts, which it adds to its global keybinds (the keybind for X becomes "send keystroke X to specified app"). However in my experience in the past, global DE keybinds tend to consume the keybind. If I want "control" to be my PTT button, I dont want discord to consume all control keypresses. I want discord to see control being pressed, but I dont want it to be THE control handler.

The whole interface is currently a bit clunky. But it at least works. I had an app surprise me by popping up the KDE portal requesting a global keybind map. I can find these in the KDE `System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > System Services > org.chromium.Chromium` config (the app that prompted me to set things up was an electron app).

So, is Plasma Wayland in a good state for Nvidia users now?

I fully agree with bisbyx above, nothing prevents a compositor from implementing this today, or even a separate app, like KDE devs did for X11 screen capture compatibility. Obviously better if the apps register shortcuts themselves, though.

Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing

Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.

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Back to the article: an interesting tidbit is that, last time I checked, the Steam Deck was still using the X11 session. I wonder if they are going to change this?


Last edited by MayeulC on 26 Nov 2025 at 6:06 pm UTC

Quoting: MayeulCI fully agree with bisbyx above, nothing prevents a compositor from implementing this today, or even a separate app, like KDE devs did for X11 screen capture compatibility. Obviously better if the apps register shortcuts themselves, though.

Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing

Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.

---
Back to the article: an interesting tidbit is that, last time I checked, the Steam Deck was still using the X11 session. I wonder if they are going to change this?

yea, once the X11 session is dropped, I expect SteamOS will also drop it, though probably not immediately since SteamOS packages are quite far behind.

Overall this is a welcome change, I've been running everything under Wayland since about 3/4 year and had zero issues that I could directly attribute to Wayland. Flameshot said something about Wayland being incompatible but the flatpak seems to work fine. I think it's in a good enough state so they can drop the X session entirely

Quoting: melkemindSo, is Plasma Wayland in a good state for Nvidia users now?

I tried switching back to Wayland two days ago, with a relatively recent version of KDE Plasma (using KDE Neon) and an NVidia RTX 3070Ti using the latest proprietary driver.

On the upside, the issue of having *anything* with transparency freezing the whole desktop is gone. This included extensions popup in firefox and the time tooltip when hovering the clock in the notification area…

On the downside, it made weylus unusable (a particularly niche case unfortunately), related to how window location and screen arrangement are reported. And video capture is not happy too…
OBS became unpredictable (a relatively larger case I'd wager). Related, the portal popup that allow selecting a screen/window for screen sharing freeze with a particularly obtuse error message in the logs (`mesa: error: MESA: failed to import sync file 'too many open files'`) rendering the whole thing useless, as even screen sharing from the browser is now borked.

And, still happening, trying to use the clipboard from a terminal application (say, using clipboard manipulation in vim in konsole) still won't work without setting up some call to external scripts that can't handle all common use cases.

So, one day ago, I switched again to X11. Everything works, and since I have no use for fractional scaling or anything fancy on my decade old displays, there's no tangible downside.

Also, since we're on the internet, some disclaimer: I *know* that this is only a personal experience. But it exists; on a system that's mostly a vanilla installation of Ubuntu+KDE Plasma, using very common software, on a graphic card from a manufacturer that represents a large share of the general public. And some of these issues are so often brushed off that it really irks me. I don't really have the resource to put development time in Plasma's implementation of wayland, and trying to raise awareness is usually met with a wall, which is frustrating. But as it is, switching to Wayland, on my relatively modern, up-to-date system, means losing features, having some software completely unusable, and the only recourse as a user will soon disappear. It does not feel great.

Quoting: Cley_Faye

Quoting: melkemindSo, is Plasma Wayland in a good state for Nvidia users now?

I tried switching back to Wayland two days ago, with a relatively recent version of KDE Plasma (using KDE Neon) and an NVidia RTX 3070Ti using the latest proprietary driver.

On the upside, the issue of having *anything* with transparency freezing the whole desktop is gone. This included extensions popup in firefox and the time tooltip when hovering the clock in the notification area…

On the downside, it made weylus unusable (a particularly niche case unfortunately), related to how window location and screen arrangement are reported. And video capture is not happy too…
OBS became unpredictable (a relatively larger case I'd wager). Related, the portal popup that allow selecting a screen/window for screen sharing freeze with a particularly obtuse error message in the logs (`mesa: error: MESA: failed to import sync file 'too many open files'`) rendering the whole thing useless, as even screen sharing from the browser is now borked.

And, still happening, trying to use the clipboard from a terminal application (say, using clipboard manipulation in vim in konsole) still won't work without setting up some call to external scripts that can't handle all common use cases.

So, one day ago, I switched again to X11. Everything works, and since I have no use for fractional scaling or anything fancy on my decade old displays, there's no tangible downside.

Also, since we're on the internet, some disclaimer: I *know* that this is only a personal experience. But it exists; on a system that's mostly a vanilla installation of Ubuntu+KDE Plasma, using very common software, on a graphic card from a manufacturer that represents a large share of the general public. And some of these issues are so often brushed off that it really irks me. I don't really have the resource to put development time in Plasma's implementation of wayland, and trying to raise awareness is usually met with a wall, which is frustrating. But as it is, switching to Wayland, on my relatively modern, up-to-date system, means losing features, having some software completely unusable, and the only recourse as a user will soon disappear. It does not feel great.

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience 😌. Articulating all of this - despite previous frustrations with talking about this - sounds like not insignificant effort and time (it would be for me anyway 😄).

There still isn't an onscreen keyboard that rivals 'Onboard' or anything close under KDE / Wayland. In fact, im not sure there even is a fully functioning onscreen keyboard under Wayland KDE-Plasma right now


the last i read about it was here (last post 6 days ago):

https://discuss.kde.org/t/plasma-6-and-wayland-no-on-screen-keyboard-working/17799/53

where the workaround requiring GDK_BACKEND=x11 & adding it to environment variables. Seemingly not working on Fedora. Look at the first post in that thread and see who the kinds of people are effected by the forced switch to Wayland. People are still struggling with this all the way back to the beginning of Wayland's inception. Sure there are workarounds to some extent but it's not a very user friendly solution, when you are telling regular folks to switch to Linux.

I guess valve might use xwayland on SteamOS for the onscreen keyboard ? will that cover every feature of a regular keyboard idk.

Hmm... probably we'll have to give up some things we (or at least I) got used to when switching to Wayland.

I've been using Wayland now for a while, and yes, it does have its benefits. E.g on my Surface Pro 7 with Gnome, I can use the full resolution of 2736x1824 with frictional scaling to 175%. It runs very smooth. With X11 performance is very laggy when moving windows and mouse speed feels way to slow. My workaround for that was to use a lower resolution, but none matches the full 3:2 screen, closest I could get was 1680x1050 showing some black bars on top and buttom.

Also Synergy/Deskflow/InputLeap/Barrier (it's more or less all the same) still has issues, on some I get the desktop-portal question for which screen to share and permission each time I start it, while it doesn't ask it on others. Same version... and copy/paste between devices doesn't work on Wayland yet.

But I can get along with these little annoyances. What I'll really be missing is the input-overlay plugin for OBS. To show the MoveMaster keypresses on screen. But input-overlay relies on libuiohook, which apparently cannot easily be made compatible with Wayland.

VR on Ubuntu 24.04 with Gnome 46 is missing DRM leasing, but that's fixed in the next version.

My only real issue is the input-overlay. Wayland works for me pretty well otherwise, I'm using it on my Ubuntu desktop PC with nVidia, old VR gaming notebook running arch and nVidia, vBazzite uses it on my Legion Go and CachyOS uses it on my ROG Ally. And the Surface Pro 7 also running Ubuntu.

Can you toggle vsync yet?

Quoting: torkel104Can you toggle vsync yet?

For gaming on KDE that LONG been fixed and as far as the desktop if you have VRR it uses that if you have it turned on and if not it uses Vsync.. I don't understand though why on Earth you would want to turn that off on the desktop itself... would be a screen tearing mess

That's good, if it will accelerate development of stuff like Vulkan rendering for Kwin.