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It was only a matter of time but it's nearly upon us - KDE Plasma with version 6.8 will be entirely dropping the X11 session to go full Wayland.

For a lot of users it won't make much of a difference, according to the blog post announcement as the "vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session". With this change they said it "opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development". Not surprising, since developing for and maintaining the Plasma desktop across two very different protocols can't be easy. At least they'll end up with more focused development.

So with this move support for all X11 applications will be "fully entrusted to Xwayland".

In the FAQ they mentioned the current Plasma X11 session will be supported still into early 2027, no exact timing as of yet though. If you really need X11, they're suggesting sticking to a long term support (LTS) distribution that ships older Plasma. If you are using X11 and sticking with it a while, the good news is that KDE applications will continue to run on X11. They're only dropping support specifically for the Plasma desktop itself.

There's still some significant issues they need to address though, which they're gradually working through to ensure Plasma on Wayland is truly good for everyone.

We're finally properly close to the year of Wayland on the desktop.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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ScottCarammell 14 hours ago
Whuff, seems a bit premature to me but I guess I'm not as smart as the people working on this. Hopefully they'll fix non-mouse-controlled cursors not wanting to show up on Wayland by then or else X4 is cooked for me.
Szkodnix 12 hours ago
As long as it allows KDE developers to expedite the development of Wayland, I'm perfectly fine with that change.

I've been running KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland for more than a year now and for me it works mostly fine, besides initial issues with multi monitor setup (some apps not scaling properly or opening on a wrong monitor by default - Window Rules mostly work) and little annoyances with asking me each single time what window to screenshare once I do the screensharing.

Those are not any deal-breakers for me, though.
syylk 10 hours ago
User Avatar
Quoting: MayeulC
Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing
Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.
Screensharing / screencasting still don't work natively in Wayland, while it works on X11.

Examples:
- Discord streaming your game screen to the other people in your voice call;
- Teams sharing your screen or a window it doesn't "own" while in a videocall;
- OBS capturing stuff from other program's GUIs and casting in Twitch or other streaming service.

I'm sure there are not the only edge cases. And I'm equally sure there are workarounds. But this is the behavior out of the box for me (Nobara 43, Plasma 6.5.2 on Wayland, ofc).

I understand program isolation and sandboxing. But if the walls of the sandbox are too tall, then one program cannot grab what another is showing, and redirect the stream appropriately.

And this is what I mean for lack of feature parity with X11. X11 can do all of the above by letting one software somehow peek at the private graphic structures of another.
etoven 8 hours ago
Breaking half the graphics cards what TF is he on. Wayland is a hot mess. Whatch how quickly I'll be reinstalling x again.
etoven 8 hours ago
Quoting: ScottCarammellWhuff, seems a bit premature to me but I guess I'm not as smart as the people working on this. Hopefully they'll fix non-mouse-controlled cursors not wanting to show up on Wayland by then or else X4 is cooked for me.

something starting to feel shady about KDE love affair with this broken pos compositor if you ask me. There's nothing wrong with your tale on this. I agree.
etoven 8 hours ago
Quoting: einherjarThis article reminded me, that I switched to Wayland out of curiosity about half a year ago.
I just forgot about it, everything seems to work.

I use an AMD graphics card though, I have no idea how well it works with Nvidia.

Work's lole s***t and there n lies the problem. Seems as though he has chosen to forgot about half+ the marketshare.
etoven 8 hours ago
"Allot of users won't notice the difference."
No just the apox half of them now suffering a broken deskto. 🙄

Seriously dude.
scaine 3 hours ago
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Quoting: etoven"Allot of users won't notice the difference."
No just the apox half of them now suffering a broken deskto.
He's not making stuff up, you know. They're using actual stats to back up their claims. Perhaps you declined to provide telemetry in the "User Feedback" Settings page, or maybe you haven't filed any bug reports?

You haven't said how you're affected badly by this though. Can you elaborate? Is your issue on the Significant Issues tracker?

Quoting: etovensomething starting to feel shady about KDE love affair with this broken pos compositor if you ask me.
It's been clear for several years now that Wayland is the future of the Linux graphics stack. What are you suggesting they do instead? Other than "stay on X11 and accept the development issues (for the KDE Plasma team) that entails".

I do miss having my windows remember their positions, although it's being worked on. But I wouldn't go back to X11 because a) no 120Hz support, b) no HDR and c) no brightness controls for external monitors. It's just too good now (for me, at least), despite its other issues.
Shmerl 2 hours ago
For lulz, people are suggesting CDE for those who want to be stuck with X11: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
tuubi 59 minutes ago
User Avatar
Quoting: scaineBut I wouldn't go back to X11 because a) no 120Hz support
Wayland definitely is the way to go, but what do you mean no 120Hz? I'm running an Xfce (X11) desktop at 120Hz right now, on AMD hardware similar to yours. Is that some weird KDE limitation on X11?

In any case, there are real (and compelling) reasons to migrate to Wayland, like HDR. No need to come up with imaginary ones.
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