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

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.

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.

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.

Breaking half the graphics cards what TF is he on. Wayland is a hot mess. Whatch how quickly I'll be reinstalling x again.

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.

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.

"Allot of users won't notice the difference."
No just the apox half of them now suffering a broken deskto. 🙄

Seriously dude.

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.

For lulz, people are suggesting CDE for those who want to be stuck with X11: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

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.

Quoting: enigmaxg2The memory leak issue with slideshow wallpapers on Nvidia is still a thing,

I do use slideshow feature for background wallpaper on my 4090 and never noticed this. Is it with plasmashell process growing infinitely in memory usage? I'll have to keep a eye on things.

Honestly I don't get that many issues now with Wayland, but it seems some people find it unusable which is interesting. Makes you wonder how their systems are setup, perhaps broken packages or configuration.


Last edited by Gerarderloper on 28 Nov 2025 at 5:39 am UTC

But 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?

Wondering the same. I'm running KDE with 144 Hz on X11.

Quoting: tuubi

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.

Under X11, I only get the option for 60Hz. This is across three distros (Pop_OS, Endeavour and Siduction), so it must be a hardware limitation of some kind.

Launching a Wayland session immediately unlocks 120Hz, along with HDR, colour profiles, brightness settings, etc.

Quoting: scaineUnder X11, I only get the option for 60Hz. This is across three distros (Pop_OS, Endeavour and Siduction), so it must be a hardware limitation of some kind.

Works For Me(TM) on KDE 6 on Debian stable, and worked on KDE 5 on Bookworm already. I'm using Nvidia BTW.

Quoting: EikeWorks For Me(TM) on KDE 6 on Debian stable, and worked on KDE 5 on Bookworm already. I'm using Nvidia BTW.

Yeah, it's frustrating. For a long time I thought it was a cable issue, but then Plasma 6 dropped for Siduction, and suddenly I was on a wayland session and boom - everything unlocked, like magic. I'm on an AMD 7900XTX, so for a while I thought it was a limitation with HDMI (AMD haven't licensed HDMI 2.1 for the mesa driver), but I've researched it, and 2.0 is more than capable, as is the DisplayPort cable I tried too. It's a top-end monitor I'm using too, so doubly frustrating!

But great to see it all "exposed" under wayland, so no going back for me now. Being able to control the brightness of my screen using the Plasma widget is amazing too - until now I had to manually control brightness using the monitor's shitty remote control! So much more convenient this way!

Quoting: tohur

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

Yeah, I have a... 'FreeSync Premium' monitor and I just set the 'Adaptive sync' setting to Automatic and honestly kind of just forgot about it. Games and such tend to just work with their Vsync settings 'on', and I can see in my monitor's overlay the refresh bouncing around as needed, no visible tearing I can see.

Even watching videos in Firefox (LibreWolf), VLC, or mpv, no tearing, even for stuff shot at 24/25fps, provided it's full screen. I haven't paid close enough attention to see how it handles smaller windows and which takes priority.

The big caveat here though, of course, is: AMD GPU.

I've heard nVidia has gotten better but it sounds like here that it's not quite caught up.

Personal nVidia-versus-AMD anecdote time:

Spoiler, click me

AMD sucked on Linux back in the bad old days of fglrx, but since the newer 'radeon' and 'amdgpu' drivers, it's worlds better.

I got burned owning a GTX 980 back in the day (still no firmware for reclocking under Nouveau!), swore I'd never buy anything nVidia ever again, and while laptop shopping was a royal pain (ended up with an Asus 'AMD Advantage Edition' G513QY that's now my wife's... and has [the terrible ACPI implementation-slash-bug](https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive), that at least is much less noticeable under Linux than the Windows it came with), and there were some initial firmware/DisplayCore related bugs with my RX 9070 XT and launching SteamVR, for the most part, new-ish AMD GPUs and Plasma 6 on Wayland have been awesome, and actually feel a lot more responsive than the exact same system logged into an Xorg session (again - was my workaround for the now-fixed SteamVR bug )

I suspect that might have been the 60Hz vs. 165Hz + VRR thing, now, come to think of it.

Quoting: ShmerlFor lulz, people are suggesting CDE for those who want to be stuck with X11: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

You joke, but CDE's one heck of an aesthetic.

Quoting: syylk

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.

Now, I understand this isn't the raw dmabuf sharing you get from X11, but functionally this... hasn't really been an issue for me for at least a couple years I feel, now - the catch is that you need the corresponding XDG Desktop Portal (the little pop-up that lets you pick what monitor or window to share) installed as well - e.g., on Arch with Plasma 6 (and in fact, comes with both the full-fat 'plasma' group and 'plasma-meta'), it's:
extra/xdg-desktop-portal-kde 6.5.3-1 (566.9 KiB 2.2 MiB) [plasma] (Installed)
    A backend implementation for xdg-desktop-portal using Qt/KF5

• Discord was a bit of an issue for a while - [Vesktop (Vencord)](https://vesktop.dev/) worked around that for a bit until they updated the official app.


• Teams, mostly the official Linux build was abandoned - [Teams-for-Linux](https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux) wraps the webapp in Electron, I believe, and was my go-to for the last ~2-3 years I needed it for work, though loading the web version in a WebKit / Chromium-based browser also worked in a pinch.


• OBS works great now, but there's one more layer in between: Pipewire, which I can also wholeheartedly recommend now as a Pulseaudio replacement (and honestly, it replaces JACK pretty well, too!). You can add whole-screen or specific window captures to your scene - the ones that have '(Pipewire)' in the name - and Pipewire then calls the xdg-desktop-portal picker. It even remembers what you picked for next time, usually, and at least for my setup, doesn't prompt again on subsequent launches for at least the full screen capture I have set up.

You used to need [obs-vkcapture](https://github.com/nowrep/obs-vkcapture) before they got the Pipewire + xdg-desktop-portal combo supported, and that did work for me as well, but it's definitely a little clunkier in having to prefix your game/app with it.

Not being too familiar with Nobara personally, it looks like something downstream from Fedora, but [their install wiki](https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/en/new-user-guide-general-guidelines) here says this for OBS (including vkcpature!):

OBS Studio specifically from Nobara also comes with several plugins pre-installed that standard OBS from flatpak does not:

obs-studio-plugin-browser (Browser Source)
obs-studio-plugin-backgroundremoval (Camera Background Removal)
obs-studio-plugin-media-playlist-source (video/audio playlist aka VLC Playlist)
obs-studio-plugin-distroav (NDI)
obs-studio-plugin-vkcapture (Vulkan Capture for both 64 and 32 bit)

Additionally, Nobara comes with the OBS Gamecapture vulkan environment variable enabled globally, meaning you dont have to set any environment variables when capturing Vulkan game footage.
To install the Nobara native version of OBS and its plugins you can do so via the 'Recommended Additions' section of the Nobara Welcome app, or search for obs-studio in the Nobara Package Manager under the 'Packages' tab.

...and [their plasma-workspace spec](https://github.com/Nobara-Project/rpm-sources/blob/43/baseos/plasma-workspace/plasma-workspace.spec#L289) includes xdg-desktop-portal-kde, so it sounds like it was supposed to all work for you out-of-the-box?