alt Hacker NewsPreparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
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Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues[1]
No ability to save and restore positions of native Wayland windows
Real-fake-session-restored apps don't remember which virtual desktop their windows were on
No full-screen aspect ratio correction
"Spare Layouts" feature not implemented
"Per-application Keyboard Layout" does not work
No way to change the gamma or manually adjust the colors without generating or finding an appropriate ICC profile
Can't switch between multiple touch strip modes
No headless RDP
Opening files using command-line binaries in Konsole doesn't raise existing windows
Global Menu is not supported for non-Qt apps
Some apps' non-maximizable windows are broken with placement policy set as maximized
[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...
What's sad is that after many years Wayland still lacks several things/features that X11 has/allows. Some of them are intentionally not implemented because of security paranoia. For example, Chrome "picture in picture" window doesn't stay on top when I click somewhere else since Wayland doesn't allow windows to stay on top. If I had a lot of time I could list how Wayland breaks many applications.
Not saying that X11 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
I think the KDE developers in particular have done a great job of pushing Wayland forward and getting features that people want and need added as new protocols. KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11, and by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland so I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage.
> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of.
In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.
I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11.
I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.
Been using Linux as sole OS for 25 years now. I will stick to X11 no problems, I am sure it will be just fine for my usage. When we thought Gnome 2 was gone, MATE fork appeared, X11 will be there for a long time. I am also going through the struggle of porting a software I maintain (github.com/edumucelli/docking) to Wayland and it is awful: "this compositor do this part, that one does that part, no compositor does this :shrug".
I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo.
The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell.
Anyone on the most recent LTS Kernel (6.18) with an older nvidia GPU will not have a good experience on Wayland. I have two machines with Pascal GPUs and:
- The nvidia binary driver is shit with Wayland
- The nvidia OSS driver does not support Pascal GPUs.
- Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly.
You can get a stable system either by using the latest kernel+nouveau or:
MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=kms_swrast
Sadly, recent GNOME versions introduced a hard dependency on systemd and can no longer be used on systemd-free distros. This is the kind of problem that the anti-systemd people had in mind back then when debates about systemd raged.
> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations [sic], and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
I've been using Kubuntu for the past 12 years without any X-related issue, and have and am actively working on stuff that requires it. I guess it's time to switch to another DE.
Wayland is great and I generally prefer it, but it's worth keeping X around for KDE Plasma I think. Things like remote desktop are nicer on X, X is much easier to use on Android compared to Wayland, etc.
I installed Arch on my old Mac few months ago, alongside Xorg and i3, they were what I was used to before I switched to Mac about 6 years ago. Back then Wayland was a mess, so I never even bothered to check it out this time.
However, few days ago my non-technical girlfriend wanted to use my laptop, I couldn't see her using i3 so I decided to install Plasma, a proper desktop environment. Lo and behold I couldn't launch it. After searching I found out I needed plasma-x11-session as the default plasma install now included just a Wayland session. I found this a bit surprising, so I did further digging and discovered a huge chunk of Linux desktop community have basically migrated to Wayland since the last time I was here. Very surprising I must say.
So I decided to try Wayland again; I installed Sway and was pleasantly surprised. My screen resolution was automatically calibrated, operations seemed to run more smoothly, my laptop's fan kicked in less frequently (don't know why), and I didn't need a compositor package to fix screen tear (bye Picom). But all these weren't the reasons I decided to stick with Wayland. You see, in x11 I've been having a persistent problem: playing videos from certain websites, notably Twitter, introduces noticeable flickers. I tried everything to get rid of this: media drivers, verifying GPU acceleration, calibrating refresh rates, nothing worked. When I installed Sway I decided to see if this issue got magically fixed, and lo! It was. Wayland has come a long way since I last tried it. Now that I mentioned it, I have just remembered I need to figure out a way to share screens on Google meets, at the moment I seem to be limited to sharing just the Chrome window.
in my mind unfortunately this basically destroys KDE's viability as a gaming platform. SO many older games just do not work properly unless run under X11 (hell, some newer ones too). XWayland is good for everyday applications but for games in my experience it too often falls flat.
No headless RDP solution is pretty unforgiveable in 2026 - right now I use Nomachine and indeed it requires X11. Why wouldn't Wayland have a solution for this? It is not a niche usecase. It is like, a headline, completely mainstream use-case.
> Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland
Wonder how representative of the real end user population this is?
A huge thank you to the KDE team. Plasma is good (finally) on Wayland for me (AMD graphics, single hi-dpi screen). I finally switched over from GNOME and I am happy with the experience.
I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps
The only downside is several of the *BSDs don't have wayland. Not all the world is linux and sometimes that is a good thing to encourage.
Does anyone know if there is any progress on window shading on Wayland? I miss it like crazy.
How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?
Slight tangent but has anyone moved from AwesomeWM to a Wayland-based tiling WM? Interested to hear what people chose. I tried Sway for a bit and while it's not bad by any means it's a bit too unlike what I'm used to. SomeWM is an attempt at "porting" AwesomeWM to Wayland and looks very promising but not quite there yet (I couldn't get Vicious widgets working and not sure if supporting them is even a goal).
I'm still on AwesomeWM for now because I have no real reason to incur the pain of switching, but still curious to know what path others are taking.
It seems to me like such a drastic change in the underlying system (removing support of one of two major display platforms) would mandate a major version change.
Complete removal of X11 should be an event to trigger KDE 7.0.
Gah I’m switching to TMUX.
"We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. "
What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support.
I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.
Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity.
Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
By the way - David refused to publish the source for the image he showed, aka "nobody uses x11 anymore".
This reminds me of the systemd folks - they also don't allow for discussions yet alone cite anything related to their claims. They just claim. If the earth is flat, they don't need evidence. Their word must be enough.
It is this image:
http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/...
David claims "internal metrics", but he also does not explain how those metrics were gained, is there bias in how they were gained, which time span and so forth.
I am not saying he is fabricating the graph, though this could be the case too. What I am asking for is to show (ALL of) the data and explain the graph and data. Otherwise this is simple propaganda, with a pre-set goal to cover-my-ass (aka explain why KDE devs try to eradicate all xorg users).
By the way, next step, as you guys may know: systemd-only. Both David and Nate also announced this before. I wonder if there are financial kickbacks.
I can't be the only long time Linux use who still has no real idea what X11 or Wayland are. Except that sometimes software won't work properly with one or the other and I need to paste some arcane command to fix it.
Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11.
Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.
Great! Now fix screenshot
until the next one
My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily.
KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable.
I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.
So long KDE. Xlibre for life.
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dumb question, with LLMs being so prolific now, why is this sort of a thing.. a thing? Why not us an agent to maintain code people use, but humans don't have time to keep up with? or at least, are agents being used in FOSS software widely for such ends, at least to reduce the burden and cheapen the cost of delivering quality FOSS experience?
It's so funny reading about how the problem with Wayland is that you have many, often incomplete, implementations while being old enough to remember the time when X11 was actually popular (and thus had many, often incomplete, implementations).
I read this yesterday wanted to raise awareness for it - https://nocoffei.com/?p=451
It describes the regression in accessibility software for Linux from x11 to Wayland. Unfortunately, judging by the pace of protocols being accepted, I think we're years out from having a solution.
The most notable thing not working is Talon, which is a voice input system that lets you insert speech to text, manipulate windows, call scripts, etc, all via voice. It's software that works on Windows, MacOS, and x11, but not Wayland.
I think unfortunately right now the best bet is to, if you need the software, stick with X11 for as long as possible. An environment like i3 will probably be maintained for decades to come. Alternatively it might make sense to build some type of bespoke solution on top of a specific wayland stack, like re implementing what you get of talon in a kde plugin or via sway IPC. This seems viable to me but an incredible amount of work.
For people that need this, having to be a developer and build your own tooling in order to use your computer... it's not a future of Linux I'm particularly excited about. I don't want to leave people who need accessibility software behind, and I don't think any security justifications are actually real roadblocks which would prevent being able to serve these people. We have a coordination problem. It's less of a technical issue and more of an issue of getting people to agree on protocols which would let software like Talon work against the entire ecosystem.
I am happy the ecosystem is moving to Wayland, I think we're going end up in a better place. Wayland does solve some real problems for me (x11 screen tearing / frame pacing issues on Nvidia). I'm happy that KDE exists, it's great software.