Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release • Hacker News Board

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#81

Post by nvme0n1p1 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

suby wrote: post #46

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 s…

I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE.

Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant.

My stuff is written in Rust, just like Talon. I'm sure it would take me an afternoon or less to copy it over to Talon... but the dev just isn't interested. I don't know why he's so dramatic about Wayland when there are people actively trying to help contribute. If you try to talk about Wayland on the official Slack, there's an autoresponder telling you to shut up about it. If this were open source, I or someone could just fork it and move on with my life.

Now I'm sure I could use Ghidra and hack the binary to add support, but I'm not excited about becoming dependent on software where the developer is actively hostile to my interests. It reminds me of the blog post from yesterday about the guy who hates his insulin pump. I'm still a Talon user but I hate it now.

I guess I'll be forced to move to XFCE soon? Where is everyone else moving to?

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#82

Post by mvdtnz » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

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.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#83

Post by brooke2k » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

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.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#84

Post by throwawee » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

alyandon wrote: post #12

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.

I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#85

Post by senfiaj » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

thesuitonym wrote: post #80

idoubtit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too bad? A hidden procedure with ten clicks, which the user has to repeat for each web browser. And it may break at any time if the browser changes some details. Or if KDE changes. And it's specific to KDE, with no alternatives in most Wayland WMs. All that for _one_ feature which works out-of-the-box with Xorg, and which Wayland removed for security reasons. From what I've seen, sharing the screen is another com…

Look, I'm not a Wayland booster, I still prefer X11 most of the time, but this is really the way it should work. Applications should not be allowed to dictate how windows appear. That is the job of the window manager. Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.

>> Chrome's PIP is a stupid workaround for Windows and Mac because they do not have robust window management.

What are you talking about? It's very convenient when I watch video while I do some work or entertaining thing on other web page or app. It's fine if you don't want to use it but many people do.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#86

Post by em-bee » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #75

shevy-java wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11 Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less? > by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I…

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

i'd be interested on your take on the graphical interface of plan9.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#87

Post by ChocolateGod » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #43

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.

There's nothing about Wayland that ties it to Linux. Wayland compositors tend to require a few features exposed by the graphics drivers (e.g. DRM) but there's nothing stopping the BSDS adding these (iirc FreeBSD already does).

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#88

Post by suby » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

nvme0n1p1 wrote: post #81

suby wrote: post #46

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 s…

I've paid for Talon beta access for years. I'm a heavy Talon+Cursorless user, and I'm dreading this move by KDE. Ultimately I think this mostly confirms the danger of using closed source software (Talon). I have some personal accessibility tooling that works just fine on Wayland. It's KDE specific but it really wasn't hard to get working. And uinput works on a level below the compositor, so X11/Wayland are irrelevant…

I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users.

He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me.

Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland.

I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#89

Post by NoboruWataya » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

#90

Post by ChocolateGod » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #51

MBCook wrote: post #16

> 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.

HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.

I wouldn't say its "plain impossible" with X11, but its significantly easier on Wayland because its a far simpler design that aligns better with the graphics hardware, we're sending surfaces (or pointers to them) with metadata to the compositor, not drawing APIs.