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KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

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Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#121

Post by prmoustache »

ferguess_k wrote: post #52

I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in…

> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?

Tech debt. The X11 dev have thrown the towel and have prefered working on something they deemed more maintainable.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#122

Post by prmoustache »

simion314 wrote: post #106
aidenn0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it. The redesign also reflects their priorities. The best analogy I can come up with is imagine a small group of people maintaining an old car frame and mechanical workings. They work hard to keep the engine running, but it's in a chassis with leaf springs and direct steer…

>Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it. Isn't wayland just soem protocol? so did the ex X11 devs wrote soem specifications and then soem went to GNOME I think the issue is that there is no wayland library that a DE can use so everyone is forced to implement it as part of the DE , so the end result is a lot…

wlroots is one such library.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#123

Post by wkat4242 »

elcritch wrote: post #112
dmit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plasma is KDE. What are you trying to say? Edit: oh, I guess swapping FreeBSD for Linux? Yeah nah, I don't know GP, but I suspect this isn't a reason for them to switch OS just to solve this.

And KDE on X11 on FreeBSD seems pretty stable so far. Feels super snappy so far.

It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.

I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#124

Post by kanbankaren »

ndiddy wrote: post #115
kanbankaren wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you do it? It doesn't allow any value below 100%?

On KDE you can just type a number into the scale percentage field in the display configuration settings pane. I typed "73" and it snapped to 72.5 which is probably close enough. I don't know whether GNOME supports anything similar, unlike KDE they really don't like giving users very many configuration options.

I tried it on KDE Plasma(6.5.3) just now and it resets to 100%.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#125

Post by exceptione »

o11c wrote: post #90

Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3). But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have t…

What are they denying? You can continue using Xwayland for *most* X applications.

I think they explain your options quite well in this blog post: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...

As they say, distro's like "AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032".

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#126

Post by wkat4242 »

neogodless wrote: post #37

Related (re: Gnome) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925950 GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code (linuxiac.com) 12 days ago | 185 comments

I'm glad not to use gnome, it really rubs me the wrong way. So few settings and options, and the way it works is totally how I don't want it to work.

I'm not 100% aligned with default KDE either but that doesn't matter because it has options to configure it just the way I want.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#127

Post by prmoustache »

lousken wrote: post #118
o11c wrote: post #90

Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3). But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have t…

Yea, it is quite disappointing. Lots of apps still don't work with wayland properly, even a lot of enterprise apps like VPNs have issues. Hopefully they will be ironed out after Ubuntu 26.04 comes out.

Apps running in xwayland run the same way as on X11, xwayland being an xserver.

Also I don't understand your relation between a vpn and a graphic protocol.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#128

Post by aseipp »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #68
gary_0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it 1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications. 2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy. The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix th…

> X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics I really wish they would figure this out. It just feels like with Threadripper etc the time is perfect for a return of thin-clients/not-so-dummy terminals running X11-like applications over the network on a server. Especially for development where many of us are running under-powered laptops and could use the boost to compilation from a beefy…

If you want thin client like behavior, you should look at stuff like Waypipe or just outright using RDP directly, both of which are much better at the job of "display remote graphical application on my computer" than X11's client-server design ever managed to accomplish.

If anything, the variety of alternative solutions for that today -- everything from single-app to high-res full-desktop game streaming -- are much more robust and viable on modern networks than the X approach ever was, even if it was a neat-o "freebie" thing that fell out of its design. You get what you pay for, I guess.

Re: KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

#129

Post by creatonez »

ottah wrote: post #101
gary_0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it 1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications. 2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy. The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix th…

I 100% agree with the performance improvement goals, but I think the security claims are overblown, and overly cautious. I honestly don't understand the point of trying to implement the security boundary in the display manager. It solves one class of security issues, while breaking a lot of accessibility and automation. The display manager just shouldn't be enforcing rigid per processes security controls, that's bett…

> that's better done further down the stack

If you do it further down the stack, you break accessibility and automation even more... this has been tried. Doesn't work.

The end goal is to have actually working Android-like sandboxing rather than some broken firejail crap.

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