Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

Post by tuna74 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #210

tuna74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." I think that is the only way forward. There is no "Linux desktop". There is KDE, Gnome etc. and if you want to do "system utilities" you have to target one of those.

No, that's a terrible idea. The right thing to do is design a Wayland protocol that gives you the access you need, get it accepted into wayland-protocols, and wait for all the compositors to implement it. Yes, that's a slow, annoying process, but doing something bespoke means either you do the same work over and over for every compositor, or you only support one or two compositors. Neither of those is a good result.

Post by lunixbochs » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

suby wrote: post #320

lunixbochs wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm the developer of Talon. It's possible to do the simple compositor specific hacks from Talon's scripting system to give yourself partial Wayland support at roughly the quality I'd be able to provide myself, and I know of a couple efforts to do this. The tentative plan for "dropping support for X11" is just to do one more public Linux X11 release, stop there, leave it available to download, and make it very cle…

Hi Lunixbochs, thank you for the comment. One of my take aways from the article was that you were considering removing the ability for Talon to work on x11 in the future. I appreciate the correction. I understand that you're dealing with a lot of unpleasant support requests (especially because people who have to use Talon are probably frustrated at having lost the ability to use their machine normally). I am sorry if…

Post by setopt » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

chadgpt3 wrote: post #316

setopt wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.

It's KDE now. GNOME is the penguin that went to the mountains while KDE largely tries to be compatible with things that aren't KDE.

Post by setopt » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

tuna74 wrote: post #321

setopt wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.

There was not really for system utilities. Apps, sure, but not system utilities.

Post by JNRowe » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

NoboruWataya wrote: post #294

JNRowe wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base. If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config fi…

I had seen river but for some reason didn't look too much into it. I think it's because at first glance it looks like a protocol that you can build a WM on, rather than a WM itself, but I guess it's probably easy to build your own tooling over it (a lot easier than "building your own WM" in the traditional sense)? I'll give it a look - thanks!