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Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk

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

#41

Post by MegaDeKay »

senfiaj wrote: post #8

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…

I have a virtual pinball cab with two (and soon) three displays. Wayland really makes life difficult here because the software needs to always put the playfield on one display, the backglass on another, and the "dot matrix display" window on a third. That's a big no-no with Wayland. Fortunately KDE has window rules as a workaround. Sway and Hyprland allow similar rules. Mutter on Gnome has no equivalent.

I'm guessing this would mess up other games as well, like multi-screen flight simulators or driving games. It would be really nice if user-trusted apps could be granted permissions on an app-by-app basis to allow absolute placement of windows for these cases instead of making us jump through hoops.

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

#42

Post by exe34 »

zubspace wrote: post #35
exe34 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!

Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....

nmtui

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

#45

Post by bityard »

ndiddy wrote: post #2

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 sing…

When I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 on my personal laptop running KDE, I knew that the switch from X11 to Wayland would happen and was braced for all kinds of issues, like every other time I tried to switch to Wayland in previous years.

Instead, I could tell literally no difference. Multiple desktops works fine, scaling works fine, screen capture works fine, old apps work fine, literally everything works just fine.

Good job, KDE team.

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

#46

Post by suby »

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.

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

#47

Post by MegaDeKay »

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.

> 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.

The risk in that in this age of AI-assisted bughunting, X11 security vulnerabilities are more numerous and as nasty as they've ever been. And that says a lot.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTU1NzA

https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-9-Vulnerabilities-AI

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

zubspace wrote: post #35
exe34 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try xmonad and dmenu. You don't need a desktop environment!

Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by superkuh »

mug1 wrote: post #10

I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps

And the statistics are only from the latest release, not over all KDE users. They mention this in the text but the disengenuous plot is what people see.

>For transparency, the one caveat in all of the above is that I've deliberately always focused on people using the latest Plasma release. We do still have a sizable chunk of users on X11 still using Plasma 5.27. Including them, the total Wayland adoption rate is about 76%.

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

#50

Post by shevy-java »

ndiddy wrote: post #2

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 sing…

> 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 don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared?

> I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage

Why is this contradicting what others report then?

> I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.

David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :)

Though, I am hardly the first with that either:

https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...

Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like?

Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from last year:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250917012150/https://jriddell....

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