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KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates (www.theregister.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.

The team behind the KDE Plasma desktop announced it is going all-in on a Wayland future. The Plasma version 6.8, "which we expect will be sometime in early 2027," will completely drop X11 support.

You don't need to worry just yet. Plasma 6.5 appeared less than a month ago, and it's currently at version 6.5.3. That means there are the entire 6.6 and 6.7 release sequences to get through, which will probably take most of 2026 and some of 2027.

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[+] -7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (13 children)

Or stylus users. If the stylus functionality won't be fixed in Wayland when this change happens, I'll have stop my regular donation to KDE and start looking for another desktop environment to support.

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  • [–] 33 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Or maybe all those things will work two years from now. And if some issues remain there's still LTS support for a while in multiple distros, since this only affects future versions.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    last i looked at what talon requires, their unresolved asks spanned 17 years of wayland development.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    The requirements are generally things that were designed away on purpose from Wayland. Even if KDE plasma had a workaround solution, they would need to communicate with all other distros to make sure all distros have similar solutions so accessibility feature devs don't have to make a version of their application for every distro, and KDE Devs themselves have said that they "don't want to allow users to shoot themselves in the foot by letting the application bypass security features" as if application A knowing the coordinates of a window in application B has any security implication whatsoever.

    Wayland is fundamentally designed without accessibility in mind at all, and will virtually never work with it. The current status is still after 17 years "tough shit" and that infuriates me.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    This isn't happening for another year or so, there's time to get styli working

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

    Good to hear! Keeping my fingers crossed.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Out of interest, which specific features / functionality is missing at the moment that you would be waiting for?

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    The main one is the Wacom stylus & screen, on a Thinkpad X1Extreme. I tried Wayland from a live Kubuntu 24.04, and in settings there was the message "Unsupported platform detected. Currently only X11 is supported". At that point I didn't check anything else. I also noticed that the desktop and windows weren't so "crisp" as they were under X11, although I can't exactly explain where the feeling came from; probably I would have chosen X11 even if the stylus had worked.

    I suspect that I can actually login on a Wayland session even now; I'll try it out as soon as I have time.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I don't think Kubuntu 24.04 had Plasma 6 because it was an LTS release. In Plasma 6.3 they completely reworked the settings page for graphics tablets, and they've also changed how fractional scaling works so it should be less blurry (if that was what was making it blurry for you before).

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Thank you for the info. I'll try a live USB with Kubuntu 25.10 or 26.04dev and check it out. Now that you mention that, the blurriness was indeed related with scaling (though not fractional).

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