37 comments
I think this is the right decision by KDE. Narrowing the scope of work is basically always a good thing for a project. KDE should either switch to wayland, or stay on X11, and not try to do both. And they've clearly decided awhile ago that they consider wayland a requirement.
I say that despite the fact that I think wayland was a poorly conceived, designed, implemented, and marketed project that has set back the adoption of the linux desktop by years.
Toodles. It's been nice using kwin as my window manager, but if plasma support for X11 is going then I expect kwin won't be long behind. Whatever, I'm still not using Wayland.
> I'm still not using Wayland.
Why?
Why would he? X11 works just fine. It's honestly tiring how much it feels like every project is trying to force people to use Wayland.
It breaks all my shit, for bullshit condescending reasons. For instance I have a script that matches window titles to pipewire audio streams so I can change the volume per window without messing around in pavucontrol/etc. There's no cross platform way to do that with Wayland because ""security"" means it's supposedly dangerous for programs to read the title bars of other applications, even though the individual Wayland compositor apparently each have a proprietary way of doing this.
Those deliberately-missing features in Wayland would have been a good opportunity to instead provide an official API plus an official security/privacy framework. Pretending that the hard problems are out of scope was such a disappointing strategy.
It is mindblowing to me that so many people think that just ripping out functionality and completely eliminating certain legitimate usecases is "progress".
And that having fucktons of incompatible compositors because wayland, by design, does not want to standardize things they decided would be harmful to myself if I needed them is also a good path forward.
Meanwhile the very real problem of "developers can't write an application that targets wayland, is brushed under the carpet, and then the entire house it's in is also buried in sand. Devs can target gnome, kde or whatever. But they'd have to support them separately. And there are certain devs who explicitly say they will not be implementing wayland support because of these issues. But at least we have solved XEyes's security issues!
Headless RDP
Not GP but...
Last time I started a wayland plasma session it kept resetting my screen brightness to 100% every time they woke from sleep. The time before that I crashed the entire desktop, dropping me back to the terminal, when I tried to drag a hyperlink between windows.
Those might have been fixed and I might try wayland again next time I update and reboot.
I don't care about its supposed advantages.
Similar for me. Wayland ran super fast which was great. But konqueror refused to open. Then crashed when I opened discord. No thanks.
Fortunately XWindows never ever caused problems or crashes for anybody ever /s
If I had to choose between something that does what I want it to and crashes occasionally and something that doesn't do what I want it to and crashes frequently, what do you think I'd choose?
Wayland reminds me very much of the Disk Utility application that shipped with Mac OS X El Capitan. The developers rewrote it because the original person who wrote it wasn't at Apple anymore and it ended up being pretty much useless due to massive amount of missing features.
It used to, yes, but once they stopped fixing it, it stopped crashing! I've not had a x11 crash in 12 years.
Was that 1 year ago or 5?
>I don't care about its supposed advantages
Since it will be the only game in town soon, it's time to start caring - or people will also have to change DEs and other apps, which would be much more trouble than getting on with the program.
> Since it will be the only game in town soon,
thankfully this hasn't been a problem so far, hopefully the end of x11 is still about 20 years away, like fusion.
This year. The drag and drop was probably last year.
Also there's no kill switch so I don't have to update. I wonder how long I can hold plasma and qt without breaking some other package.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058531 ("KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support (phoronix.com)"—237 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085593 ("KDE going all-in on a Wayland future (kde.org)"—46 comments)
I like 6.6 and I would mind dropping X11 support this quickly, this ideally should be in KDE 7.0/8.0 because, as I understand it, many apps and drivers are not ready for Wayland/XWayland.
Give it one more release then drop it?
I am curious - there are many x11 only apps, will they stop working OOTB?
No, XWayland isn't going away. Just X.org for running them.
> Just X.org for running them
What does that mean?
"While we can’t promise all problems will be completely gone"
They could promise to drop support for it once the wayland one reaches feature parity. If any "significant issues" remain, then it's simply not ready for release.
I hate this modern trend of releasing stuff before it is done. And in the commercial space we are now moving on to releasing stuff before they even get started on development. Selling promises. "Buy our shit now and we promise that next year it will be able to do X!"
Remember this not a billion dollar company we are talking about here, this is volunteer OSS project. If no one wants to maintain the X11 support then that's up to them.
Its more the case that certain people decide X11 will no longer be supported and block anyone from trying to support it in "their" project.
Good bye, accessibility.
They're working on it: <https://www.kdab.com/enhancing-accessibility-and-creative-to...>
Also 6.8 is at least 2 years out, so there's still time to work the remaining issues out. As far as I know only speech input remains a major problem, so hopefully they'll figure that out.
It'd be nice if they could finish it before "forcing" it on everyone.
> Also 6.8 is at least 2 years out
It's been decades since Wayland was "ready". But surely two more years...
Wayland is the IPv6 of the windowed display world.
The bright, complete, unfettered future always just a few more versions and a few more years over the horizon.
I'm sure the good people at KDE wouldn't mind delaying 6.8 if more work is needed for something as important as accessibility. And let's be real: if you don't need voice input then KDE on Wayland is ready.
Wayland isn't decadeS (plural) old. So it can't have been ready that long. And it still isn't. It's a design-by-committee type of thing.
> It's been decades since Wayland was "ready".
Decades? Really?
Wayland very first release was 17 years ago in 2008 and QT didn't support it until 2015. xdg-desktop-portal first stable release was in 2018 and PipeWire in 2023.
I thought we had peaked with systemd when it came to FUD here but Wayland might give it a run for its money.
No one is "forcing" anything on you, and I'm finding this argument increasingly disingenuous. If you prefer the current versions then you're entirely free to keep them.
But you do not get to demand that future versions are only ever implemented your way. If that's what you want, fork the project or pay someone to do it for you. Acting entitled about the work of volunteers who are sharing it with you for free is not a good look.
KDE's been putting a lot of work into accessibility on Wayland.
What accessibility features will you be missing in KDE Plasma 6.8?
Why?
I don't hack my window manager, I use the GUI out of the box. I have never had a major issue with Wayland.
Same. It's had far fewer issues for me than X, even on Nvidia with my current laptop. Multiple monitors with different resolutions & thus different fractional scaling ratios just works, from the Plasma settings GUI. No need to edit any configs manually. That never worked out-of-the-box for me with X.
sigh
I like KDE but I'm still running X11 on Void Linux, partly because I just don't feel like trying to switch over to Wayland and reconfigure my two systems.