Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
blog.davidedmundson.co.uk71 points by jandeboevrie 3 hours ago
71 points by jandeboevrie 3 hours ago
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 single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
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.
Yeah agreed. I switched to kde from gnome a few months back, and it's amazing how much better it's been in a thousand little ways.
> 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....
> Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this.
That is because people who don't have a problem don't think about this and so don't comment. Many wayland users don't know. I think I switched this machine I'm using now to wayland a while ago but I don't remember, and maybe it switched back in an update and I didn't notice (which is the point, I know I switched at some point and I couldn't tell the difference - which is how it should be)
Perhaps the Wayland code path does not have to do thousands of workarounds with an ancient API made thinking on remote graphical terminals.
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.
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 remain to the 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 is not broken and should not be replaced, but many Wayland's decisions harm user experience more than X11.
If you use KDE, you can work around this because of the powerful feature set the window manager has for setting custom window behavior.
1. Right click the PIP window and then click "More Actions-> Special Window Settings".
2. On the window that pops up, click "Add Property", and add "Window title". Change the drop-down from "Unimportant" to "Exact match" (this works on Firefox because the window title is always "Picture-in-Picture", you might have to do something slightly different on Chrome if it does something different).
3. Click "Add Property" again, add "Keep above other windows", change the drop-down to "Force", and change the radio button to "Yes".
4. From now on, all PIP windows will show up on top of other windows.
It would definitely be nicer if there was some sort of "always on top" permission that applications could request, but it's not too bad.
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.
Yes, exactly. This security paranoia makes the devs' lives much more complicated. I have seen many apps turning off advanced features, such as screen color pickers. Automatation tools can be broken. Apps cant know their window positions, etc. You can see countless dev rants about Wayland and how it's generally unpleasant experience to work with.
I know nothing about the detailed technical differences between X11 and Wayland but with Hyprland for me the PIP is working as expected so I assume its not just a Wayland issue but specific to the window manager you are using? Maybe somebody else can explain?
As far as I know, there are multiple Wayland implementations. Which is also not good because it creates fragmentation and potential inconsistencies (some subtle differences in behavior, differences in bugs, etc). Maybe Hyprland solves the issue, but I don't want to use this DE just because it solves this particular issue. I have tons of other needs and preferences.
Isn't that usually how it goes? Wayland is a million little optional protocols, which in the abstract is a lovely idea but in practice means which things work depends on which grab-bag of features your compositor supports.
I think in Hyprland it just works because floating windows stay on top by definition.
Gnome has a "Always on Top" toggle for each window. I imagine there's a protocol for an application to set it by default but the OP's window manager might not implement it or there might be an incompatibility.
But users do not want to have to toggle that for every PiP video they watch. Its why I am still on X11
Ah, for some reason I figured this was a minor bug that'd be fixed eventually. Wayland windows are never allowed to spawn always-on-top? Sort of lame.
If the logic is that it's the window manager's job to set window rules for this, fine, but in that case Plasma should probably ship with preconfigured rules matching the Chrome/Firefox PiP window.
I also find the lack of an Xlib-compatible macro API disruptive but I usually run an X11 session inside Xvnc for this purpose anyway.
I fixed this like this:
1. Right click PIP window 2. More Actions -> Configure special window settings 3. Add property -> Layer Force Popup
After this it spawned always in middle, I also added property Position Remember, so it spawns where it was previously. I have no idea if this is the best way to fix but worked for me.
I can't speak for Chrome, but I can right click a Firefox picture-in-picture window, tell it to remain on top, and it does, no problem. I've been using Plasma Wayland for years now and this has worked for ages
The issue is you have to do that every single time. On X11, they remain on top by default
Strange... with Firefox in KDE/Plasma just works.
I definitely have to right click on the window in the taskbar and select Always Keep On Top with Firefox on Plasma Wayland. Not too big a deal but would be nice if it was something Firefox could just set on its own.
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.
I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.
When was the last time you tried? What compositor?
I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system.
What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides?
Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.
Just works out of the box without problems in Debian 13.
The only issue that I noticed it's with screen scaling doing weird things with OpenOffice.
Well, there's SonicDE, but like many such projects it's probably maintained by reactionaries which introduces its own suite of issues around security, code quality, and "will this be maintained in a year, 5 years?"
Thank goodness I never jumped back on the KDE bandwagon once KDE4 stopped sucking donkey balls. I just went with xmonad and the few apps I actually use.
> Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations [sic], and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.
I wish they would have listed what some of those features might be.
They're still trying to figure that one out themselves.
I’m not surprised they’re not nailed down. But I’d appreciate seeing a “we’re looking at X or Y or if Z is now possible” kind of thing.
The maintenance and performance stuff is good, but it’s not exactly end user stuff. Yeah you benefit but it’s less obvious.
I don’t follow this stuff closely so personally I have no idea what kind of Wayland only features could exist that couldn’t before.
One nice feature is trackpad gestures. x11's trackpad gestures are awful, but on Wayland you can have the 1:1 multitouch that everyone loves.
HDR support would be one I suppose. IIRC it's plain impossible with X11.
That already works with Plasma Wayland. It's still a bit finicky to make it work with things running in XWayland (Windows games primarily) but it's getting better.
Did you really just [sic] a British guy using British spelling?
Is that a British spelling? Oops.
Honestly my computer gave it a red underline so I decided to do that. I didn’t think about it harder than that.
If I recognized it like “colour” I wouldn’t have.
A huge thank you to the KDE team. Plasma is good (finally) on Wayland for me (AMD graphics, single hi-dpi screen). I finally switched over from GNOME and I am happy with the experience.
The only downside is several of the *BSDs don't have wayland. Not all the world is linux and sometimes that is a good thing to encourage.
I've been using Kubuntu for the past 12 years without any X-related issue, and have and am actively working on stuff that requires it. I guess it's time to switch to another DE.
Most people are not you. A small minority do things that really need X. However there is good reason to say that the things that really need X are things you shouldn't do anyway.
Meanwhile there is a slightly larger minority that need things that cannot be done in X.
For the vast majority of people they cannot tell the difference, either works just fine. If there are issues they are tiny things they don't notice until somebody points it out - and then they forget in a few days.
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
Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :)
And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.
But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.
Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
[delayed]
I do like how the wayland usage statistic are based on wayland apps crashing more than x11 apps
Crash reports are only mentioned as confirmation of other statistics, and in any case, the vast majority of crashes have nothing to do with the window system used.
How do you get that?
They showed the statistics based on their telemetry tools and said they match crash data.
Not that it was 100% from crashes.
Also the fact they can tell which one is in use does not mean that’s the reason it crashed. It could be crashes due to bad network handling or file corruption or something that has nothing to do with the GUI.
Linux users are more likely not to opt-in and actively opt-out of spyware, telemetry, or whatever you want to call it.
The ones that don't are more likely those who leave things on defaults, are involved with the project or a distro, or similar. No, I don't have anything that backs this up. The statistics they're using can never be accurate, by virtue of being free software that ships on privacy concious distros to privacy cincious people. There was a study that backs up this claim, but I'm not google.
OTOH, xfce is doing fine.
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%.
How can I embed my mpv window in other application now?
qimgv uses libmpv for video playback support for example. I'm guessing that's not what you mean, but I'm struggling to think of how one might "embed" one application inside of another on xorg.
x11 supports foreign window embedding. You can embed window from other application into your own window. That's why lots of mpv/vlc based players/editors doesn't work probably on wayland. The only way to achieve this on wayland is writing a custom compositor for the foreign window.
Probably with Special Window Settings (right click top bar of your mpv window)
This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support.
I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.
So long KDE. Xlibre for life.
Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity.
Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.
[dead]
[dead]
"We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. "
What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?
Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11.
Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.
Funny, my impression of KDE in the 3 and 4 eras was “Wow, this is shiny and sleek— oh, and it crashed. Nevermind.” Nowadays there is nothing I would recommend more to the average user who just wants something normal that works. It just works. What you’re saying just sounds like a pointlessly personal and ideological attack. Against a piece of software. Why?
I don't really like Systemd neither - but Wayland and Systemd are pretty much opposites of each other. Systemd does (too) many things, many of them badly. Wayland does well what it does, but it (still!) does too little. Wayland is adding features and is pretty close to doing "everything necessary". Systemd keeps accreting worse replacements for existing services.
I dont know when where these "good old days" but in 2000s KDE was superunstable. It seemed to have all the cool UI tweaks but 30% of them barely worked.
Modern KDE is nothing like that, and i cannot see how this is a bad thing.