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KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support

142 points by mikece 10mo ago

account42 10mo ago
Maybe they should get it to work well on Wayland first.
jeroenhd 10mo ago
The KDE blog has more details: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
artisin 10mo ago
As an X11 holdout, my time seems nigh.
- deaddodo 10mo ago
  You still have XFCE.
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  You're at a fork in the road. Do you chose Y11 or X12?
- lousken 10mo ago
  Devuan should hopefully keep it for quite some time
- theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
  The future is now old man.
  - panzi 10mo ago
    The future seems buggy and incomplete.
    - bboozzoo 10mo ago
      But it's coming anyway, whether people like it or not. FWIW, it is my understanding that XWayland is still supported, so it's not like your apps will stop working.
      - panzi 10mo ago
        My problems with Wayland are KDE specific. I tired it, but there where so many window management regressions and sometimes graphical glitches that I switched back. But that was under plasma 6.4. Have to try again now on 6.5 to see if these issues are fixed. If not I should write a bug report, I guess. Also there needs to be an alternative for (or patch to) simplescreenrecorder that works under Wayland. I don't want use a complex thing like OBS to make a quick demo video to demonstrate something for a co-worker and stuff.
        0134340 10mo ago
        I'm not sure about SSR currently but Kooha and KDE's own Spectacle work on Wayland fine. I'm running Plasma 6.5 on Arch and very pleased with it.
        panzi 10mo ago
        Didn't know Spectacle can do screen recordings now. Just tried it: The "New Recording" button seems to be broken. It does nothing. No error message on the terminal even. Maybe it only works under Wayland?
        IshKebab 10mo ago
        Yeah same here. Kind of shitty. OBS Studio still works fortunately.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
        > FWIW, it is my understanding that XWayland is still supported, so it's not like your apps will stop working. Applications generally work through XWayland. Accessibility and automation tools do not.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 10mo ago
    Why do you think it's acceptable to insult someone when they have a legitimate concern regarding a software defect?
    - theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
      Oops...I dropped this /s Just so I'm clear: I still think it's too early to drop X11 support (even though Wayland has been basically fine for me for a long time).
    - MyOutfitIsVague 10mo ago
      For the record, it's a Malcolm in the Middle reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CzBi5tIfzK4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=CzBi5tIfzK4
- k4rli 10mo ago
  Wayland+sway switch from x11+i3 is so simple and works so well. Only minor annoying thing not working for me are right-click context menus on some applets like Blueman and Steam.
  - layer8 10mo ago
    One’s minor annoyance is someone else’s dealbreaker.
  - quibono 10mo ago
    With a tiny tiny caveat of wanting to run Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau.
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      Nvidia's official drivers have supported Wayland quite well since the 550-series. If you haven't tried it in a few years, now is a great time to give it a spin.
- Jach 10mo ago
  Wake me up when MATE drops X11 support. I don't see it happening any time soon.
lousken 10mo ago
Wtf? This was supposed to happen with Plasma 7, or did I miss a memo?
- deaddodo 10mo ago
  This is the memo.
  - lousken 10mo ago
    No https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2025-March/123654.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2025-March/12365...
    - deaddodo 10mo ago
      Notice how that was 6+ months ago, and this newest post is from today? That’s how memos work.
      - lousken 10mo ago
        Exactly, so this will create a lot of criticism for no reason. Should have happened with Plasma 7 with QT 7, or at least in the release after next debian freeze (unless they freeze it with v6.7). If the switch will happen early 2027 that means upcoming Debian will already be wayland only.
c-hendricks 10mo ago
TBH I thought they already did. Plasma's X support is a separate package now on Arch at least.
- Gualdrapo 10mo ago
  They moved X stuff to separate packages since they added support for Wayland
jmclnx 10mo ago
As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.
- sapiogram 10mo ago
  As long as you're willing to stay on some old LTS distro, you'll be fine for at least another 10 years. X isn't going anywhere.
- cupofjoakim 10mo ago
  I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
  - serf 10mo ago
    >"Linux" does not force anything on you right? >It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
    - MyOutfitIsVague 10mo ago
      It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
kanbankaren 10mo ago
Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors. The fonts look terrible on it. I had to move to KDE Plasma on X11 ever since GNOME started forcing Wayland on us. I guess I have to buy a 4K monitor in future.
- sapiogram 10mo ago
  I thought this problem was Wayland's reason for existing?
  - hatmanstack 10mo ago
    Nah mate, it's all about the Wayland Trust model. No keylogging, consent-based screen recording, and no window spying. Isolation.
    - StillBored 10mo ago
      https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht... Notice the date.. 1996 (for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).
- nhumrich 10mo ago
  Sure it does. I have that set right now... Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland
  - thewebguyd 10mo ago
    > Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland I suspect the original commenter had an issue with GNOME specifically, as I've noticed it too, on Wayland native apps. GNOME handled fractional scaling poorly, and fonts didn't align to the grid right and looked fuzzy at anything that's not 1x or 2x scale. KDE got this right from day 1.
  - 10mo ago
panzi 10mo ago
If you ask me it's still too early.
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
This is a real shame. I'm using X11 still because Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland, and the alternative (Vesktop) doesn't support keybinds when the window isn't focused. Since my distro (Arch) doesn't support holding back packages, I guess I'll have to switch distros entirely so that my Discord setup stays working. :/
- galleywest200 10mo ago
  I use Discord in-browser on my Arch setup. Seems to work OK.
- kataklasm 10mo ago
  What's not working for you? I have only used Discord a handful of times since switching to wayland and nothing egregious stood out. In fact, I had way no issues at all when I had tons back on X11 with Discord. Could very well be due to my low Discord usage until now though :)
- cosarara 10mo ago
  You can use IgnorePkg in pacman.conf. Things might break, but the feature exists.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- kronicum2025 10mo ago
  I use Discord App on Arch on KDE on Wayland. What are the issues that you are facing?
- ch_123 10mo ago
  > Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland Is this specifically to do with screen sharing or streaming? I use it purely as a chat client under Wayland and it has generally worked fine. (Now that I think of it, I've had a few weird crashes, but nothing which made it unusable)
elcritch 10mo ago
I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz. Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.
- kronicum2025 10mo ago
  KDE on Linux is the way. Extremely Stable.
  - dmit 10mo ago
    Plasma is KDE. What are you trying to say? Edit: oh, I guess swapping FreeBSD for Linux? Yeah nah, I don't know GP, but I suspect this isn't a reason for them to switch OS just to solve this.
    - elcritch 10mo ago
      And KDE on X11 on FreeBSD seems pretty stable so far. Feels super snappy so far.
      - wkat4242 10mo ago
        It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
        elcritch 10mo ago
        > What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. This! I didn't realize how much I wanted this. FreeBSD release base packages are stable but all the regular packages are super up to date. Plasma looks very updated and stable. I've tried rolling distros like Opensuse Tumble and Manjaro but eventually if you don't update them regularly you get a huge change and often many things change/break. Had your bluetooth speakers working finally? Now that's gone! On the other hand stable releases in linux distros also seem to fail. Didn't update your random Ubuntu server in the corner of the office for the last year? Well now the apt links are broken and down for the release so you can't update the current release so you can upgrade. > I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course. It's nice, many of the same basics I learned on freebsd 6 years ago all still magically work. ifconfig works even with ipv6. You learn two files and you can do most anything. I'm definitely gonna consider Freebsd for embedded devices if I can as well. You dint need buildroot or yocto as it's already part of the BSDs.
mattstir 10mo ago
This is an interesting move, and I wonder what that means for accessibility in Plasma. Wayland simply isn't designed with accessibility in mind, so each compositor ends up having to implement their own non-standard APIs. I know virtual keyboards are lacking for example.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- dannyfritz07 10mo ago
  I'm not arguing that accessibility is good, but they did very briefly address a11y in the FAQ: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/#what-about-accessibility https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
brooke2k 10mo ago
That's extremely disappointing. Wayland has gotten a lot better but there are still many, many instances where I have to switch into an X11 session in order to play certain games (especially older ones). I am a huge fan of KDE but this may actually force me to switch to something else :(
- vrmiguel 10mo ago
  These older games don't run fine with Xwayland?
  - brooke2k 10mo ago
    Nope. Off the top of my head, I've had serious issues (crashing, visual glitching, extreme lag, etc) running OpenMW and Minecraft on XWayland, both of which were resolved entirely by switching to X11. There have been many others too, those are just at the front of my mind because they were the most recent. Oh, also Godot has a lot of issues on Wayland at the moment, specifically the Godot editor. I spent a long time trying to figure those out, because if I'm developing I would really rather be in a Wayland session where my DPI stuff works much better, but ultimately I resigned to just running the Godot editor only under an X11 session.
  - perihelions 10mo ago
    I have a modern one with a mouse-event bug specific to Wayland, that still presents in XWayland windows. Switched to KDE/X11 just to work around it (so, not exactly enthused to see this news item on HN).
neogodless 10mo ago
Related (re: Gnome) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925950 GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code (linuxiac.com) 12 days ago | 185 comments
- wkat4242 10mo ago
  I'm glad not to use gnome, it really rubs me the wrong way. So few settings and options, and the way it works is totally how I don't want it to work. I'm not 100% aligned with default KDE either but that doesn't matter because it has options to configure it just the way I want.
lvncelot 10mo ago
Hm. Just a few months back, the KiCad team posted about their woes with Wayland: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/ https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...
- aseipp 10mo ago
  That whole dust up just ended up being some bugginess in their native EGL/Wayland backend, which was known, but it was amplified by some distros accidentally enabling the Wayland backend by default. A build setting triggered the default render path to use EGL, but if you just set GDK_BACKEND=x11 and force KiCad onto XWayland, everything works just fine. And those bugs have probably been sorted out in distros by now. See https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayland/58261/6 https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayla... for some details. TL;DR their Wayland backend is incomplete, it accidentally got enabled for some users, run KiCad on XWayland instead until their EGL backend is ready.
aidenn0 10mo ago
Wayland is missing one thing still for me. Perhaps someone can tell me there is a way to do this: 1. ssh into a machine with a running session 2. start (something) that lets me remotely connect to it Right now I have two working solutions for X11 (x11vnc, freerdp-shadow) but zero for Wayland. I think this is intentional because the venn diagram of remote-access-tools and malware has a large intersection, but it's very useful too!
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
  Isn't that wayvnc?
  - aidenn0 10mo ago
    If that really meets my needs, that will pull me away from KDE to a wlroots based compositor. I'll try it later, thanks.
    - c-hendricks 10mo ago
      KRDP: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp But it needs a logged-in session, you can't get access to the login manager.
      - aidenn0 10mo ago
        I want to connect to a logged-in session; I can't get krdp to let me do it without me locally granting permissions though.
        noisem4ker 10mo ago
        They fixed that. I can definitely connect remotely in an unattended way as long as I'm logged in locally. These might have something to do with it: https://develop.kde.org/docs/administration/portal-permissions/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/administration/portal-permissio... https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp/-/merge_requests/102 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp/-/merge_requests/102
ferguess_k 10mo ago
I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in debugging and fixing/improving legacy codebase. But again I'm not really a sys programmer so I'm probably on the wrong side.
- etamponi 10mo ago
  I might try to explain with some examples. 1) it would really be nice to renovate that old house in the city center of an old Italian town! Oh but hold and behold: you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. And it would cost twice as much as building a new one. And the new one would have better insulation and a modern layout, and be exactly like you want. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve an existing thing. 2) it would really be nice to fix that car from the '60ies. Oh but hold and behold: the design doesn't really allow you to have all the safety measures of modern cars. And the maximum speed is going go be 65mph on a good day. And it's going to cost you twice as much as a new car, OR you'd have to learn tons of mechanical stuff to be able to fix it yourself. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve existing things. 3) it's just more fun to build new things (at least for some people). It's open source. People do this for free, to learn and enjoy their time. They can do whatever they want, and they decided to go with the shiny new thing. Is it better than fixing and improving an existing technology? I don't know. But apparently it's more fun! :)
  - ferguess_k 10mo ago
    Thanks! These are all valid points although I'm looking for more technical answers -- but these are good enough!
  - saint_yossarian 10mo ago
    > you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. Ah you mean like in the wayland-protocols repo? :) (not disagreeing with your actual point though)
xacky 10mo ago
This what we want, as more systems go Wayland only it means more pressure to actually fix Wayland bugs instead of falling back to X11.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- kasabali 10mo ago
  there's no wayland bugs, there's design decisions
wetpaws 10mo ago
[dead]
o11c 10mo ago
Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3). But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have to hunt for a new DE. It looks like the only serious possibilities are: Cinnamon - my gut says this might have the most users? Often cited as the reason to use Linux Mint by people who don't know the difference between a distro and a desktop environment. LXQt - apparently has stabilized enough to obsolete LXDE (hopefully it isn't being developed by headless chickens like GNOME and now KDE) MATE - why must there be so many GNOME forks? (I know why) ... does this one even have anything to distinguish it? Xfce - the longest stable history as its own thing (all other DEs are known to lack some combination of widespread support and essential features; there are a handful for which it is possible that support will arrive but it is not the case yet, and they will still lose on the "weight of history" stability criterion)
- aaomidi 10mo ago
  X is basically going away. The maintenance on it is going to drop off really hard once KDE moves away from it too.
- lousken 10mo ago
  Yea, it is quite disappointing. Lots of apps still don't work with wayland properly, even a lot of enterprise apps like VPNs have issues. Hopefully they will be ironed out after Ubuntu 26.04 comes out.
  - prmoustache 10mo ago
    Apps running in xwayland run the same way as on X11, xwayland being an xserver. Also I don't understand your relation between a vpn and a graphic protocol.
    - lousken 10mo ago
OhMeadhbh 10mo ago
Half of the software I use on a daily basis (lots of old SunOS-era custom data reduction software) doesn't work under Wayland. Guess I'll finally flip my daily driver over to *BSD.
- wkat4242 10mo ago
  X11 is very well supported under FreeBSD, but the problem is with KDE. FreeBSD does have Wayland but it's not ready for prime time
- NoGravitas 10mo ago
  XWayland is not going away.
wkat4242 10mo ago
Too bad. FreeBSD isn't there yet with Wayland support. It boots now but has a lot of glitches and crashes. And FreeBSD packages are rolling so I'm normally on the latest and greatest.
npteljes 10mo ago
This is interesting to me, because SteamOS, so Steam Deck uses KDE. I really wonder how they are going to tackle going from X to Wayland on 4 million machines, and what that will bring.
- happymellon 10mo ago
  I thought it used Gamescope, with the option to boot to KDE. So they won't have to do.much for Gamescope, and the current hardware should support Wayland. We shall see with the new hardware coming out next year though.
  - npteljes 10mo ago
    Oh, that's right! They use KDE only for the Desktop Mode operation, not the normal one. So yes, not much is impacted.
- TiredOfLife 10mo ago
  Steamdeck uses snapshots of Arch that are a year or two behind. That means if 6.8 will come to SD it will be in 5-10 years
skeledrew 10mo ago
I'm on Kubuntu and use xpra, xdotool and a few other x-specific things fairly regularly. Wondering what this means for me as I'm very reluctant to lose my capabilities. I'd rather freeze my updating indefinitely.
jtokoph 10mo ago
At least XWayland will still be supported. Native Wayland windows don’t support controlling window position or living through transparent windows. This is important for apps that provide overlays.
tsoukase 10mo ago
In the domain of graphics, Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart. In a Qemu VM a testing installation of Plasma+Wayland is dog slow and crashes the whole system. Using the workaround for X it runs faster and stable.
- 0134340 10mo ago
  >Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart >Using the workaround for X it run faster and stable I think your post proves opposite.
  - mzajc 10mo ago
    The latest Plasma version still includes the X session. This post concerns the upcoming version, which takes away your choice of using the X session.
greenavocado 10mo ago
KeepassXC (a must-have application and dealbreaker) is still broken on Wayland. The recommended "solution" is to edit the .desktop file to resemble the following: QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 keepassxc https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  There are lots of Keepass clients you can use. My go-to on Wayland is Secrets: https://apps.gnome.org/Secrets/ https://apps.gnome.org/Secrets/
  - KetoManx64 10mo ago
    So I'll have to download all the GNOME bloat to run this within KDE?
- haakon 10mo ago
  Huh. I use KeePassXC on Wayland and I had no idea about that, it works fine. Could be because I've set QT_QPA_PLATFORM user-wide.
- lousken 10mo ago
  QT6 port is still not ready https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/11651 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/11651 The main issue for me with keepassxc is the broken autotype on wayland
ed4bb9fb7c 10mo ago
Is there a way to make a screen video recording on Wayland? Nothing works for me. Debian testing.
- rbits 10mo ago
  Does OBS not work for you?
Kholin 10mo ago
I'm used to play video games on my Linux PC with KDE Plasma, but because some little glitches, I must use X11 session. Not sure if wayland is stable enough for gaming, as I know SteamOS use X11 session as default.
- d3Xt3r 10mo ago
  Native Linux games work just fine under Wayland (KDE). Windows games now work too (under Wine/Proton) but isn't ready for prime time yet (although GloriousEggroll's Proton is in a much better shape though thanks to additional Wayland compatibility patches, but it's still technically beta). In saying that, games running in Wayland using XWayland run. mostly okay, but most performance-conscious folks might want to run them using Valve's gamescope microcompositor which usually delivers better performance and as a bonus, packs some nifty features like better HDR support, resolution spoofing and FSR scaling, which means you can upscale games on low-end PCs, or supersample older low-res games on modern PCs.
thway15269037 10mo ago
This is nauseating. I hope someone forks KDE into like KDElive or something so I could continue use X11 and not bother with piece of junk of Wayland. The whole thing is a wrong way for free software and is being pushed by couple big corps out of their interests.
theodric 10mo ago
I sure hope they manage to sort out an interface (or even an off switch) for the compiled-in touchpad gestures in KDE Plasma-Wayland that even override Touchegg, not to mention the font rendering that has been glitchy for literally years. Those are the two main things keeping me on KDE Plasma-X11, and which will see me leave KDE for something else (XFCE? NsCDE? IDFK.) if they remain unresolved after the X11 session is removed.
- mghackerlady 10mo ago
  NsCDE is kinda dead unfortunately
StillBored 10mo ago
The KDE blog entry reads like a modern political platform denying climate change, or claiming renewable energy can replace traditional energy sources on the grid. One head strictly stuck in the ground and ignoring the cases that make many of those statements flatly false. Like for example, the nvidia support. Nvidia support in Linux is in the 'good luck' catalog, especially on any optimus laptop, where one is lucky if the power management works, much less multiple screen docking/undocking, and a heap of other issues. Then please clarify which actual driver stack one is running (nouveau vs provide by nvidia binaries, vs nvidia open source) To claim its great with wayland ignores core failures that still exist. Its the same with X11 forwarding, which like copy paste, has been steady degrading to the point where all the dbus/etc services being depended on makes double digit percentages of applications not work with 'ssh -X' and oh wow, waypipe. It seems all of windows/osx and KDE/Gnome are steadily shooting themselves in the foot. I'm sorta happy I pulled my financial support not long ago, there are a couple 'toxic' people in the distro DE community who are pushing their own agendas, everyone else be damned. And weirdly enough it seems those people aren't doing it for some corporate/whatever reason, but just to wave a flag about their accomplishments. The entire reason most people claim wayland is 'better' is largely FUD, but that doesn't stop the true believers.
jackyard86 10mo ago
I tried wayland multiple times before, but the lack of xsct equivalent and the awful input delay (compared to X11 window managers without compositor) made my experience very frustrating. Some might say "it's just a one or two frame delay", but for me that makes a night and day difference. Just an additonal frame delay gives me a feeling of driving a 70s American boat car with worn out tires.

142 points by mikece 10mo ago

Maybe they should get it to work well on Wayland first.

The KDE blog has more details: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...

artisin 10mo ago

As an X11 holdout, my time seems nigh.

deaddodo 10mo ago
You still have XFCE.
DonHopkins 10mo ago
You're at a fork in the road. Do you chose Y11 or X12?
lousken 10mo ago
Devuan should hopefully keep it for quite some time
theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
The future is now old man.
- panzi 10mo ago
  The future seems buggy and incomplete.
  - bboozzoo 10mo ago
    But it's coming anyway, whether people like it or not. FWIW, it is my understanding that XWayland is still supported, so it's not like your apps will stop working.
    - panzi 10mo ago
      My problems with Wayland are KDE specific. I tired it, but there where so many window management regressions and sometimes graphical glitches that I switched back. But that was under plasma 6.4. Have to try again now on 6.5 to see if these issues are fixed. If not I should write a bug report, I guess. Also there needs to be an alternative for (or patch to) simplescreenrecorder that works under Wayland. I don't want use a complex thing like OBS to make a quick demo video to demonstrate something for a co-worker and stuff.
      - 0134340 10mo ago
        I'm not sure about SSR currently but Kooha and KDE's own Spectacle work on Wayland fine. I'm running Plasma 6.5 on Arch and very pleased with it.
        panzi 10mo ago
        Didn't know Spectacle can do screen recordings now. Just tried it: The "New Recording" button seems to be broken. It does nothing. No error message on the terminal even. Maybe it only works under Wayland?
        IshKebab 10mo ago
        Yeah same here. Kind of shitty. OBS Studio still works fortunately.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
      > FWIW, it is my understanding that XWayland is still supported, so it's not like your apps will stop working. Applications generally work through XWayland. Accessibility and automation tools do not.
- mx7zysuj4xew 10mo ago
  Why do you think it's acceptable to insult someone when they have a legitimate concern regarding a software defect?
  - theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
    Oops...I dropped this /s Just so I'm clear: I still think it's too early to drop X11 support (even though Wayland has been basically fine for me for a long time).
  - MyOutfitIsVague 10mo ago
    For the record, it's a Malcolm in the Middle reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CzBi5tIfzK4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=CzBi5tIfzK4
k4rli 10mo ago
Wayland+sway switch from x11+i3 is so simple and works so well. Only minor annoying thing not working for me are right-click context menus on some applets like Blueman and Steam.
- layer8 10mo ago
  One’s minor annoyance is someone else’s dealbreaker.
- quibono 10mo ago
  With a tiny tiny caveat of wanting to run Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau.
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    Nvidia's official drivers have supported Wayland quite well since the 550-series. If you haven't tried it in a few years, now is a great time to give it a spin.
Jach 10mo ago
Wake me up when MATE drops X11 support. I don't see it happening any time soon.

lousken 10mo ago

Wtf? This was supposed to happen with Plasma 7, or did I miss a memo?

deaddodo 10mo ago
This is the memo.
- lousken 10mo ago
  No https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2025-March/123654.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2025-March/12365...
  - deaddodo 10mo ago
    Notice how that was 6+ months ago, and this newest post is from today? That’s how memos work.
    - lousken 10mo ago
      Exactly, so this will create a lot of criticism for no reason. Should have happened with Plasma 7 with QT 7, or at least in the release after next debian freeze (unless they freeze it with v6.7). If the switch will happen early 2027 that means upcoming Debian will already be wayland only.

c-hendricks 10mo ago

TBH I thought they already did. Plasma's X support is a separate package now on Arch at least.

Gualdrapo 10mo ago
They moved X stuff to separate packages since they added support for Wayland

jmclnx 10mo ago

As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.

sapiogram 10mo ago
As long as you're willing to stay on some old LTS distro, you'll be fine for at least another 10 years. X isn't going anywhere.
cupofjoakim 10mo ago
I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
- serf 10mo ago
  >"Linux" does not force anything on you right? >It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
  - MyOutfitIsVague 10mo ago
    It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.

kanbankaren 10mo ago

Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors. The fonts look terrible on it. I had to move to KDE Plasma on X11 ever since GNOME started forcing Wayland on us. I guess I have to buy a 4K monitor in future.

sapiogram 10mo ago
I thought this problem was Wayland's reason for existing?
- hatmanstack 10mo ago
  Nah mate, it's all about the Wayland Trust model. No keylogging, consent-based screen recording, and no window spying. Isolation.
  - StillBored 10mo ago
    https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht... Notice the date.. 1996 (for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).
nhumrich 10mo ago
Sure it does. I have that set right now... Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland
- thewebguyd 10mo ago
  > Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland I suspect the original commenter had an issue with GNOME specifically, as I've noticed it too, on Wayland native apps. GNOME handled fractional scaling poorly, and fonts didn't align to the grid right and looked fuzzy at anything that's not 1x or 2x scale. KDE got this right from day 1.
- 10mo ago

panzi 10mo ago

If you ask me it's still too early.

bigstrat2003 10mo ago

This is a real shame. I'm using X11 still because Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland, and the alternative (Vesktop) doesn't support keybinds when the window isn't focused. Since my distro (Arch) doesn't support holding back packages, I guess I'll have to switch distros entirely so that my Discord setup stays working. :/

galleywest200 10mo ago
I use Discord in-browser on my Arch setup. Seems to work OK.
kataklasm 10mo ago
What's not working for you? I have only used Discord a handful of times since switching to wayland and nothing egregious stood out. In fact, I had way no issues at all when I had tons back on X11 with Discord. Could very well be due to my low Discord usage until now though :)
cosarara 10mo ago
You can use IgnorePkg in pacman.conf. Things might break, but the feature exists.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
kronicum2025 10mo ago
I use Discord App on Arch on KDE on Wayland. What are the issues that you are facing?
ch_123 10mo ago
> Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland Is this specifically to do with screen sharing or streaming? I use it purely as a chat client under Wayland and it has generally worked fine. (Now that I think of it, I've had a few weird crashes, but nothing which made it unusable)

elcritch 10mo ago

I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz. Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.

kronicum2025 10mo ago
KDE on Linux is the way. Extremely Stable.
- dmit 10mo ago
  Plasma is KDE. What are you trying to say? Edit: oh, I guess swapping FreeBSD for Linux? Yeah nah, I don't know GP, but I suspect this isn't a reason for them to switch OS just to solve this.
  - elcritch 10mo ago
    And KDE on X11 on FreeBSD seems pretty stable so far. Feels super snappy so far.
    - wkat4242 10mo ago
      It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
      - elcritch 10mo ago
        > What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that. This! I didn't realize how much I wanted this. FreeBSD release base packages are stable but all the regular packages are super up to date. Plasma looks very updated and stable. I've tried rolling distros like Opensuse Tumble and Manjaro but eventually if you don't update them regularly you get a huge change and often many things change/break. Had your bluetooth speakers working finally? Now that's gone! On the other hand stable releases in linux distros also seem to fail. Didn't update your random Ubuntu server in the corner of the office for the last year? Well now the apt links are broken and down for the release so you can't update the current release so you can upgrade. > I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course. It's nice, many of the same basics I learned on freebsd 6 years ago all still magically work. ifconfig works even with ipv6. You learn two files and you can do most anything. I'm definitely gonna consider Freebsd for embedded devices if I can as well. You dint need buildroot or yocto as it's already part of the BSDs.

mattstir 10mo ago

This is an interesting move, and I wonder what that means for accessibility in Plasma. Wayland simply isn't designed with accessibility in mind, so each compositor ends up having to implement their own non-standard APIs. I know virtual keyboards are lacking for example.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
dannyfritz07 10mo ago
I'm not arguing that accessibility is good, but they did very briefly address a11y in the FAQ: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/#what-about-accessibility https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...

brooke2k 10mo ago

That's extremely disappointing. Wayland has gotten a lot better but there are still many, many instances where I have to switch into an X11 session in order to play certain games (especially older ones). I am a huge fan of KDE but this may actually force me to switch to something else :(

vrmiguel 10mo ago
These older games don't run fine with Xwayland?
- brooke2k 10mo ago
  Nope. Off the top of my head, I've had serious issues (crashing, visual glitching, extreme lag, etc) running OpenMW and Minecraft on XWayland, both of which were resolved entirely by switching to X11. There have been many others too, those are just at the front of my mind because they were the most recent. Oh, also Godot has a lot of issues on Wayland at the moment, specifically the Godot editor. I spent a long time trying to figure those out, because if I'm developing I would really rather be in a Wayland session where my DPI stuff works much better, but ultimately I resigned to just running the Godot editor only under an X11 session.
- perihelions 10mo ago
  I have a modern one with a mouse-event bug specific to Wayland, that still presents in XWayland windows. Switched to KDE/X11 just to work around it (so, not exactly enthused to see this news item on HN).

neogodless 10mo ago

Related (re: Gnome) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925950 GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code (linuxiac.com) 12 days ago | 185 comments

wkat4242 10mo ago
I'm glad not to use gnome, it really rubs me the wrong way. So few settings and options, and the way it works is totally how I don't want it to work. I'm not 100% aligned with default KDE either but that doesn't matter because it has options to configure it just the way I want.

lvncelot 10mo ago

Hm. Just a few months back, the KiCad team posted about their woes with Wayland: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/ https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

aseipp 10mo ago
That whole dust up just ended up being some bugginess in their native EGL/Wayland backend, which was known, but it was amplified by some distros accidentally enabling the Wayland backend by default. A build setting triggered the default render path to use EGL, but if you just set GDK_BACKEND=x11 and force KiCad onto XWayland, everything works just fine. And those bugs have probably been sorted out in distros by now. See https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayland/58261/6 https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayla... for some details. TL;DR their Wayland backend is incomplete, it accidentally got enabled for some users, run KiCad on XWayland instead until their EGL backend is ready.

aidenn0 10mo ago

Wayland is missing one thing still for me. Perhaps someone can tell me there is a way to do this: 1. ssh into a machine with a running session 2. start (something) that lets me remotely connect to it Right now I have two working solutions for X11 (x11vnc, freerdp-shadow) but zero for Wayland. I think this is intentional because the venn diagram of remote-access-tools and malware has a large intersection, but it's very useful too!

yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
Isn't that wayvnc?
- aidenn0 10mo ago
  If that really meets my needs, that will pull me away from KDE to a wlroots based compositor. I'll try it later, thanks.
  - c-hendricks 10mo ago
    KRDP: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp But it needs a logged-in session, you can't get access to the login manager.
    - aidenn0 10mo ago
      I want to connect to a logged-in session; I can't get krdp to let me do it without me locally granting permissions though.
      - noisem4ker 10mo ago
        They fixed that. I can definitely connect remotely in an unattended way as long as I'm logged in locally. These might have something to do with it: https://develop.kde.org/docs/administration/portal-permissions/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/administration/portal-permissio... https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp/-/merge_requests/102 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp/-/merge_requests/102

ferguess_k 10mo ago

I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in debugging and fixing/improving legacy codebase. But again I'm not really a sys programmer so I'm probably on the wrong side.

etamponi 10mo ago
I might try to explain with some examples. 1) it would really be nice to renovate that old house in the city center of an old Italian town! Oh but hold and behold: you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. And it would cost twice as much as building a new one. And the new one would have better insulation and a modern layout, and be exactly like you want. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve an existing thing. 2) it would really be nice to fix that car from the '60ies. Oh but hold and behold: the design doesn't really allow you to have all the safety measures of modern cars. And the maximum speed is going go be 65mph on a good day. And it's going to cost you twice as much as a new car, OR you'd have to learn tons of mechanical stuff to be able to fix it yourself. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve existing things. 3) it's just more fun to build new things (at least for some people). It's open source. People do this for free, to learn and enjoy their time. They can do whatever they want, and they decided to go with the shiny new thing. Is it better than fixing and improving an existing technology? I don't know. But apparently it's more fun! :)
- ferguess_k 10mo ago
  Thanks! These are all valid points although I'm looking for more technical answers -- but these are good enough!
- saint_yossarian 10mo ago
  > you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. Ah you mean like in the wayland-protocols repo? :) (not disagreeing with your actual point though)

xacky 10mo ago

This what we want, as more systems go Wayland only it means more pressure to actually fix Wayland bugs instead of falling back to X11.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
kasabali 10mo ago
there's no wayland bugs, there's design decisions

wetpaws 10mo ago

[dead]

o11c 10mo ago

Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3). But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have to hunt for a new DE. It looks like the only serious possibilities are: Cinnamon - my gut says this might have the most users? Often cited as the reason to use Linux Mint by people who don't know the difference between a distro and a desktop environment. LXQt - apparently has stabilized enough to obsolete LXDE (hopefully it isn't being developed by headless chickens like GNOME and now KDE) MATE - why must there be so many GNOME forks? (I know why) ... does this one even have anything to distinguish it? Xfce - the longest stable history as its own thing (all other DEs are known to lack some combination of widespread support and essential features; there are a handful for which it is possible that support will arrive but it is not the case yet, and they will still lose on the "weight of history" stability criterion)

aaomidi 10mo ago
X is basically going away. The maintenance on it is going to drop off really hard once KDE moves away from it too.
lousken 10mo ago
Yea, it is quite disappointing. Lots of apps still don't work with wayland properly, even a lot of enterprise apps like VPNs have issues. Hopefully they will be ironed out after Ubuntu 26.04 comes out.
- prmoustache 10mo ago
  Apps running in xwayland run the same way as on X11, xwayland being an xserver. Also I don't understand your relation between a vpn and a graphic protocol.
  - lousken 10mo ago

OhMeadhbh 10mo ago

Half of the software I use on a daily basis (lots of old SunOS-era custom data reduction software) doesn't work under Wayland. Guess I'll finally flip my daily driver over to *BSD.

wkat4242 10mo ago
X11 is very well supported under FreeBSD, but the problem is with KDE. FreeBSD does have Wayland but it's not ready for prime time
NoGravitas 10mo ago
XWayland is not going away.

wkat4242 10mo ago

Too bad. FreeBSD isn't there yet with Wayland support. It boots now but has a lot of glitches and crashes. And FreeBSD packages are rolling so I'm normally on the latest and greatest.

npteljes 10mo ago

This is interesting to me, because SteamOS, so Steam Deck uses KDE. I really wonder how they are going to tackle going from X to Wayland on 4 million machines, and what that will bring.

happymellon 10mo ago
I thought it used Gamescope, with the option to boot to KDE. So they won't have to do.much for Gamescope, and the current hardware should support Wayland. We shall see with the new hardware coming out next year though.
- npteljes 10mo ago
  Oh, that's right! They use KDE only for the Desktop Mode operation, not the normal one. So yes, not much is impacted.
TiredOfLife 10mo ago
Steamdeck uses snapshots of Arch that are a year or two behind. That means if 6.8 will come to SD it will be in 5-10 years

skeledrew 10mo ago

I'm on Kubuntu and use xpra, xdotool and a few other x-specific things fairly regularly. Wondering what this means for me as I'm very reluctant to lose my capabilities. I'd rather freeze my updating indefinitely.

jtokoph 10mo ago

At least XWayland will still be supported. Native Wayland windows don’t support controlling window position or living through transparent windows. This is important for apps that provide overlays.

tsoukase 10mo ago

In the domain of graphics, Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart. In a Qemu VM a testing installation of Plasma+Wayland is dog slow and crashes the whole system. Using the workaround for X it runs faster and stable.

0134340 10mo ago
>Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart >Using the workaround for X it run faster and stable I think your post proves opposite.
- mzajc 10mo ago
  The latest Plasma version still includes the X session. This post concerns the upcoming version, which takes away your choice of using the X session.

greenavocado 10mo ago

KeepassXC (a must-have application and dealbreaker) is still broken on Wayland. The recommended "solution" is to edit the .desktop file to resemble the following: QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 keepassxc https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973

bigyabai 10mo ago
There are lots of Keepass clients you can use. My go-to on Wayland is Secrets: https://apps.gnome.org/Secrets/ https://apps.gnome.org/Secrets/
- KetoManx64 10mo ago
  So I'll have to download all the GNOME bloat to run this within KDE?
haakon 10mo ago
Huh. I use KeePassXC on Wayland and I had no idea about that, it works fine. Could be because I've set QT_QPA_PLATFORM user-wide.
lousken 10mo ago
QT6 port is still not ready https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/11651 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/11651 The main issue for me with keepassxc is the broken autotype on wayland

ed4bb9fb7c 10mo ago

Is there a way to make a screen video recording on Wayland? Nothing works for me. Debian testing.

rbits 10mo ago
Does OBS not work for you?

Kholin 10mo ago

I'm used to play video games on my Linux PC with KDE Plasma, but because some little glitches, I must use X11 session. Not sure if wayland is stable enough for gaming, as I know SteamOS use X11 session as default.

d3Xt3r 10mo ago
Native Linux games work just fine under Wayland (KDE). Windows games now work too (under Wine/Proton) but isn't ready for prime time yet (although GloriousEggroll's Proton is in a much better shape though thanks to additional Wayland compatibility patches, but it's still technically beta). In saying that, games running in Wayland using XWayland run. mostly okay, but most performance-conscious folks might want to run them using Valve's gamescope microcompositor which usually delivers better performance and as a bonus, packs some nifty features like better HDR support, resolution spoofing and FSR scaling, which means you can upscale games on low-end PCs, or supersample older low-res games on modern PCs.

thway15269037 10mo ago

This is nauseating. I hope someone forks KDE into like KDElive or something so I could continue use X11 and not bother with piece of junk of Wayland. The whole thing is a wrong way for free software and is being pushed by couple big corps out of their interests.

theodric 10mo ago

I sure hope they manage to sort out an interface (or even an off switch) for the compiled-in touchpad gestures in KDE Plasma-Wayland that even override Touchegg, not to mention the font rendering that has been glitchy for literally years. Those are the two main things keeping me on KDE Plasma-X11, and which will see me leave KDE for something else (XFCE? NsCDE? IDFK.) if they remain unresolved after the X11 session is removed.

mghackerlady 10mo ago
NsCDE is kinda dead unfortunately

StillBored 10mo ago

The KDE blog entry reads like a modern political platform denying climate change, or claiming renewable energy can replace traditional energy sources on the grid. One head strictly stuck in the ground and ignoring the cases that make many of those statements flatly false. Like for example, the nvidia support. Nvidia support in Linux is in the 'good luck' catalog, especially on any optimus laptop, where one is lucky if the power management works, much less multiple screen docking/undocking, and a heap of other issues. Then please clarify which actual driver stack one is running (nouveau vs provide by nvidia binaries, vs nvidia open source) To claim its great with wayland ignores core failures that still exist. Its the same with X11 forwarding, which like copy paste, has been steady degrading to the point where all the dbus/etc services being depended on makes double digit percentages of applications not work with 'ssh -X' and oh wow, waypipe. It seems all of windows/osx and KDE/Gnome are steadily shooting themselves in the foot. I'm sorta happy I pulled my financial support not long ago, there are a couple 'toxic' people in the distro DE community who are pushing their own agendas, everyone else be damned. And weirdly enough it seems those people aren't doing it for some corporate/whatever reason, but just to wave a flag about their accomplishments. The entire reason most people claim wayland is 'better' is largely FUD, but that doesn't stop the true believers.

jackyard86 10mo ago

I tried wayland multiple times before, but the lack of xsct equivalent and the awful input delay (compared to X11 window managers without compositor) made my experience very frustrating. Some might say "it's just a one or two frame delay", but for me that makes a night and day difference. Just an additonal frame delay gives me a feeling of driving a 70s American boat car with worn out tires.