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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; i

by o11c 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
    These apps do have GUI, don't you know? Xwayland doesn't solve their issues. Imagine you have Cisco VPN and you want to connect - you connect and then close the dialog. It is just gone. Why? On wayland no tray icon is shown. Now imagine you have Fortigate VPN and you want to connect - you enter the IP address and click connect but nothing really happens. Why? No confirmation dialog was ever displayed in wayland. Now imagine you have palo alto vpn and you try to connect ... good luck. Can you work around that by using CLI? Yes, but this is THE issue with wayland. Until critical business apps work, x11 version must be supported, otherwise plasma is only useful for gamers and those that do not have to use their pc for work. I am not against switching to wayland, I just want a reasonable roadmap, not something like - we are going to break your major apps next time you upgrade. edit: I just mentioned VPNs because they are the first in line when it comes to work from home. Don't let me start on remote support or remote control apps.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - prmoustache 11mo ago
      If you can use the cli, it is at best mildly annoying but not critical. Having said that, deprecating x11 completely is the one motivation for dev to fix bugs and/or find ways. Wayland really started to catch up with missing features when some distros like Fedora started using it by default. If you want to stay on legacy stuff such as x11 while the remaining stuff is fixed, there are plenty of long term support distros out there anyway. You aren't forced to use the latest bleeding edge kde version available.
      - lousken 11mo ago
        It would be critical if I were to move any non-IT employees from windows to linux. As said in one of my comments - this could very well mean that the next version of Debian will have KDE Wayland only which would already mean <5years of support today. I am not saying wayland is not catching up, I am saying enterprise apps are the issue.
exceptione 11mo ago
What are they denying? You can continue using Xwayland for *most* X applications. I think they explain your options quite well in this blog post: 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... As they say, distro's like "AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032".
- o11c 11mo ago
  That's like saying "my car has most of its components working", when it has no engine, only 12V battery power. For me personally, the first dealbreaker I keep hitting is the fact that input-method-adjacent keyboard logic is quite broken (necessary if you ever want to use a language other than English, even temporarily). There are also, of course, the innumerable minor bugs that will be fixed from one release to the next (but also replaced by other bugs). The number of these decay exponentially and it will probably be a decade or so before Wayland sessions becomes as stable as X11 in this regard. There are quite a few cases where applications auto-detect that Wayland is running and as a result run in degraded mode, intentionally or unintentionally. I remember some bug with menus not working properly ... And scaling, often touted as one of Wayland's features, often works better under X11!
  - array_key_first 11mo ago
    X11 has never been 'stable', in my experience. It's janky as all fuck. Constant stuttering and tearing, and looks slightly different on every piece of hardware, even from the same manufacturer.
    - o11c 11mo ago
      Tearing is 100% a matter of whether your video drivers are tuned for benchmarks or desktop use; just set an environment variable.
      - array_key_first 11mo ago
mghackerlady 10mo ago
MATE is specifically a fork of GNOME 2, and works pretty much exactly like it did. there's a similar fork of KDE 3 called trinity that you might want to check out

by o11c 11mo ago

aaomidi 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  These apps do have GUI, don't you know? Xwayland doesn't solve their issues. Imagine you have Cisco VPN and you want to connect - you connect and then close the dialog. It is just gone. Why? On wayland no tray icon is shown. Now imagine you have Fortigate VPN and you want to connect - you enter the IP address and click connect but nothing really happens. Why? No confirmation dialog was ever displayed in wayland. Now imagine you have palo alto vpn and you try to connect ... good luck. Can you work around that by using CLI? Yes, but this is THE issue with wayland. Until critical business apps work, x11 version must be supported, otherwise plasma is only useful for gamers and those that do not have to use their pc for work. I am not against switching to wayland, I just want a reasonable roadmap, not something like - we are going to break your major apps next time you upgrade. edit: I just mentioned VPNs because they are the first in line when it comes to work from home. Don't let me start on remote support or remote control apps.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - prmoustache 11mo ago
    If you can use the cli, it is at best mildly annoying but not critical. Having said that, deprecating x11 completely is the one motivation for dev to fix bugs and/or find ways. Wayland really started to catch up with missing features when some distros like Fedora started using it by default. If you want to stay on legacy stuff such as x11 while the remaining stuff is fixed, there are plenty of long term support distros out there anyway. You aren't forced to use the latest bleeding edge kde version available.
    - lousken 11mo ago
      It would be critical if I were to move any non-IT employees from windows to linux. As said in one of my comments - this could very well mean that the next version of Debian will have KDE Wayland only which would already mean <5years of support today. I am not saying wayland is not catching up, I am saying enterprise apps are the issue.

exceptione 11mo ago

What are they denying? You can continue using Xwayland for *most* X applications. I think they explain your options quite well in this blog post: 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... As they say, distro's like "AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032".

o11c 11mo ago
That's like saying "my car has most of its components working", when it has no engine, only 12V battery power. For me personally, the first dealbreaker I keep hitting is the fact that input-method-adjacent keyboard logic is quite broken (necessary if you ever want to use a language other than English, even temporarily). There are also, of course, the innumerable minor bugs that will be fixed from one release to the next (but also replaced by other bugs). The number of these decay exponentially and it will probably be a decade or so before Wayland sessions becomes as stable as X11 in this regard. There are quite a few cases where applications auto-detect that Wayland is running and as a result run in degraded mode, intentionally or unintentionally. I remember some bug with menus not working properly ... And scaling, often touted as one of Wayland's features, often works better under X11!
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  X11 has never been 'stable', in my experience. It's janky as all fuck. Constant stuttering and tearing, and looks slightly different on every piece of hardware, even from the same manufacturer.
  - o11c 11mo ago
    Tearing is 100% a matter of whether your video drivers are tuned for benchmarks or desktop use; just set an environment variable.
    - array_key_first 11mo ago

mghackerlady 10mo ago

MATE is specifically a fork of GNOME 2, and works pretty much exactly like it did. there's a similar fork of KDE 3 called trinity that you might want to check out