Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma’s intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session.
Nate Graham in his blog post today conveniently sums up the current KDE Plasma X11 session support as:
– We’ll make sure Plasma continues to compile and deploy on X11.
– Bug reports about the Plasma X11 session being horribly broken (for example, you can’t log in) will be fixed.
– Very bad X11-specific regressions will probably be fixed eventually.
– Less-bad X11-specific bugs will probably not be fixed unless someone pays for it.
– X11-specific features will definitely not be implemented unless someone pays for it.
There’s been talk that Plasma 7 will probably do away with X11 session support. In Nate’s blog post today he describes the X11 removal plans as:
“Yes, the writing is on the wall. X11’s upstream development has dropped off significantly in recent years, and X11 isn’t able to perform up to the standards of what people expect today with respect to support for multi-monitor setups, high DPI monitors, HDR, VRR, other fancy monitor features, multi-GPU setups, screen tearing, security, crash robustness, input handling, and more.
As for when Plasma will drop support for X11? There’s currently no firm timeline for this, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen in the next year, or even the next two years. But that’s just a guess; it depends on how quickly we implement everything on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues. Our plan is to handle everything on that page such that even the most hardcore X11 user doesn’t notice anything missing when they move to Wayland.
…
The Plasma team isn’t emotional about display servers; it’s just obvious that X11 is in the process of outliving its usefulness. Someday Wayland will be in this boat too; such is the eventual fate of all technologies.In addition to the fact that Wayland is better for modern hardware, maintaining code to interact with two display servers and session types is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. Our resources are always limited, so we’re looking forward to the day when we can once again focus on programming for a single display server paradigm. It will mean that everything else can improve just a little bit faster.”
Also interesting is that more than 70% of KDE Plasma 6 users are running on Wayland based on telemetry data:
“At this point in time, our telemetry says that a majority of Plasma users are already using the Wayland session. Currently 73% of Plasma 6 users who have turned on telemetry are using the Wayland session, and a little over 60% of all telemetry-activating users (including Plasma 5 users) are on Wayland.”
Those wanting to read more about the Plasma X11/Wayland state in the post by developer Nate Graham can do so via his blog.
