In light of Plasma 6.8 looking to go Wayland-exclusive and retire their X11 session support, SonicDE (formerly “KDE-Lite”) is getting off the ground as a fork of the relevant X11 support within the KDE desktop.
SonicDE has been getting established over the past two months with a goal of preserving and improving the X11-specific code within the KDE desktop. This community-based desktop environment currently includes “sonic-win” as an X11-only lightweight fork of the KWin code, sonic-workspace as a fork of KDE Plasma Workspace, silver-sddm for the display manager code, and related bits.
So far they have been removing Wayland-only code, addressing deprecated elements within the codebase, and other changes in trying to enhance the X11 support within this KDE/SonicDE code. They have also begun working on a Vulkan back-end for the Sonic-Win code.
SonicDE is still in its early stages but for those interested the project is hosted on GitHub. Beyond the source code on GitHub, there are SonicDE “-sonic” packages in Arch Linux AUR, packages coming to OpenMandriva, and hopes of finding it packaged on other Linux distributions as well for those wanting to continue enjoying X11 session support as it’s phased out by upstream KDE Plasma 6.8+.
