I think this is the right decision by KDE. Narrowing the scope of work is basically always a good thing for a project. KDE should either switch to wayland, or stay on X11, and not try to do both. And they've clearly decided awhile ago that they consider wayland a requirement.
I say that despite the fact that I think wayland was a poorly conceived, designed, implemented, and marketed project that has set back the adoption of the linux desktop by years.
Toodles. It's been nice using kwin as my window manager, but if plasma support for X11 is going then I expect kwin won't be long behind. Whatever, I'm still not using Wayland.
It breaks all my shit, for bullshit condescending reasons. For instance I have a script that matches window titles to pipewire audio streams so I can change the volume per window without messing around in pavucontrol/etc. There's no cross platform way to do that with Wayland because ""security"" means it's supposedly dangerous for programs to read the title bars of other applications, even though the individual Wayland compositor apparently each have a proprietary way of doing this.
Last time I started a wayland plasma session it kept resetting my screen brightness to 100% every time they woke from sleep. The time before that I crashed the entire desktop, dropping me back to the terminal, when I tried to drag a hyperlink between windows.
Those might have been fixed and I might try wayland again next time I update and reboot.
Same. It's had far fewer issues for me than X, even on Nvidia with my current laptop. Multiple monitors with different resolutions & thus different fractional scaling ratios just works, from the Plasma settings GUI. No need to edit any configs manually. That never worked out-of-the-box for me with X.
I like 6.6 and I would mind dropping X11 support this quickly, this ideally should be in KDE 7.0/8.0 because, as I understand it, many apps and drivers are not ready for Wayland/XWayland.
Also 6.8 is at least 2 years out, so there's still time to work the remaining issues out. As far as I know only speech input remains a major problem, so hopefully they'll figure that out.
Are there any reasonable on screen keyboards for wayland already? Something on par with onboard i.e. all keys available.
Without that wayland is no go for at least half of my active linux devices.
"While we can’t promise all problems will be completely gone"
They could promise to drop support for it once the wayland one reaches feature parity. If any "significant issues" remain, then it's simply not ready for release.
I hate this modern trend of releasing stuff before it is done. And in the commercial space we are now moving on to releasing stuff before they even get started on development. Selling promises. "Buy our shit now and we promise that next year it will be able to do X!"
Remember this not a billion dollar company we are talking about here, this is volunteer OSS project. If no one wants to maintain the X11 support then that's up to them.
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I say that despite the fact that I think wayland was a poorly conceived, designed, implemented, and marketed project that has set back the adoption of the linux desktop by years.
Why?
Last time I started a wayland plasma session it kept resetting my screen brightness to 100% every time they woke from sleep. The time before that I crashed the entire desktop, dropping me back to the terminal, when I tried to drag a hyperlink between windows.
Those might have been fixed and I might try wayland again next time I update and reboot.
I don't care about its supposed advantages.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085593 ("KDE going all-in on a Wayland future (kde.org)"—46 comments)
Give it one more release then drop it?
Also 6.8 is at least 2 years out, so there's still time to work the remaining issues out. As far as I know only speech input remains a major problem, so hopefully they'll figure that out.
> Also 6.8 is at least 2 years out
It's been decades since Wayland was "ready". But surely two more years...
What accessibility features will you be missing in KDE Plasma 6.8?
They could promise to drop support for it once the wayland one reaches feature parity. If any "significant issues" remain, then it's simply not ready for release.
I hate this modern trend of releasing stuff before it is done. And in the commercial space we are now moving on to releasing stuff before they even get started on development. Selling promises. "Buy our shit now and we promise that next year it will be able to do X!"