KDE Plasma 6.0 Approved For Fedora 40 - Including Dropping The X11 Session

www.phoronix.com KDE Plasma 6.0 Approved For Fedora 40 - Including Dropping The X11 Session

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I can only hope plasma6 has serious improvements on Wayland compatibility with nvidia drivers because plasma5 is unusable.
Yes, I know it works on your machine. It doesn't work on mine :P
- This is Nvidia fault, no?
  
  Ye but people don't want to accept that the company charging $5000 for a GPU is also too stubborn and lazy to pay any devs to write decent drivers
- Nvidia's latest driver patched several issues with Wayland sessions - perhaps the experience will be a tiny bit better now
  
  I had a quick go at it yesterday (the latest 535 broke DDC CI for one of my monitors, making plasma-powerdevil unable to start) and for whatever reason KWin ran at something like 3 seconds per frame. No that's not a typo, I mean it. I hope it's fixed before it gets to Arch's repo.
  EDIT: It works! I had to switch to the DKMS driver (the main one isn't in the repos yet) but other than that my Wayland session didn't die a horrible death. Well smooth. I still didn't test much, but at least night light works.
  
  Waiting for the driver to reach the repos to try it out. I am hopefull in an Hyprland future! You know, some day!
- Hopefully Fedora and others forcing users onto Wayland is going to help push Wayland devs to fixing the stuff that's breaking compatibility for everyone still stuck on X11.
  
  Wayland is just a protocol, issues need to be fixed by devs of the apps/toolkits that have still haven't migrated over unfortunately.
  
  Yeah, I share the feeling. Not sure if the problem lies on Wayland or Nvidia but hopefully if Wayland becomes the standard they'll address the elephant in the room!
- Completely agree. I keep trying to open a new session on a clean new user regularly to check if it works and it is absolutely horrible. 3 days ago after updating the system and seeing some new latest kde versions coming in, tried again and noped the out of it in a few minutes. The fonts and scalling in so many places are very bad.
  I keep reading about great improvements in the 6 version and am really hopeful for it to be usable.
  Or the problem is just that no developers have normal regular laptops that are 14'' at 1080p and can't imagine that proper scaling at 125% and 150% needs to work out of the box.
  Edit: I don't even have nvidia hardware, it's just regular intel stuff. Can't imagine the struggle of nvidia folks.
  
  The other half of the developers have 13" 2160p displays that are sharp either way – but don't notice the battery life hit.
  Iirc there's ongoing work for proper fractional scaling protocol, so it might get fixed for KDE/QT applications at some point.
- Completely agree, as an NVIDIA user (for now) I am screwed if I am required to use Wayland. I mean, I use Wayland for a long time and it works well with NVIDIA but there are many things that don’t quite work, like many emulators (Yuzu/RPCS3) that for some reason have a strange tearing, or some programs that simply won't open in xWayland.
- I'm hoping this project will be ready enough in time to pair with it https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html
  
  Seems like it's still pretty green :/

I’m really looking forward to Plasma6. I know gnome has its fans but I am really just a reluctant user. Every day gnome works against me and I have to resort to workarounds.
Do I want to navigate, inspect, and manipulate my files quickly? I use dolphin.
Do I want to have a convenient panel to get a very quick glance of my currently running programs as well as a place to pin my most commonly used ones? That’s an extension.
Do I want sub-windows to always block their parent window, preventing me from interacting with the parent further? No solution.
Do I want desktop icons? Do I want excessive notifications from common tasks my computer is doing instead of from my own programs?
I have more complaints but I think I am making myself clear. Overall I do like gnome and it has good performance, but there are so many annoying aspects. KDE is itself not perfect. There’s enough reasons for me to continue using gnome over kde5. But that’s why I hold out hope for plasma 6.
- Anybody else really hate how a lot of gnome programs have settings that are hidden in the optional gnome-tweaks program instead of putting them in the control panel or program preferences? I swear gnome3 is the only DE that genuinely despises its users.
- I've been using Gnome for a long time, then Dash to Dock broke, switched to Plasma, not looking back ^__
- What are your reasons to use gnome over kde? Most of the things you mentioned are reasons I use gnome over kde so I’m curious to know other perspectives.
  
  Overall I do think KDE is more cluttered. So I like Gnome's streamlined appearance (even if it omits too much). I also think the desktop compositor and shell are really well made, (i.e. mutter and gnome-shell), so I don't really have performance complaints.

The future is here old man

Good for Fedora for being a trendsetter regarding Wayland, though I'm sure others are right in suggesting that this is probably not being done with KDE's express approval lol.

I just want kde on Wayland not to have blury font with fractional scaling. It's just unusable. Once that's fixed, I'm all set to use it as my daily driver.
- Fixed. Not backported since it requires a QT update. Fix is coming with Plasma 6. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446674
  
  Nice
  
  What does the baby emoji and 27d means? It only shows in voyager
- I have fractional scaling on current plasma wayland and don't have blurry font. Is this a specific usecase?
  
  Just your regular 27" 4k monitor. If I set it to 200%, everything is fine, but things are huge. I have to have it on 175%, and that makes the font very blurry. Also, any window decorations that are not default plasma get blurry, too. I've already posted about it in the kde instance and zamunda (a KDE dev) said it was fixed in plasma 6. So, I guess I'll just wait it out.

Perhaps it'll start working with Wayland in 6.1 then ;)

I can feel all the X11 fanboys crying lol
- How hard do you have to search to find these x11 fanboys? Because whenever this topic comes up, the only detractors I see are users who complain because they can't use wayland for various reasons.
  On the other hand those on the other extreme are easier to find, as they always celebrate x11 users (willingly or not) getting screwed; so toxic.
- I don't think anyone is an X11 fan boy. We all know Wayland is the future. I would be using it if it worked on my machine.
  
  I see you've never been on the Phoronix forum.
  
  Try Phoronix
  A bunch of old fucks jerking themselves off to a half functional workflow they've had since 1987

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Plans were drafted in September to offer KDE Plasma 6 in Fedora 40.
All of these releases should take place at the end of February to inaugurate the Plasma 6.0 desktop.
Fedora 40 meanwhile should be out by the end of April and the Fedora KDE spin or those otherwise manually installing the KDE desktop will thus be able to enjoy the fresh Plasma 6 experience.
Well, the FESCo members have signed off on the Plasma 6.0 plan and the X11 support removal is still included.
FESCo members voted in this ticket to approve the Plasma 6.0 change proposal for Fedora 40.
Separately being pursued as well for Fedora 40 is removing the GNOME X11 session support.
The original article contains 246 words, the summary contains 117 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I really want to use wayland - and even though maybe I shouldn't I still do on my laptop - but man... on Plasma 5 that thing is borked. And I'm not even running on NVIDIA.
Whenever the system wakes up from sleep or an external display reconnects all open windows are gone and the system enters a weird state which forces me to reboot. How was "all windows are lost when the compositor crashes" not something fixed in the early days, is beyond me. That must make even developing for Wayland unnecessarily difficult/annoying.

I wonder if they consulted Plasma devs about it. Sure they said that they aim to make Wayland ready for Plasma 6, but it didn't sound like it was an actual plan for 6.0. After all they got their hands full with Qt 6 porting, and there are still major roadblocks with completing Wayland support, while 6.0 is about to have its alpha release already.
Knowing Fedora devs however, I suspect they didn't. They switched to Plasma Wayland by default several Fedora releases ago, when it was in no way ready. I guess I will switch to a different distro when this time comes.
- Yes, they did. Neal has been pushing for Wayland by default upstream for a while, and getting that in for Plasma 6.0 was and is the plan.
- Or do what I do and don't update for half a year. The previous version is supported for a month after the release the next-next version.
  
  It's still not enough time for KDE devs to fix all major issues with Wayland. It requires at least another two years in the oven.
- Yeah, as usual the opinionated crew are making something that one may even like feel like it's forced down everyone's throat (see: systemd, snap...) and making everything worse. I don't see how any Linux desktop distro worth its salt can get by ignoring 90% of the PC GPU market share and essentially forcing them into an inferior desktop experience for pure ideology's sake, and I LIKE Wayland. I even put up with all its quirks in a particularly quirky implementation (KWin). But this ain't it if you want users to use your OS.

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