Going all-in on a Wayland future

blogs.kde.org Going all-in on a Wayland future

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

14 comments

X11 is already dead IMO, if you didn't move yet (still on i3wmfor example), it's time to upgrade.
- I'm proudly retro computing then. X serves me well.
- @idriss
  Some things just don't work properly on Wayland. For example, #NoMachine remote #Plasma desktop sessions connect, show a white screen, then disconnect. Switching to an X11 session solves the problem. This is a showstopper, so I'm sticking with X.Org.
  @ashleythorne
  
  Fair
  but this is more of the NoMachine not doing the upgrade than Wayland having issues. I guess the closes thing in Wayland is now https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man1/waypipe.1.html over ssh or simply go nuclear with full screen sharing / control with RustDesk.
- If things work for the user then I don't see the need to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. Future is with Wayland for sure but if things are okay for them right now, not that much reason to switch
  
  Definitely. The only problem is when things start being breaking for X11, it will a forced less pleasant upgrade.
  Just like everyone can use Win XP, but none of latest software like browsers support XP. So do it at own paste now or be forced to upgrade later.

We are at a weird place right now. The original problem solved by x11 is more relevant than ever. The security model, however, is not.
- What is that problem? I'm not knowledgeable about those protocols.
  
  Basically X11 lets everything it does talk to everything else it does. There’s minimal isolation and there’s not a clean way to do that in x11 without fundamentally changing how it works and breaking compatibility. There were also other issues to were too messy to solve without breaking things. So it was better to just start over. And now we have Wayland.
  One example of this is you could have Firefox and a terminal window up in an x11 environment and Firefox could theoretically see everything you are typing in the terminal window.

I assumed this stage had already happened.

I wish I could be excited for this, but there are still many things missing or buggy in Wayland.

14 comments