KDE Plasma will continue having an X11 session, as Kubuntu switches to Wayland by default
KDE developers confirm Plasma will continue having a maintained X11 session, and now we know Kubuntu will be Wayland by default.
On the KDE side, developer Nate Graham wrote a blog post to note that “Plasma’s X11 session continues to be maintained”. Graham said this means:
- 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.
However, the future is still very clearly Wayland-focused. There’s no timeline for when Plasma will drop X11 support, but it will happen eventually but we’re still years away from that. There’s still a number of significant issues they’re working through.
KDE’s own stats show that “73% of Plasma 6 users who have turned on telemetry are using the Wayland session”. Again, this is why telemetry is useful, it can show developers where they need to actually focus, it’s not the bad word many seem to think it is.
As for Kubuntu, as confirmed by developer Rik Mills in reply to a user question about shipping a Wayland-only session (cheers, OMGUbuntu):
Yes, we have recently split the plasma sessions out into 2 separate packages, plasma-session-wayland and plasma-session-x11. At the moment we intend to ship the wayland one by default on the ISO and installs, while users who still want an X11 session will be free to install the X11 one.
Not surprising, with Ubuntu proper firmly moving to Wayland.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
