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Is anyone planning on forking Plasma to restore X11 support when it is dropped? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by northernscrub@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn't ready yet. There's so much shit that simply doesn't work, and they're all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven't seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.

Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?

edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:

  • remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.

  • nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I'm not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.

  • applications in general felt sluggish

  • it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.

  • lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.

  • screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.

  • application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn't work. I'm told it should work, but it doesn't.

here's the thing. I'm not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I'm very pleased that we have new options. I'm arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.

so no, this isn't a "self report" as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.

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[-] sanpo@sopuli.xyz 85 points 4 days ago

There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work

People complaining about Wayland always like to say that, but usually don't give any specific examples.

If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn't be actively working to switch.

For what it's worth, since a few years Wayland works better on my PC than X11 ever did, and with more features.

[-] undu@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 4 days ago

I've used Wayland exclusively for years, but here's an example: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/

tl;Dr the Wayland ecosystem has still not caught up in all edge cases, the weirder setup you have the more likely you're affected

[-] eugenia@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago

Ubuntu, which is all-in on Wayland, does not wake up from sleep with our nvidia 3060. We have to reset the machine. So, no, it's not an edge case, we have a very, very popular Asus motherboard (the one everyone recommended on youtube 3 years ago), and still nothing. Even with newer versions of the driver, newer versions of ubuntu, same problem occurs.

[-] dadarobot@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago

i use x11 termux with xreal glasses for my travel rig. as far as i know, there is no wayland support for termux.

also when i use steam link from wayland it is very buggy. i tried again a couple months ago and had the same issue. 

are these niche use cases? absolutely. but i have 2 different niche use cases that exclude using wayland. its a shame if ill have to quit using gnome (i know this thread is about kde) over this. 

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[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

and with more features.

Look, if you're gonna tell x11 folks to provide examples of how Wayland is not meeting their needs, you need to meet the same bar and give a few examples of what these features are.

This is honestly what is holding me back from going all in on wayland... I don't see any benefit.

[-] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 17 points 4 days ago

Fractional scaling w/ HiDPI displays, especially when the monitors are different resolutions, works so much better in Wayland than X11

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[-] LeFantome@programming.dev 12 points 3 days ago

Xorg fans will not accept that people like Wayland better because it is a better experience: higher performance and less jank. But that is the main reason and the reason that 80 percent of new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and will never switch. It does not matter if you believe it.

And of course the “killer feature” of Wayland is that it runs Wayland apps. And Wayland-only desktop environments and compositors. This will matter more and more every day. I could live without foot and COSMIC but already the fact that I cannot use Niri on Xorg is all I need to know to be Wayland exclusive.

But if you need an itemized list:

  • HDR
  • VRR
  • Multi-monitor fractional scaling
  • Tear-free
  • isolated I/O
  • multi-touch
  • kinetic scrolling
  • security in general
  • and probably more

Waypipe and WPRS are better than the X11 equivalents.

Oh, and inevitability.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

I appreciate your response.

I am happy that keyboard and other I/o are being treated as separate from a security perspective.

Xorg fans

I am not as impressed by this comment snippet.

I am not a "fan" of xorg, and you should absolutely stop looking at it this way. This isn't a matter of having a favourite car manufacturer. I am not commenting to convince everyone that xorg is "better".

I simply use xorg. I have work to do, I use Linux to do it. My most stable and predictable configuration is using xfce, it just stays out of the way. I don't care about ricing. I don't GAF about GPU accelerated terminal emulators, especially when they bonk trying to connect to Solaris tty. I don't care about HDR. If you do care about these things, that's great, I'm not trying to diminish that.

I have been using Linux for almost 30 years, professionally for almost 25. I have been through Mir. I have somehow made it through alsa transition to pulseaudio, which sucked. I have been through Unity, the ffmpeg debacle, systemd, ndis wrappers, netplan, etc. Some of these new tooling options are better than previous ones, some aren't. They effectively get the job done, and that's the bottom line.

Never in my Linux experience have I seen such a sudden push to not only move everyone to new tooling, but to cast everyone using the old tools as somehow "refusing to move on", especially in the last 2 or 3 years.

There will come a time when you will see your current tooling will be left behind and you'll be in my situation. Have some grace about it.

And stop calling me an xorg "fan".

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[-] forbiddenlake@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

One benefit is it's the future and my DE is going to drop X soon.

Another is it's more secure. Not just any window can read the clipboard or the keys you press. Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog whenever I hit them.

Am I doing a good job convincing you? Anyway, I switched to Plasma Wayland and it was fine for me, with a few tweaks needed.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

it's the future

No doubt about that. It's been "the future" for more than a decade. But even 5 years ago, Wayland was a complete dumpster fire if you strayed outside average use. So yeah, I've heard this before.

Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog

I understand that this is a real sticking point with some use cases, I hope this is resolved soon. I'm definitely fuzzy on the workings of portals, compositors, input, etc.

Am I doing a good job convincing you?

This is the overwhelming response to my questions about Wayland, and it's weird. Wayland isn't a fancy new car I need to use to stay relevant. I work in terminals and a browser, Xfce is fine.

As I mentioned in another response, I am not trying to use the newest coolest thing, I work every day in Linux and I need my setup to be stable and predictable.

And no one needs to convince me, when xfce is finally discontinued or unusable, I'll have to find a similar Wayland alternative. Nothing compels me to switch yet.

I am not trying to suggest that the old way is better, we have needed to move on from x11 years ago.

[-] northernscrub@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

clipboard...

This just sounds bothersome. A clipboard should really be machine-wide, that's the purpose of it. Although I can understand the reticence there, what with password managers. I would argue that, to achieve that sort of security, there should be a separate, "secure" clipboard that only enrolled applications can access - and enrollment should be left up to the user, not the application developer.

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[-] brxghtjen@sh.itjust.works 34 points 3 days ago

Seems like it would take less effort to improve Wayland than maintain a forked DE for X11.

[-] Telorand@reddthat.com 3 points 3 days ago

Probably true, but iirc, there are already people planning to keep X11 going, because change means fucking up their personal workflow.

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[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.

Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.

I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.

[-] northernscrub@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I habitually use a clean install whenever I move OS - so much so that I've been buying new storage drives for the sake thereof. I actually have one ready to go for Trixie, once I finish a current project.

[-] chloroken@lemmy.ml 42 points 4 days ago

As someone who likes X11, Wayland works fine. To say it has so many things wrong is a self report. People like you make shit up about Wayland because you had some unrelated issue years ago. Just give a rest.

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[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 30 points 4 days ago

I think realistically the best option is to stick with an older version of KDE until your issues get fixed upstream or switch to another DE.

Anyone technically literate enough to port KDE back to X11 is likely also literate enough to fix the blocking bugs.

... Unless they're doing it purely on ideological grounds, which is probably not a healthy way to run a project.

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[-] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 18 points 4 days ago

Plasma and Gentoo user here.

The transition has been so uneventful and simple that I didn't even noticed. I run some 15 desktops with different mixed hardware setups and use VNC / RDP sometimes too.

One day I started noticing on some desktops Wayland was now in use, by chance. Then I started taking notice.

I can say the ones moved to Wayland are smoother, but might be aneddotical. Beside that, cannot care less about X11 or Wayland, they both work just fine for all my use cases.

For the sake of future, welcome Wayland!

/smallrant Sorry for X11, have to say I have been in the business since kernel version 2 and I DO NOT miss losing X11, its a bunch of half assed half baked spaghetti tech that has done its own time and would not have kept up with life. /rantover.

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[-] mub@lemmy.ml 24 points 4 days ago

Wayland development continues to push forward. Currently it works better than X11 in 95% or setups, and it won't be long before it covers 99.5%. X11 is legacy now, and Wayland works perfectly for the vast majority of users and is only improving. The time to move on is coming.

For legacy use cases there will be an alternative X11 DE you can use for a long time yet.

[-] LeFantome@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago

There are few Wayland only apps today. But as the percentage of Linux desktop users on Wayland goes over 80 percent, that will change.

And today, GUI toolkits and desktop environments have to limit features to those that will work in both environments. But not for long.

My guess is that it will be totally impractical to use an X11 only desktop 3 years from now. 5 for sure. In fact, I bet few people will even have Xwayland installed 5 years from now. To run what? Xfig? Netscape?

But certainly it will still be possible to run an X server. Xorg itself will still probably run fine. It already uses KMS and DRI from the kernel and those may not change much. And I am sure at least a few zealots will still be pushing XLibre a decade from now. And Wayback will almost certainly let you run an X11 desktop for many, many years to come for those “legacy use cases” you talk about. Like running CDE for a couple of hours.

Probably the most interesting development has been Phoenix. They have floated the idea of having an X11 first environment (eg. using an X11 window manager) that can run Wayland apps too. If that actually happens, I am sure it will find some fans. If you have spent 15 years fine-tuning your FVWM or Xmonad config, you won’t want to give it up.

It will be interesting to see where the BSD world goes with all of this. I think FreeBSD will go Wayland. But NetBSD and OpenBSD could be x11 holdouts. But the Wayland-only app problem will impact everyone. Time will tell.

[-] Czele@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

You can just stay with the last plasma version that supports x11 as long as it doesnt start to bit rot. Btw, try wayland and see if YOUR workflow works

[-] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 days ago

I have 1660super and Plasma just works on my Arch Linux PC. Maybe try updating your system.

[-] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I feel similarly especially about remmina, though as I understand it this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I'm quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).

It's too bad because on Debian 13 here wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren't for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.

I would hope plasma's decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 days ago

I imagine that some graphical environments will always support X11. I'd suggest you switch to one of those. If someone forked Plasma, it'd have far fewer eyes on it than something like i3. I assume XFCE will continue to support X11 for a while too since it's only just working on Wayland support. Maybe some of the less common DEs like MATE are worth looking into?

[-] LeFantome@programming.dev 3 points 3 days ago

I could see MATE going Wayland only before XFCE does. They are a “traditional” desktop but not committed to old tech in general. Their whole system has already been ported to Wayland when used with a compositor like Wayfire or LabWC. As a small project, they may not want to maintain both longer term.

Lots of MATE users on other UNIX systems though. Not just BSD but Solaris and such. So, who knows.

XFCE is building libraries to make supporting both longer term easier. So, they should support X11 for a long time. We will see what happens if GTK5 is Wayland only.

Trinity Desktop is probably stuck on X11.

And most X11 window managers will remain X11 window managers forever. The only reason Sway exists is because i3 is not moving. There is Wayland Maker instead of WimdowMsker and DWL instead of DWM. This list goes on. What non-DE x11 window manager is porting to Wayland? I cannot think of one.

But Plasma is not ditching X for a year or more. And many distros will ship the X version far longer. The freaking out seems more like a political statement than a pragmatic requirement at this point.

If Debian Forky ships Plasma with X11 support in 2027 (and I bet it does), the first version of Debian Stable to ship Wayland-only Plasma will be Debian 15 in 2029/2030. Many, maybe most, never-Waylanders will have migrated to Wayland by then.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah. It looks like a lot of the BSDs might be the way to go if for whatever reason you want/need to stay on X11. I've been trying out OpenBSD on one of my machines, and following for quite a lot longer, and progress on Wayland support seems to be relatively slow over there.

[-] mononoke@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 3 days ago

Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn't happened yet. I don't think there is anything wrong with this.

[-] gr3q@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

None of the x11 sessions in any DE were as smooth video output-wise as the Wayland sessions I tried, especially with multiple monitors, they always had various problems and stutter.

That is why I switched to Wayland in the end.

[-] jtzl@lemmy.zip 8 points 4 days ago

In fairness, x11 is a bit of a dumpster fire and has been as long as I've used Linux (since 2003).

[-] normonator@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Remote access is the one pain point. There is very little for RMM or remote software that works on wayland. KDE has that in the works already.

Everybody says Rustdesk but it is a bad joke regardless of wayland.

Personally I host a simplehelp server(paid) and it's really good but wayland support is a no go so far.

Everything else has been categorically better and fixed a lot of issues for me that I used to have on X11 which I've used for like 15 years.

X11+Gnome until gnome 3 then KDE for me because I'm not using a damn tablet (or workspaces).

[-] Corngood@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago

It obviously won't work for everyone, but for remote access I've been very impressed with waypipe. I use it to pull windows from headless machines onto my main workstation, like X forwarding.

I'd like something for persistence, like wprs, but it's not quite there yet.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 days ago

I switched from x to Wayland eaely/mid last year, prior to that there were quirks. But now: no screen tearing, no nvidia issues when using their driver, steam games play instead of black screen.

The bonus is security.

[-] giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 days ago

we should get some "it isnt ready yet" t-shirts made for the legacy folks.

[-] anelephant@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Checkout the Wayback project on fdo

[-] EponymousBosh@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago

There's a couple new things being worked on; namely, Wayback and Phoenix.

[-] doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.

People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.

Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.

I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.

Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.

The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.

[-] anelephant@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Pipewire and alsa are completely different things. Pipewire uses pulse/jack which then use alsa, or am I missing something?

[-] doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago

People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).

When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.

Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.

I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.

It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.

[-] kumi@feddit.online 3 points 3 days ago

I really hope the X11 session stays maintained.

Otherwise, KDE will finally have a reason to get get its MATE/Cinnamon equivalent

What should the fork be called? Surely someone can do better than "Plaxma DE".

[-] onlooker@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago

This already exists, sort of. It's called Trinity Desktop. However, it's a fork of an older version of KDE, specifically 3.5.

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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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