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KDE Plasma's Wayland Transition "Nears Completion" In Ending Out 2025 (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@lemy.lol to c/linux@programming.dev

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In addition to today's blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition "nears completion" as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027.

Headlining the KDE highlights for 2025 by Nate Graham was the work on the Wayland transition. This year saw Wayland work around HDR / color management, P010 video color support, better drawing tablets, improved accessibility, overlay planes, RandR emulation, screen mirroring, support for custom modes, pre-authorization for portal-based permissions, clipboard and USB portals, and support for a variety of newer Wayland protocols. Wayland's xdg-toplevel-tag, color-representation, fio, xx_pip, and other protocols were implemented this year

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[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I came in here expecting to see a bunch of Wayland hating. Happy to be wrong.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

I think a fair number of the “Wayland haters” upgraded to KDE on Debian 13 and found out that things had gotten better in the years since Debian 12 was released. Or their Debian-based distro did the same.

As the percentage of Wayland users goes above 75%, it gets harder to trash Wayland as, instead of people coming to agree with you, the majority of the comments support Wayland instead.

We are in the final transition where an increasing number of users have never used Xorg at all. Pretty much the only “new” Xorg users coming to desktop Linux these days are via Linux Mint. Once it goes Wayland, Xorg use in Linux will likely drop below 10%. XFCE is the other “big” X11 DE but it is already defaulting to Wayland on some distros.

We already have our first Wayland-only DE, COSMIC, and GNOME and KDE are not far behind. Despite it lagging, I do not think Cinnamon will keep x11 long after they switch.

There are some new places for x11 fans to go though. There is XLibre of course. And now there are Wayback and Phoenix. So people do not have to complain as loudly that they are being “forced” onto Wayland as Xorg development slows to a crawl. Both Phoenix and Wayback use the kernel DRM and KMS and so they are much smaller and easier to build and ship even if distros drop Xorg. Phoenix may even run Wayland apps. So if you love some x11 wm, it looks like you will be able to keep it around a bit longer.