Fedora’s commitment to embracing cutting-edge technologies while maintaining stability has made it a favorite among Linux enthusiasts, developers, and system administrators.
Each release brings together a diverse range of software packages, kernels, and desktop environments to create a versatile and user-friendly operating system.
Now, the Fedora community is once again on the cusp of an exciting decision: the possible inclusion of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment in the Fedora 40, slated for release in April next year.
The current stable release, KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, is the last in the 5.x series, so all developer efforts have been focused on the upcoming Plasma 6 release, which is expected to be a turning point in the evolution of this desktop environment.
As reported earlier this month, it is slated to be released in February 2024 if everything goes as planned. That gives Fedora’s devs enough time to integrate the desktop environment over the following two months until Fedora 40 hits the street in late April.
The most important thing to note is that Fedora 40 plans to completely remove the X11 support in the Plasma 6 desktop and instead rely entirely on Wayland. The following three factors condition this decision:
- The Xorg server has been deprecated since RHEL 9.0 and will be dropped in “a future major RHEL release.”
- Graphics fallback modes are Wayland-friendly now with SimpleDRM enabled since Fedora 36.
- NVIDIA drivers support GBM for Wayland instead of EGLStreams. Wayland is fully supported on current NVIDIA drivers.
In addition, X11 support will not be kept for KDE Plasma 5 versions, and Plasma 6 will not be backported to older versions of Fedora.
Finally, we must emphasize that this is currently only a proposal, so it must first be approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) before it can become a reality. All expectations are, however, for this to happen. The proposal’s entire content can be seen here.
