FESCo members voted 6+1 to include KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland as the only desktop mode available in Fedora 40.
Fedora is a distribution that has always stayed on the cutting edge of innovation, but this time, it will surprise even its most die-hard supporters.
As we reported back in September, there is a proposal about the upcoming KDE Plasma 6 to be included in the Fedora 40, which is expected to be released around the end of April 2024.
So far, nothing surprising, given that the Plasma 6 release date is set for February 28, 2024. The new major version of the desktop environment promises to bring many changes and improvements, becoming a milestone in its future evolution.
However, the more intriguing aspect of the proposal is the suggestion to remove X11 support from the Plasma desktop completely in Fedora 40 and rely only on the Wayland session.
For Fedora Linux, the transition to KDE Plasma 6 will also include dropping support for the X11 session entirely, leaving only Plasma Wayland as the sole offered desktop mode.
And this is already a fact! With 6+1 votes, the proposal was approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) – a unit responsible for approval and coordination of changes for the Fedora releases.
Considering that a similar proposal has already been made for the GNOME desktop, it seems like next year’s Fedora will be the first distribution to switch entirely to Wayland, abandoning X11 altogether.
Something that has been talked about in the Linux ecosystem for years, but no distribution has dared to implement it thoroughly.
So I don’t know if 2024 will be another announced year of Linux on the desktop, but all signs point to one for Wayland on the desktop. Let’s face it – X11 is ancient and gets virtually no development anymore except minimal patching when necessary.
On the other hand, Wayland is the future. Whether or not this appeals to the general Linux user, it offers a far simpler and more modern design, which improves efficiency and security for Linux desktop environments. Not to mention that, unlike X11, Wayland has enjoyed active development in recent years.
Before these things happen, however, we are all waiting for the much anticipated Fedora 39 release – which will include GNOME 45 as a flagship feature – to arrive on November 7 following two consecutive delays.
In conclusion, by focusing on Wayland, Fedora is positioning itself at the forefront of a movement that is likely to become the standard across all major Linux distributions soon. So, all we have to do is wait and see if these predictions come true.
> Let’s face it – X11 is ancient and gets virtually no development anymore except minimal patching when necessary.
And, it’s still more stable, better supported and has even more and better functionality than Wayland…
For years, I have both installed, and I have to switch from time to time from one to the other. To do everything that I need, I need X11. In the first place, to do extension development in Gnome. I also use X11 for removing window decorations (like the title bar) that take too much space when I’m drawing with Krita. On top of that, I even can’t adjust the brightness of my screen in Wayland, which I have to solve with “Soft Brightness Plus”. They use a black rectangle with adjustable transparency, as a hack.
Luckily, I don’t use Fedora.
Bad news for photographers who require colour calibration for their workflow, as yet Wayland has no support for this.
I feel wayland don’t really play ball with nVidia setups and as other mentioned it lacks features that you would expect was there by now.
I would like to see a more streamlined version of X where most of the ancient code was stripped away which ain’t used by 99.999% of the users.
It’s always good to read comments complaining about an ever-changing world… Gnome 3 is still here, systemd hasn’t caused a massive security failure and so now Wayland is the big whine from the traditionalists. It wasn’t always better in the past!
Lol. Sometimes people wine because they care.
About me, I love the Gnome 3 workflow from the beginning. And actually, I like the extension model too. I’m neutral about systemd, as long as I can have a good functioning system. Since it was the choice of my distro, I go along with it. And my opinion about Wayland is that it is a good step forward, but it isn’t there yet. I use bouth (Wayland and X11) for different tasks.
For me, the only thing is that I would like to be able to keep using Gnome.
I’m not opposed to Wayland in principle. I’m saying it doesn’t work. At least not for what I need to do with my computer. Every few months I try Wayland again to see if the show stopping problems are gone, but they never are. Being about 10 years into Wayland it is hard to believe this is really the current state of something that is going to become the only option for mainstream distros. We are just now in 2023 getting people paying attention at all to the portal and input consequences of Wayland. There is no reliable KVM solution. VNC and remote networking requires on-site manual approval each time. Nextcloud’s tray menu appears in the middle of the screen. Mouse tracking speed is erratic.
One reason people have not switched to Wayland is because it seems like everyone has these problems and the only upside of dropping X11 is that in theory it will twist arms to fix Wayland, but it does not inspire confidence to know that it took being forced to do it to warrant fixing show stoppers.