Interesting news came from the KDE camp. The KWin team has officially split the project into two parts: KWin X11 and KWin Wayland. According to an announcement to the KDE’s mailing list, these split components are now hosted at two distinct repositories:
This change marks a shift in how desktop environments can be deployed on Linux, as KWin X11 and KWin Wayland are now fully co-installable without any direct conflicts.
Consequently, when KDE Plasma 6.4 is released (scheduled for June 12), individual Linux distributions can opt to include only KWin Wayland or ship both KWin X11 and KWin Wayland, depending on their default display protocol and user preferences.
Moreover, it is worth noting that KWin Wayland is now “de-facto” KWin moving forward, meaning users and distros will likely continue to see it simply packaged as “kwin.” While the naming decision ultimately lies with each distro, the KDE team recommends that any “kwin” package now be recognized as “kwin_wayland,” reflecting the project’s focus on Wayland.
Another important announcement is that KWin X11 will remain under maintenance until KDE Plasma 7, for which there is no scheduled roadmap yet, but it’s likely to happen next year. Although it is mostly feature-frozen—per a longstanding freeze highlighted in an earlier blog post—bug fixes will still land there.
According to the announcement, developers should commit new fixes to KWin Wayland first and then backport them to KWin X11. Finally, keep in mind that the KWin X11 codebase still retains some Wayland traces, particularly around testing.
For more information, refer to the KDE mailing list. The project is expected to officially announce this change in a dedicated blog post shortly.
Cant stop the future. X11 has done its job. KDE is preparing the phaseout – after a 10year transition phase, its about time 👍
give me a call when KDE over wayland supports persistent sessions (window placement on virtual desktops, window geometry) and an easy way to remap the keyboard and mouse. emphasis on the ‘easy’.
Older Nvidia hardware will suffer from this. A real shame.
(TLDR: Forcing Wayland and POPCNT (SSE4.2) defeats the purpose of “Legacy Friendliness”, people will defend bad Linux choices, but will criticize Microsoft for the same, people may not switch to Linux because of the drama and just stick with Windows.)
Exactly, yet no one else seems to realize this until it is to late, not to mention it defeats the purpose of Linux being “Legacy Friendly”, yet these projects are making Linux no different than Windows by forcing a new display protocol that doesn’t work/glitches on older hardware, forcing POPCNT (SSE4.2) instructions (Ubuntu), and don’t even get me started on the fact that Wayland has been around since 2008, yet it is still a mess especially on old nVidia GPUs/Drivers. You also have people defending theses idiotic choices, yet when Microsoft does the same or similar, people rightfully criticize them, however when a Linux project does it or the same, people will defend it like it is their loved ones, and it gets beyond frustrating! These same people will also wonder why others aren’t switching to Linux, but at the same time, force unnecessary change down your throats which defeats the purpose of Linux, especially on legacy hardware, which is why people stick to Windows as trash as it is. To be clear I am not a fan of X11’s limitations, like it can’t do mixed refresh rates without workarounds, however you shouldn’t force Wayland down people’s throats.
Good.
So KDE will basically drop support for all platforms that aren’t Linux, including the BSDs and Solaris? That would be a really bad step in my opinion.
FYI:https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
Also:https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.htmlhttps://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and
So, not all is lost.
And Solaris as a desktop is a dead end, I’m not even sure it supports recent versions of Plasma or Gnome anyway (last I checked Solaris used Mate by default).