Dear KDE community,
On 27/11/2025 15:43, Valder N. wrote:
Good afternoon, dear developers of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment.
Could you please clarify the situation with the news
<https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/>
about discontinuing support for the X11 protocol in favor of
supporting only the Wayland protocol starting with version 6.8?
I hope you understand that even according to the data provided in the
article, X11-session is used by 30% of active users. In reality, this
number is significantly higher, and to verify this, you can refer to
the statistics on the use and downloads of individual software
packages in the repositories of active distributions. However, even
30% (!) should be more than enough to justify the need to continue
supporting this protocol.
Perhaps in the future (but apparently not soon!), Wayland will replace
X11, but this should be done in an evolutionary manner, rather than by
cutting off support for what currently works and provides the best
performance.
In particular, in tests on virtual machines, the use of the Wayland
protocol leads to increased RAM consumption, as well as memory leaks
over time. This is not observed in X11 sessions. The “speed” of the
working environment and its “responsiveness” in X11-session is also
clearly noticeable.
In this regard, we kindly request that the entire community that
regularly uses the KDE Plasma desktop and regularly uses X11-session
continue to support X11-session and not follow the path of GNOME.
I sincerely hope for your conscientiousness and responsiveness.
I second this request.
Keep also into account that quite a few applications are effectively
using Xwayland with mixed results.
I'm not sure where the statistics and 'hard data' come from "The vast
majority of our users are already using the Wayland session [...]" or
"Will X11 applications still work? Outside of rare special cases, yes,
they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer [...]" and
hope, agreeing with the OP, that some deeper analysis and consideration
besides the announcement be made towards the user and developer
communities, in particular developers who don't have the same.
In particular, as a long time user/supporter/contributor to Linux
Audio/Music Applications, many of these are struggling or at least
facing quite massive efforts needed to in moving to Wayland; many of
these are community-driven and smaller (often 'one-person') projects and
rely on specific features or toolkits still interlinked with X11; in
some ceses these are rather complex software By nature) with limited
resources compared to the 'major' Linux projects (e.g. [1][2][3][4][5]).
Some (especially libraries/toolkits) are working on Wayland support but
it might take them time and effort... more time than the drop time.
So, to second the request in the previous message, I hope X11 will be
supported for additional time and facilitate the transition which at one
point will happen.
This is not an 'anti-wayland' stance, it's more of an attention on
'wider community inclusiveness' when transitioning towards something so
ingrained in the Linux ecosystem. Maybe KDE could take an active role in
possibly supporting non-KDE developers / communities in the transition
beyond just dropping X11?
Lorenzo
[1]
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg2067327.html
[2]
https://discourse.ardour.org/t/ardour-mixbus-wayland-native-any-time-soon/89542/2
[3] https://sourceforge.net/p/qmidiarp/mailman/message/59205269/
[4] https://github.com/muse-sequencer/muse/issues/1250
[5] https://github.com/lv2/lv2/issues/70
