Fedora 40 Looks To Offer KDE Plasma 6 Desktop, Drop The KDE X11 Session

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 40 Looks To Offer KDE Plasma 6 Desktop, Drop The KDE X11 Session

Fedora developers are looking at offering KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 in next year's Fedora 40 release. With the upgrade to Plasma 6 it's also planned by the Fedora packagers to drop support for the KDE X11 session -- thereby just leaving the KDE on Wayland session...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan

[Calinou]

Will there be a way to install KDE X11 using official packages post-installation? If not, I hope Copr will be doing its thing…

On Fedora 38, I get frequent desktop freezes with Wayland even on 13th-gen Intel graphics (let's not speak about NVIDIA). Not to mention the various feature limitations around Wayland such as global shortcuts, screen recording, etc. Therefore, one of the first things I do post-install is switch to a X11 session and it becomes perfectly stable. Fedora 40 is 7 months away, and I doubt all the stability and feature issues with Wayland will be resolved by then.

If there's no other solution, I may have to stick to Fedora 39 and hope that Wayland issues will be resolved by the time Fedora 41 is released (since you can upgrade two versions at once without going EOL).

[You-]

Global shortcuts and screen recording both work on Wayland.

The Wayland implementation in qt/kde5 was (at times?) buggy (for instance I am unaware of any screen freezing on gnome-shell) and the developers are confident that those bugs are/will be resolved in Qt6/KDE6.]

It is interesting that the KDE community is moving faster in deprecating the X11 backend as normally you will get the haters either blaming gnome or Red Hat. This gives a different dynamic.

[cassiofb-dev]

Global shortcuts and screen recording both work on Wayland.

The Wayland implementation in qt/kde5 was (at times?) buggy (for instance I am unaware of any screen freezing on gnome-shell) and the developers are confident that those bugs are/will be resolved in Qt6/KDE6.]

It is interesting that the KDE community is moving faster in deprecating the X11 backend as normally you will get the haters either blaming gnome or Red Hat. This gives a different dynamic.

Yeah, I'm really excite with XFCE progress too.
Wayland brings a lot of QoL and performance improvements but the thing I like the most is the security.

[andyprough]

leading-edge Linux distribution

I haven't tried it myself in a few years, but I was listening to a podcaster a couple of weeks ago who said after a year wtih Fedora he had moved to OpenSUSE because Fedora just had far too many abandoned and out-of-date packages in its repos. He said this wasn't an issue with OpenSUSE. Is this true generally, or just one person's experience? If Fedora's letting its repos get full of unmaintained junk, I don't think it would be one that people should be recommending any longer.

[hiryu]

KDE+Wayland+Nvidia hasn't been a great experience for me. I really tried... but it was rather sluggish/laggy. I eventually reverted back to X.

Hardware acceleration for Firefox doesn't work. If you force it, Firefox will typically crash in under a minute (and even if by miracle it lasts longer than that, it still ALWAYS crash). Is this strictly an Nvidia wayland problem or an issue with kwin+Nvidia+Wayland? I'm unsure.

On my laptop with Optimus, KDE+Wayland is pretty great. Very zippy. Firefox is accelerated. I'm unsure how, but at least through Steam, the Nvidia GPU just works for games. I don't even have to set environment variables to get games to use the discrete GPU like I do under X.

Hopefully by the time KDE 6 is out and ready for prime time, these issues will be addressed.

[RejectModernity]

Hopefully by the time KDE 6 is out and ready for prime time, these issues will be addressed.

Perhaps, you should address these issues to nvidia

[chromer]

We all love Wayland, but apps, DEs, and features aren't mature enough to fully switch to.

[kiffmet]

I've been using KDE Wayland as a daily driver (with AMD graphics though) for more than 2.5 years now. I haven't had any issues that arise from me being on a Wayland session instead of an X11 one for a good, long while now.

[You-]

I haven't tried it myself in a few years, but I was listening to a podcaster a couple of weeks ago who said after a year wtih Fedora he had moved to OpenSUSE because Fedora just had far too many abandoned and out-of-date packages in its repos. He said this wasn't an issue with OpenSUSE. Is this true generally, or just one person's experience? If Fedora's letting its repos get full of unmaintained junk, I don't think it would be one that people should be recommending any longer.

It seems a strange sentiment. He will need to give examples.

There might be abandoned packages if a maintainer steps down and no one takes over, but such packages are removed from the next release.

All packages are also rebuilt in mass rebuilds very regularly.

OpenSUSE also has many distros so a question will be what did he move from (stable released Fedora?) to what (factory or rolling/tumbleweed?).

Making conclusions off vague anecdotes is also a very bad idea.