I personally think this is a bad and a selfish movement from Fedora distribution. KDE Project wanted to make Wayland as first choice in SDDM and to keep X11 as second one, and the first priority for next Plasma 6 was to keep the same level of stability reached in 5.27 after the migration to Qt6, but with such sudden move from an external player it caused distraction to KDE devs. This was a move never seen from any major distribution like ArchLinux or Ubuntu, only Fedora jumps to any near swamp without consideration to the efforts of KDE Project.
At least demand from KDE team what is ready and what is not yet complete, because any problem on Plasma 6 desktop will be the responsibility of KDE and not Fedora.
Iām preemptively sorry for the snarky comment, but good thing not only your opinion matters in this. The folks from the KDE spin have been doing a ton of maintenance work trying to help Plasma Wayland get to the state it currently is.
If you and other people here are so eager for X11 to stay, feel free to join the SIG and do the work to do so, because the people that have actually been doing this for years have reached the point that they feel like it isnāt worth it anymore.
Yes, and the point of the change proposal being open for discussion is for people to point out issues they have in order to convince those voters.
For what itās worth, we are doing this while working with KDE developers upstream. I know itās been mentioned earlier in the thread that Fedora often takes the first step for these things, but what I think is less understood is that KDEās relationships with distributions are more symbiotic than dictatorial.
The effort we put into our KDE experience and the work we do to push things forward is appreciated by KDE developers and allows them to prioritize their efforts to make a great platform and desktop experience.
Fedora ships a mostly vanilla experience with some light customization. These light changes are done with input from the KDE community, and in some respects includes us making improvements in the upstream codebases. A lot of the improvements in Plasma Wayland came as a result of user exposure to it by default in Fedora KDE. Fedora has a great relationship with KDE and Fedora KDE SIG is one of the largest and most active SIGs in Fedora. But we are volunteers working on Fedora KDE because we love Fedora and KDE Plasma, we have limits based on what we can work on, support, and rely on.
It is highly well-known that X11 is mostly dead. Itās a matter of time that people will need to switch from X11 to Wayland, and thereās no such thing as a good time to do it. And Fedora isnāt the only distribution using Plasma Wayland by default today. KDE Neon on the KDE Slimbook and KaOS both do.
As far as I know, Screenreaders dont work on Wayland. This is the only real stopper bug I can think of.
Until blind tooling is very much improved, and that takes way too much time, Fedora is simply not a viable Distro for blind people if X11 is simply removed.
I know this is kind of a big pot to open, as I have no idea how many blind people are simply gone to MacOS. But its so frustrating, there are so awesome TTS engines, everything seems very close.
Fedora has no LTS, so until screen readers are working very very very well and stable, Wayland is simply excluding people that actually need it.
All those innovations like screen tearing, night light, HDR, are all irrelevant to the blind people. I know its because users develop what they use. Its difficult
Even if fedora not has everything like LTS versions. With Fedora we do have several Spins like Mate where still are on X11 and this apps still are working.
And yes with Accessibility tools and apps, it is the same as with any other kind of software, please give feedback what it is missing. If you have family members or friends who have need of such tools, encourage and help them to test and report.
I think Fedora team has a great misunderstanding of what is the true role of an operating system, itās not being able to run cutting edge desktop on top of the newest kernel, the true purpose is to be able to run end user applications.
Some X11 apps canāt work properly on Wayland and will not be ported to Wayland in the lapse of several months, because some of them need big funding plus years of rewriting while others will never be modified.
The best way to tackle this is to wait until KDE Plasma officially drop X11, at that time the impact will be much greater for all big Linux communities, then most Linux apps developers will correctly tackle the port issue to Wayland. For now Fedora action has no impact at all, because X11 can be run on other distributions like Arch based distros.
I think you have a great misunderstanding of what is the true role of Fedora as an operating system, and as a project.
Not all distros (āoperating systemsā) have the same self-given role. What you describe as ānot its roleā is pretty much the role which Fedora gave itself.
Maybe you want to be clearer about what you want (not what you donāt want). Depending on what you want, how soon you want to profit from the latest development, how long you want to hold on to an existing environment (set and versions of apps to run), your best choice will be the latest Fedora (39 as of a few minutes ago); an older still supported Fedora (38); a āFedora with long time supportā, i.e. one of our downstreams (cum grano salis) such as AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux. Or, of course, an LTS version somewhere else.
The Fedora KDE maintainers donāt want to maintain extremely complicated dead code any more, rightly so, now when itās considered in a good enough state.
These maintainers know what theyāre doing, and have their finger on the pulse. If there was enough of a doubt that this wasnāt an appropriate decision, it wouldnāt be a conversation.
This isnāt a decision made to inconvenience users, in spite of how you perceive otherwise. 6.0 is a major release, so it makes sense to get this change in now, so that users can operate under the assumption a major release will introduce changes. If this occurs in a minor release, there would be more uproar than there is now, and given KDE 5.0 was almost a decade ago, by the time of KDE 7 Fedora will likely be behind other distros in terms of Wayland support.
Iām happy to be corrected by @ngompa here, but If the blocking issues arenāt resolved by the time KDE 6 drops, this likely wonāt go ahead.
If we donāt have sufficient resolution for showstopper issues upstream by KDE Plasma 6.0 GA, then the packages will be reintroduced as deprecated packages, marked for future removal. But Iām pretty confident that weāre going to have those handled.
They will not exist for EPEL 10 KDE though in any case.
Plasma 6 big goal was and still migrating to Qt6 and has nothing to do with dropping X11.
These maintainers know what theyāre doing, and have their finger on the pulse.
Plasma desktop is way bigger than Fedora, there are many big Linux distributions that did nothing like what Fedora want to do, and no pressure will be on KDE team to follow your direction. KDE community is in fact more directed by usersā feedback instead of using elites voting.
This isnāt a decision made to inconvenience users
Well, for you as distribution contributor, you consider the integration of the new desktop as the final goal, while users consider running their apps as the true goal.
And as such, they have maintainers that are happy to still work on Plasma X11.
Fedora and other projects have no/very little interest in terms of maintenance due to daily driving Wayland or other reasons. See Nealās response. If someone were to so passionately offer to contribute to the X11 stack; then great, I imagine that would prevent this at all. But even after this was a conversation (not even a new conversation, itās 6 months old by now), nobody has stepped up. With nobody to maintain it, the decision to remove it is quite simple.
Also misunderstanding whatās going on here, as outlined in the above response from Neal. This change is linked to various Plasma changes to resolve a large amount of the issues raised in this thread and others, in the unlikely event of the work not being completed this wonāt happen yet.
And barring a very small number of apps, both will be achieved. The reality is Wayland will never be 100% compatible with Xās features, while at the same time X is considered to be dead. There will almost certainly never be another major release. Thereās no good time to make this choice, so better to get it in now so all future work can accelerate.
Fedora 39 was just released and Fedora 40 will not be released until next spring so Iām guessing a lot will change by then.Either way wayland is coming and xorg will be a thing of the past so Iām ok with whatever choice is made.
Itās important to note that thereās a larger problem around upstream maintenance too. @ngraham wrote a detailed blog post about the X11 and Wayland situation two months ago. Itās not just Fedora that is affected by the upstream situation, everyone is. Weāre just the first to stop ignoring it.
