[Plasma] X11 Support

[Lorenzo Sutton]

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/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/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
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