Don't drop X11 support after Plasma 6.7 (last release Feb 2027)

[Martin Flöser]

Am Montag, 2. Februar 2026, 18:19:44 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit schrieb Nate 
Graham:
> On 2/2/26 10:12 AM, Alberto Salvia Novella wrote:
> > That the guy is pissed of doesn't mean the conversation isn't
> > constructive or respectful.
> 
> It literally does.
> 
> You can't have a rational conversation with someone who's pissed off. It
> drives up your own emotional level and everyone ends up angry and not
> listening.
> 
> That's why it's important to keep it professional and technical.

And to be totally honest, nowadays there exist good ways to take out the 
emotions. Take your mail with all the emotions, pass it to an LLM like ChatGPT 
and tell it "Please turn this into a constructive mail focusing on the 
technical shortcomings of Wayland" and you get a wonderful mail where nobody 
can complain about the style.

That said I feel that I have to comment on it a little bit. Please see me as 
somebody who has no hard feelings into it. I have not contributed a single 
line of code in years. While I worked on the beginnings of Wayland I always 
said that I would never recommend the switch to Wayland only, as I am too 
biased.

So what do I think today: the ship has passed. No matter how the Plasma team 
decides: X11 is gone, there is no way back. The first desktop environments 
dropped support for X11, the distributions will follow, the toolkits will 
follow. Don't expect to have a Qt 7 with X11 support. Don't expect to have 
Firefox or Chrome with X11 support in a few years. This will go away. Anybody 
who has to work with this stuff will chose Wayland over X11. What mess for KDE 
would it be if Firefox stopped working?

Let's not make the work of the people more difficult than it has to be. There is 
now SonicDE. I wish them good luck and I am surprised that now there are 
people wanting to work on X11. Ten years back when I was still maintainer of 
KWin I never found someone wanting to work on X11. Good luck to them. I am 
glad that I do not have to use X11 any more.

Cheers
Martin