Bonum Certa Men Certa

IBM's Fedora 40 Dropping X11 as an Option for KDE Users, in Effect Forcing Those Users to Adopt a Broken Wayland



Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

Fedora 40 Dropping X11 Option for KDE, Forcing Users to Broken Wayland.



I’ve written about Wayland and the many problems it has before. I will incorporate those by reference here.



Will Wayland Even Survive the Collapse of IBM? X11 Likely Will.



foobar2000 on Wine, Wayland, and GNOME Equals Trouble.



Reasons Why Debian 12 KDE Should Not Default to Wayland. More Flatpak Observations. (Hiding Proprietary Software)



Wayland is a “replacement” for the X.org X11 server (Xorg).



Wayland doesn’t work right.



Wayland is causing IBM themselves to do more work on “XWayland”, the compatibility layer, than they would have to do to continue supporting Xorg Server itself!



Hardly anything actually runs on Wayland natively.



Other than the KDE and GNOME applications, with glitches, maybe Firefox and a couple of other things.



Most people will need XWayland forever, because application developers just don’t have any incentive to leave X, and in some cases, their application isn’t even possible on Wayland.



None of this has made IBM reconsider the last 15 years, where the reception has been tepid, at best, so now they want to go balls-to-the-wall and force KDE users on Fedora to use Wayland, even though Plasma 6 will support X11 itself.



This means that the users are being prevented from using functionality that KDE will continue supporting indefinitely.



That’s good, considering that there are dozens of KDE/Wayland bugs and Plasma 6 and Qt6 fix less than half.



My advice is to just get rid of Fedora and use another distribution.



Same as it has been for a while now, especially if you want to run KDE.



IBM threw KDE out of RHEL years ago and doesn’t care if it works right or not, and the people maintaining KDE in Fedora are Windows and Mac fanboys, using Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari.



When I tried Fedora with KDE and couldn’t get it to log out and log back in, one of them told me that they only used it on Parallels Mac, which is a PC emulator.



Not actual hardware.



SG-1



When these people say they have “full confidence” in Wayland’s ability to replace X11 on Fedora 40 KDE, you need to take it for exactly what that’s worth.



My advice is just install a distribution where it supports X11 now, the next few releases almost certainly will, and every release is supported for quite a while.



It’s possible that Wayland will be “inevitable”, but based on what I’ve seen you want as many trouble-free years with X11 as you can get, so that maybe some of these Wayland problems actually get fixed before X11 is removed from the software itself.



Fedora 40 doesn’t have to be the future of “Linux” distributions.



If they’re getting this annoyed by having to have an X11 session that the users know to use if they don’t want their desktop to crash and burn all the time, consider that they might just give up and drop all the desktop environments that haven’t been ported to Wayland at all.



At some point, I would say, they’re going to give up and only have two desktops left in Fedora.



Then maybe just GNOME after that.



After all, with IBM “getting tired of compiling Webkit“, and LibreOffice, and dozens of other small packages that desktop users need, in general, why should entire desktop environments be spared?



Fedora is being “cleaned out” to only the rafters. That is to say, only the parts that IBM sees monetary returns on.



“Beat it, Freeloaders!”

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