Comment by account42

10 days ago

Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that.

And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.

3 comments

account42

simoncion 10 days ago

> Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream...

IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]:

  There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.
  
  This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.

I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts.

Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE.

[0] <https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...>

account42 10 days ago
That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest. If you can't run full KDE on X11 there will not be many KDE developers caring about X11 support. KWin for example has already gained many bugs on X11 that I expect to never be fixed. And now KWin for X11 is split into a separate project which will hopefully mean fewer further regressions but probably also not much further development which means bitrot as things around it change.
- simoncion 10 days ago
  
  > That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest.
  Given this statement from the announcement that I linked to previously
  The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027. We cannot provide a specific date, as we’re exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.
  I expect that I will get at least a year's notice before they stop actively working on the rest of the parts of KDE that interact with X11... whenever that ends up being. A year is more than enough time to find replacements for things that might eventually stop working one day.
  Were I sixteen, I'd be very excited to preemptively move to something else. Now? The folks who work on it say that they'll keep it working for the forseeable future, and their behavior suggests that I'll get ample notice before they stop working on it.
  The software in question works now (AFAICT) and will continue to work for quite a while. I am likely to get a significant amount of warning before they stop working on the software. I see no reason to switch. I have much better things to do with my time.