Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

Posted by jandeboevrie 4 hours ago

Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release(blog.davidedmundson.co.uk)

73 points | 67 commentspage 2

gjvc 1 hour ago|

until the next one

startpage_com 2 hours ago||

So long KDE. Xlibre for life.

superkuh 2 hours ago||

This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support.

I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.

novafunc 4 minutes ago||

> here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland

I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight

creesch 1 hour ago||

> There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all

Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago.

I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time.

Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes.

There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each.

I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.

calvinmorrison 2 hours ago||

Trinity Desktop supports X11. If you liked KDE3.5 you might like Trinity.

Good bye KDE. Good bye Red Hat. We're doin our own thang now.

rid 1 hour ago||

My concern is that KRdp still doesn’t feel ready to replace the mature X11 remote desktop options. In VM/headless setups, the X11 stack is ugly but predictable, you can run Xvfb, VNC/Selkies/xrdp & control resolution pretty easily.

KRdp on Plasma/Wayland is still much more fragile. It depends on a logged-in Plasma session, has rough edges around unattended access, session startup, reconnection, display sizing, authentication/cert handling, and general automation. Those are exactly the things cloud desktops and disposable VM images need to be boringly reliable.

I’m not against deprecating X11 long term, but deprecating it before KRdp is a solid replacement leaves server/VM/remote-desktop users in a bad spot, hopefully now the team can focus solely on Wayland, KRdp will receive some much needed love.

jccx70 2 hours ago||

[dead]

calvinmorrison 2 hours ago||

"We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. "

What is with KDE and releasing broken software? What's the rush to release when there are known issues?

shevy-java 2 hours ago|

Good old David - he loves systemd. No wonder he does not like X11.

Oldschool KDE devs were better. Today's generation of David or Nate, are just killing KDE off. But no worries, on their blog they'll continue how everything is great. It is so great that they need a donation-widget to keep on pestering people to donate. So now you can pay for them ruining the legacy here.

segbrk 2 hours ago||

Funny, my impression of KDE in the 3 and 4 eras was “Wow, this is shiny and sleek— oh, and it crashed. Nevermind.” Nowadays there is nothing I would recommend more to the average user who just wants something normal that works. It just works. What you’re saying just sounds like a pointlessly personal and ideological attack. Against a piece of software. Why?

ahartmetz 2 hours ago|||

I don't really like Systemd neither - but Wayland and Systemd are pretty much opposites of each other. Systemd does (too) many things, many of them badly. Wayland does well what it does, but it (still!) does too little. Wayland is adding features and is pretty close to doing "everything necessary". Systemd keeps accreting worse replacements for existing services.

vkazanov 2 hours ago||

I dont know when where these "good old days" but in 2000s KDE was superunstable. It seemed to have all the cool UI tweaks but 30% of them barely worked.

Modern KDE is nothing like that, and i cannot see how this is a bad thing.