In addition to today’s blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition “nears completion” as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027.
Headlining the KDE highlights for 2025 by Nate Graham was the work on the Wayland transition. This year saw Wayland work around HDR / color management, P010 video color support, better drawing tablets, improved accessibility, overlay planes, RandR emulation, screen mirroring, support for custom modes, pre-authorization for portal-based permissions, clipboard and USB portals, and support for a variety of newer Wayland protocols. Wayland’s xdg-toplevel-tag, color-representation, fio, xx_pip, and other protocols were implemented this year
I came in here expecting to see a bunch of Wayland hating. Happy to be wrong.
I think a fair number of the “Wayland haters” upgraded to KDE on Debian 13 and found out that things had gotten better in the years since Debian 12 was released. Or their Debian-based distro did the same.
As the percentage of Wayland users goes above 75%, it gets harder to trash Wayland as, instead of people coming to agree with you, the majority of the comments support Wayland instead.
We are in the final transition where an increasing number of users have never used Xorg at all. Pretty much the only “new” Xorg users coming to desktop Linux these days are via Linux Mint. Once it goes Wayland, Xorg use in Linux will likely drop below 10%. XFCE is the other “big” X11 DE but it is already defaulting to Wayland on some distros.
We already have our first Wayland-only DE, COSMIC, and GNOME and KDE are not far behind. Despite it lagging, I do not think Cinnamon will keep x11 long after they switch.
There are some new places for x11 fans to go though. There is XLibre of course. And now there are Wayback and Phoenix. So people do not have to complain as loudly that they are being “forced” onto Wayland as Xorg development slows to a crawl. Both Phoenix and Wayback use the kernel DRM and KMS and so they are much smaller and easier to build and ship even if distros drop Xorg. Phoenix may even run Wayland apps. So if you love some x11 wm, it looks like you will be able to keep it around a bit longer.
I got so lucky, a while ago, I used to stream on twitch and make videos on YT, and I needed to upgrade my gpu from an Rtx 2060 since I had no vram for video editing. Ultimately I went with a Radeon ex 7800xt, because it had/(still has?) a really good price:performance ration. A few months later, I switched to Linux and learned how much better and was for it. I have genuinely had no problems with Wayland and I’m so happy about it
Sadly I have a macro keyboard for my OBS hotkeys but on KDE I have to focus on the OBS for them to work and that kill the whole purpose.
Unless there’s a way to make them work without losing focus of my game window.
Yes, you dodged a bullet for sure, and the 7800 should age well.
That being said, I think the RTX 2060 is new enough to have fewer Linux issues, and simply having DLSS means it would have aged quite well too.
Yep! I actually ended up putting it in my server for media transcoding in jellyfin and it works pretty damn well. I’ve had a few hiccups with the drivers not loading after kernel updates, so I made a script that runs every boot to check if the drivers are there, and if not, to reinstall/rebuild them and reboot up to 5 times. If, after 5 times, it doesn’t work. It stops rebooting so I can try to manually fix it.
Heh. Sounds like you basically invented dkms?
If your distro doesn’t ship Nvidia drivers in sync with (and built against) your kernel, you’re supposed to install dkms versions that rebuild the driver automatically after every kernel/driver update. Not that this is obvious or anything, it took me a while to figure it out.
What distro are you using?
I’m on fedora linux! I’ve heard of dkms but have never looked into it in the slightest
Ah yeah Fedora does not support Nvidia. But third party repos should have a dkms version of the driver you should install instead.
On distros that do support Nvidia, the Nvidia driver is always paired to the kernel they provide, updating together.
Otherwise you literally do have to rebuild it every time. That’s what dkms automates, heh.
I really appreciate Wayland and how much progress was made in the past year
I’ve been using Plasma 6 for a while now on Wayland and it’s been just about perfect. Really appreciate the KDE team!
Wayland is one of the reasons I picked fedora/plasma
