Kubuntu 25.10 will not ship with an X11 desktop session on its ISO, following Ubuntu's lead. An X11 Plasma session will remain available for manual install.
25% of users sticking with X11 is a very significant amount. which roughly means wayland does not account for the needs of a quarter of its (hostilely taken over, now) userbase
Those users can stick with the last version of KDE or GNOME that supports X11. They’re insisting on using unmaintained software already, so it shouldn’t be much of a leap to do the same with the DE.
It’s really not fair to demand that people building your DE for free maintain two vastly different rendering stacks when they clearly don’t want to.
the word insisting shows your arrogance. Insisting on something implies one has a choice. Those who are sticking with X11 are doing so because wayland just does not do what they need.
If it’s not insisting, it’s demanding, which is worse.
There are many tools now that replace X11 behavior. If Wayland doesn’t “do what they need”, at this point there’s a strong chance they have not put in any effort into making it work for them.
For desktop forwarding there’s waypipe.
For tablet users, KDE (And probably gnome) have pretty good tablet support at this point.
For artists, KDE JUST got much better color calibration and HDR support.
For gamers, WINE now has an experimental Wayland-native mode, and barring that we have Gamescope to make it behave semi-native (so this one is more of a future-ish solution that you can use now).
Screen recording mostly just works with pipewire and almost everything supports it now including Discord.
25% of users sticking with X11 is a very significant amount. which roughly means wayland does not account for the needs of a quarter of its (hostilely taken over, now) userbase
Hostile takeover is not the correct term here
Those users can stick with the last version of KDE or GNOME that supports X11. They’re insisting on using unmaintained software already, so it shouldn’t be much of a leap to do the same with the DE.
It’s really not fair to demand that people building your DE for free maintain two vastly different rendering stacks when they clearly don’t want to.
is it really “insisting” when there is no alternative for your use case?
That’s the thing though, there are alternatives now. They just take more discovery and setup time than most are used to.
the word insisting shows your arrogance. Insisting on something implies one has a choice. Those who are sticking with X11 are doing so because wayland just does not do what they need.
If it’s not insisting, it’s demanding, which is worse.
There are many tools now that replace X11 behavior. If Wayland doesn’t “do what they need”, at this point there’s a strong chance they have not put in any effort into making it work for them.
For desktop forwarding there’s
waypipe.For tablet users, KDE (And probably gnome) have pretty good tablet support at this point.
For artists, KDE JUST got much better color calibration and HDR support.
For gamers, WINE now has an experimental Wayland-native mode, and barring that we have Gamescope to make it behave semi-native (so this one is more of a future-ish solution that you can use now).
Screen recording mostly just works with
pipewireand almost everything supports it now including Discord.Etc.
Not factoring in distros that haven’t switched the default like steamos