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.
On the one hand that means future Kubuntus (for a while) won’t have remote desktop, remote UI commands, global hotkeys, nor other such useful features. Or, heck, won’t have accessibility. On the other hand, from the progress I’ve seen KDE are among the better positioned to change that, so who knows. Prepping for a Kubuntu LTS?
On the third hand, it’s still Ubuntu. The Wayland fixes are probably going to be shipped as snaps for the Pro version.
the problem now is that while kde and gnome do have most of those things on wayland, it’s all bespoke. there are no universal wayland remote desktop systems or accessibility pushes, just “the gnome one” and “the kde one”.
Gotta love that about FOSS communities. Every time someone tries to do something interesting, we burn them at the stake. It’s a classic of the Mozilla fandom, for example.
That has always been my main criticism about wayland: it’s actually vaporware.
It’s just a spec (and not even a complete one) that says “now, you go do our work and implement all this”. So everyone has to go and do their own thing, which is the usual big corpo strategy to kill small corpo and/or FOSS. So I wonder why don’t people see it. Pulseaudio, wayland, systemd, all came in at about the same time as the “microsoftism” infection in Linux development.
From what I recall, for the first 5-or-so years there was not even a reference implementation (and I don’t know if that is still the case, but do would expect it is).
I don’t see how Wayland could be “antifoss.” It is literally controlled by the major desktops. For smaller projects there are libraries that do the heavy lifting.
The major benefit is that the performance us much better since you don’t have a bloated display server that has decades worth of bad code.
Not a great experience but it does work. Honestly I don’t know why it exists at this point. It is holding back Wayland in a lot of cases and they are sluggish to implement anything.
On the one hand that means future Kubuntus (for a while) won’t have remote desktop, remote UI commands, global hotkeys, nor other such useful features. Or, heck, won’t have accessibility. On the other hand, from the progress I’ve seen KDE are among the better positioned to change that, so who knows. Prepping for a Kubuntu LTS?
On the third hand, it’s still Ubuntu. The Wayland fixes are probably going to be shipped as snaps for the Pro version.@lambalicious @tonytins KBUNTU will, KDE is NOT eliminating X.
the problem now is that while kde and gnome do have most of those things on wayland, it’s all bespoke. there are no universal wayland remote desktop systems or accessibility pushes, just “the gnome one” and “the kde one”.
it’s fragmenting the desktop.
Unfortunately, that’s by design. Mir was the display server that tried to combat that exact problem, and we burned it at the stake.
Gotta love that about FOSS communities. Every time someone tries to do something interesting, we burn them at the stake. It’s a classic of the Mozilla fandom, for example.
Ironically, everyone hated it because they thought it would cause fragmentation.
What we need is a remote session API
I don’t see that happening though
That has always been my main criticism about wayland: it’s actually vaporware.
It’s just a spec (and not even a complete one) that says “now, you go do our work and implement all this”. So everyone has to go and do their own thing, which is the usual big corpo strategy to kill small corpo and/or FOSS. So I wonder why don’t people see it. Pulseaudio, wayland, systemd, all came in at about the same time as the “microsoftism” infection in Linux development.
From what I recall, for the first 5-or-so years there was not even a reference implementation (and I don’t know if that is still the case, but do would expect it is).
I don’t see how Wayland could be “antifoss.” It is literally controlled by the major desktops. For smaller projects there are libraries that do the heavy lifting.
The major benefit is that the performance us much better since you don’t have a bloated display server that has decades worth of bad code.
i think weston is the reference implementation, but i don’t know if it’s usable
It is “usable”
Not a great experience but it does work. Honestly I don’t know why it exists at this point. It is holding back Wayland in a lot of cases and they are sluggish to implement anything.
KDE already has remote desktop and global shortcuts implemented. It’s applications that are lacking proper Wayland support.
The remote desktop is only RDP and VNC with the built in server.
There is no API for easily starting or managing a desktop session
KDE does have remote desktop support
This is going to be an interesting shake up, to say the least.