Wayland by Default for KDE Plasma Desktop

Summary

Change the default session selection in SDDM to prefer the Wayland-based KDE Plasma Desktop session over the X11-based one.

Owner

Name: Neal Gompa, Rex Dieter
Email: ngompa13@gmail.com, rdieter@gmail.com
Product: KDE Spin
Responsible WG: KDE SIG

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 34
Last updated: 2020-09-06
FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

With KDE Plasma 5.20, the KDE Plasma desktop environment has reached a point where nearly all commonly used features in the desktop and all major applications function in the Plasma Wayland environment on all major GPUs (including NVIDIA with the proprietary driver). Starting with Plasma 5.20 in Fedora 34, we will change the default configuration for Wayland and X11 Plasma sessions so that Wayland is preferred and used by default, while permitting the X11 session to be selected as the alternative desktop environment option.

Feedback

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora has long been a leader in advancing the adoption of the Wayland protocol as part of the overall strategy to improve the Linux graphical software stack. Much of the quality of Wayland for GNOME can be attributed to the work done by the Fedora Workstation WG as part of advancing the GNOME platform. It is now the KDE SIG's turn to do the same for the KDE platform. By making this change, we are helping push the adoption forward for newer, more streamlined, and overall more actively developed graphics technology for the KDE ecosystem.

Scope

Proposal owners:

 * Modify plasma-workspace to switch to Wayland
   1. Rename /usr/share/xsessions/plasma.desktop to /usr/share/xsessions/plasma-xorg.desktop and subpackage it out as plasma-workspace-xorg
   2. Rename /usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasmawayland.desktop to /usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasma.desktop
   3. Make plasma-workspace require plasma-workspace-wayland and recommend plasma-workspace-xorg
 * Modify @kde-desktop comps group for Fedora 34 to include plasma-workspace-xorg for the media.

Other developers: N/A (not applicable for this Change)

Release engineering: #9741

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Alignment with Objectives: N/A (not applicable for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Systems using certain (very old) graphics hardware or graphics drivers (matrox, etc.) may have problems running the Wayland session. In these (rare) cases, users may have to configure SDDM to use X11.

How To Test

Log into a KDE Plasma desktop. Do any activity you would normally do in your daily desktop use: launching applications, configuring displays, etc. Things should work the same way under Wayland as they used to under X.

User Experience

The user experience should not change noticeably.

Dependencies

This mainly affects the plasma-workspace package, and the details of what changes there are described in the Scope section.

Contingency Plan

Contingency mechanism: Revert the file renames and switch plasma-workspace-xorg to be the required package instead of plasma-workspace-wayland
Contingency deadline: beta freeze
Blocks release? Yes
Blocks product? KDE Spin

Documentation

Some upstream documents about Wayland

There is currently no coherent up to date documentation about Plasma Wayland.

Release Notes

The KDE Plasma Desktop is using the Wayland display system now. X applications will continue to run transparently through XWayland.

Search

Changes/WaylandByDefaultForPlasma

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