David Edmundson is a longtime KDE developer who writes about Plasma, Wayland, login management, and Qt.
Commenters regard him as a veteran KDE developer and link his posts on the Plasma login manager, Wayland, and KDE Store security.
> So what was the screenshot feature of X11?
In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.
> Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?
I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (which were the first to support such mechanisms, some of them even using more direct DE-specific private protocols instead of XDG Portals).
But I spent a few seconds googling for general screenshot apps, found Flameshot (which makes sense as a cross-platform app), and it turns out that support for the XDG Portal approach was added to it almost 5 years ago:
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/1272
And if you peek around the diff, you can tell that KDE/GNOME-specific support, on Wayland - using DBus but not the XDG Portals protocol - already existed, in early 2021, in fact...
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/commit/a5df852268ed935b3ca6f265308d3c3d082218bd
That's the commit that added KDE/GNOME-specific Wayland screenshot support.
8 years ago, in a 3rd-party app!
> Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?
I'd forgotten that this happened, but for screensharing from a X11 client, someone already went…
Global themes and widgets created by 3rd party developers for Plasma can and will run arbitrary code, That's how the do what they do. You are encouraged to exercise extreme caution when using these products.
Global themes do not only change the look of Plasma, but also the behavior. To do this they run code, and this code can be faulty, as in the case mentioned above. The code was not malicious, by the way, just wrong. The same goes for widgets and plasmoids.
We are already calling on the community to help us locate and quarantine defective software by using the "Report" buttons available on each item in the KDE Store.
Meanwhile, KDE is taking measures to properly warn users before each download and we are also putting in place ways of auditing and curating what is uploaded to the KDE store.
https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/kde-store-content/
Nevertheless, this will take time and resources. We recommend all users to be careful when installing and running software not provided directly by KDE or your distros.
And remember to report any faulty products you find!
By the way - David refused to publish the source for the
image he showed, aka "nobody uses x11 anymore".
This reminds me of the systemd folks - they also don't
allow for discussions yet alone cite anything related
to their claims. They just claim. If the earth is flat,
they don't need evidence. Their word must be enough.
It is this image:
http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/graph-1024x683.png
David claims "internal metrics", but he also does not explain how those metrics were gained, is there bias in how they were gained, which time span and so forth.
I am not saying he is fabricating the graph, though this could be the case too. What I am asking for is to show (ALL of) the data and explain the graph and data. Otherwise this is simple propaganda, with a pre-set goal to cover-my-ass (aka explain why KDE devs try to eradicate all xorg users).
By the way, next step, as you guys may know: systemd-only. Both David and Nate also announced this before. I wonder if there are financial kickbacks.
I am really curious but do not have the time to check this myself: is the vscode telemetry part of the open core bit? The reason I ask this is because I agree with your points and I usually allow telemetry for FOSS programs (for example [1]).
If the telemetry code is open and people can verify that there isn't any identifiable data that is being collected, I don't see any issue with leaving it on in vscode too.
[1] https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/what-we-can-learn-from-plasma-telemetry/
That's a workaround, not a a fix and might break applications which legitimately need more time to stop!
A proper fix is to integrate startup and shutdown of all applications with systemd. That's something not properly supported everywhere yet. For example for KDE that's currently in the works: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/plasma-and-the-systemd-startup/
Regarding your point 5: Application developers embrace systemd (and thereby reject portability to some extent) because it makes it easier for them to not do infrastructure work. A description of that phenomenon in KDE can be read here:
http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/systemd-and-plasma