KDE Blogs

> Here is all of the stuff, filtered through Wikipedia's editorial process that is intended to eliminate unfounded personal opinion, stuff from unidentifiable sources, nonsense, and bias. Look, it isn't a hate parade; therefore there is no hate parade as M. Shuttleworth claimed.

Actually, that Wikipedia link is not meant as evidence against Shutterworth's comments or in defense of my own. It's provided merely as context to those who are just now hearing about this situation.

No, my comment regarding the lack of a hate parade is supported only by common sense. A position easily taken once one digs a bit deeper into this subject. You should click through some of the actual references mentioned in (and outside of) that Wikipedia article:

Matthew Garrett's comments,
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

Bradley Kuhn's comments,
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html

Jonathan Riddell's comments,
https://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/26/kubuntu-wont-be-switching-mir-or-xmir

Aaron Seigo's comments,
https://plus.google.com/+AaronSeigo/posts/76Nd9RSTZWp

Then, tell me if these opinions or the community comments they generated actually seem hateful.

In fact, the only substantial hate generated by this debacle was really in response to Canonical's unfounded swipe at Wayland, which was later retracted, and Shutterworth branding of opponents as "The Open Source Tea Party". And even that level of grandstanding only generated a modicum of hate from the community in…

> Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream...

IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]:

There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.

This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.

I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts.

Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE.

[0] <https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/>

Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to.

> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.

Yeah, support for custom DPI in general isn't great. I've been using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.html for years to at least partially help.

Edit: I think I answered my own question about how recent the change might have been: https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-fractional-scaling/

This seems to be just after I last tried. I'll give it another go, thanks BatteryMountain!

It did not get far in market share, sure, but it never stopped going like Big Screen did and made the transition to 6 at the same time as Plasma Desktop.

Here are some recent developments:

1. https://plasma-mobile.org/2025/07/08/releases-25-07/ (also explaining that most software is part of 'Plasma Gear', which makes sense as it is software for both mobile and desktop, but has the downside of making Mobile less visible)

2. https://blogs.kde.org/2025/07/05/this-week-in-plasma-chugging-along/ and look for Plasma Keyboard in this post. (Personally I am a bit sad that they are seemingly abandoning Maliit, which is also used in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch and is IMHO fine, but hey, at least it shows that Mobile is not dead.)

GNOME 2 was perfect. I use the spiritual sucessor MATE wherever it’s possible. It’s not perfect and arguably “boring” but there is really something to it https://mate-desktop.org/

On a side note a similar project exist for KDE 3. Trinity Desktop https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

And on a second mildly related side note: /r/linux had a thread about a modern (2009) OpenSuse spin with KDE 2 a few months ago. It was released as an april’s fools joke but the ISO file totally disappeared from the internet. Or at least the sub couldn’t find it (and the archive.org mirror is corrupted) https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-brings-back-desktop-functionality Maybe someone here have it? :)

On the KDE side, Wayland has been going pretty well. Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-transfer-progress-graphs/#plasma-640-3

For me the real conundrum was SwayWM vs KDE Wayland rather than any X.org session; I really felt like SwayWM was a good upgrade from i3wm and gave me a better desktop session with much less hacks. Hope to see wlroots push forward and support some of the newer Wayland protocols, it has started to fall behind a little bit, but I think it's good for alternative desktops.