Nate Graham

If KDE and GNOME are stuck, it's not because they can't innovate with their UIs enough with traditional ways of interacting with a computer. In fact, I don't think innovating in a way that doesn't involve new ways to interact (such as VR/AR) is very desirable to most users.

The truth is, most people don't want to install operating systems, even if they're free and easier to install than Windows. The only way to go further is to ship with hardware and for that combination of hardware and software to be in demand. On top of that, when the operating system/desktop environment has reached a decent baseline of general usability like KDE Plasma and GNOME have, the software ecosystem around the OS/DE is more of a limiting factor than the UIs of the OS/DE.

The fact that System 76 sells laptops could actually give their DE a significant advantage over other small DEs if they ship their own DE. It's unlikely to overtake KDE and GNOME since System 76 doesn't sell tons of laptops like Dell or other big hardware companies, but I guess never say never.

I don't expect instant world domination, but I hope the Steam Deck (which will ship KDE Plasma for its desktop mode) will greatly boost the popularity and developer community of KDE. With success, there is a chance at a snowball effect where new users who enjoy the product contribute and bring attention, which brings more new users, etc. All things considered, the share of people using the Steam Deck isn't going to be that big compared…

Mid-august we had to vote on new KDE goals (I suppose I received the invitation to vote because I contributed a few bugfixes and features to some KDE projects). We had to chose and sort by priority six goals among these choices:

— Enhancing control and automation: integrate KDE Plasma (and apps) with Smart Home Ecosystems

— Freedom through Better Data and Workflow Organization and Management

— KDE Needs You! - Formalise and boost KDE's processes for recruiting active contributors

— KDE-based Text Snippet Expansion

— Sandbox all the things!

— Plasma - A Beacon for Open Design

— Refining and Enriching KDE: Empowering Users with Convenient and Intuitive Features

— Streamlined Application Development Experience

— Unify the Plasma experience

— We care about your Input

I'm quite glad that the three goals which won the vote and thus are being prioritized are the "meta" goals. I see those as strategic investments that will ensure the other goals can then be accomplished, in the same vein as the recent news that KDE will starting asking for donations directly in Plasma through a once-a-year notification [1]. It's great that KDE is taking care of KDE itself so that it will be able to take an even better care of all the projects that it hosts (starting with the Plasma desktop environment, but not only).

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/

Honestly, I was never convinced that concentrating all developer effort onto Wayland was the best idea. Wayland seemed like a massive over-correction from X11, where the protocol and core were "simple" in comparison to X11 which did everything. Being simple, by itself, is not a virtue -- Wayland basically forced all the essential complexity of the problem to the compositors (a la Waterbed theory of Complexity [1]). Given there are so many compositor implementations, they essentially end up reinventing the wheels all the time. This is a bit better now with wlroots, but unfortunately, the ecosystem is already fragmented. I'm not saying X11 is superior to Wayland or vice-versa, but frankly I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland.

I would highly recommend reading through some of these blog posts who expound upon the problems of Wayland more eloquently than I can [2,3,4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

[2]: https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

[3]: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-thing/

[4]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnicalMeritsIrrelevant

I'm sorry to raise your blood pressure (;p), but this laptop (bought over 3 years ago) hasn't seen anything else other than KDE Plasma, the first couple of months with X, but with Wayland since then. I have seen none of the issues you've listed, nor did I notice any performance or battery life degradation with the switch, quite the opposite -- while the battery life seemed to have remaining pretty much the same, performance (specially with multi-monitor setups) is much better. My laptop also has dual GPUs (discrete Nvidia and integrated Intel) and I notice no differences between running with nvidia completely turned off and in optimus hybrid mode.

My only issue is, ironically enough, also with multi-monitor setups, where the layout and main monitor selection seems unstable and sometimes changes when waking up from sleep. I've been following KDE's development (through Nate's incredible blog[0]) and I'm pretty sure these problems have been fixed with the new 6.0 release.

But yeah, you seem to be particularly affected by bugs, sorry for the experience. What Nvidia card do you have? And driver versions?

[0]: https://pointieststick.com

this bit is a no-go for me. they've decided what goes in the immutable base os and allowed a set of kde apps citing subpar experience flatpak versions. I'm guessing they haven't tested all flatpak apps as they tested their apps.

"Well, we’re kind of cheating a bit here. A couple KDE apps are shipped as Flatpaks, and the rest you download using Discover will be Flatpack’d as well, but we do ship Dolphin, Konsole, Ark, Spectacle, Discover, Info Center, System Settings, and some other System-level apps on the base image, rather than as Flatpaks.

The truth is, Flatpak is currently a pretty poor technology for system-level apps that want deep integration with the base system. We tried Dolphin and Konsole as Flatpaks for a while, but the user experience was just terrible."

https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-release-of-kde-linux/

> to disprove a claim made by uninformed people

KDE developer wrote recently:

> X11 isn’t able to perform up to the standards of what people expect today with respect to .., 10 bits-per-color monitors,.. multi-monitor setups (especially with mixed DPIs or refresh rates),... [1]

Multi-monitor setups are working since 20+ years. 10 bits are also supported (otherwise how would the PRO versions of graphic cards support this feature).

> chose to put its energy into bringing it all together in

I cannot recall, was there any paper analyzing why working and almost working X11 features do not fit, few additional X11 extensions cannot be proposed anymore and another solution from scratch is inevitable. What is a significant difference of a X11 and a wayland protocol extension.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/