Hello Kde maintainers:
I have the following questions to confirm with you. Looking forward to
your reply.

For Debian 13 release, in the KDE Plasma 6 version:
Will Wayland be set as the default display protocol?
Is the Xorg display protocol supported (users can set xorg as default
display protocol themselves)?
After setting the display protocol to Xorg in the sddm login screen, is
it possible for a kde application to cross-call the Wayland interface?

For the next Debian 14 release:
Is the Wayland display protocol supported by default?
Is the Xorg display protocol retained, or is the xorg display protocol
removed?

Best regards,
Dandan Zhang

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Le 21 juillet 2025 12:15:47 GMT+02:00, zhangdandan <zhangdandan@loongson.cn> a écrit :

Hello Kde maintainers:

Hi Dandan,

these are interesting questions you are asking. Most of these should be answered in the Debian KDE wiki article [1] but are unfortunately currently not or with outdated answers.
Hopefully I'll find the time to update this for the Trixie release but really, anyone feel free to beat me to it. 🙂

So let me answer here.

I have the following questions to confirm with you. Looking forward to your reply.

For Debian 13 release, in the KDE Plasma 6 version:
Will Wayland be set as the default display protocol?

Yes, as was the case for Debian 12 / bookworm.

Is the Xorg display protocol supported (users can set xorg as default display protocol themselves)?

Yes, you can choose between Plasma (Wayland) and Plasma (X11) sessions on the SDDM login screen (or any display manager) from a default Plasma install of Debian 13.

After setting the display protocol to Xorg in the sddm login screen, is it possible for a kde application to cross-call the Wayland interface?

Not that I know of. But it doesn't matter because :
- as far as I'm concerned the Wayland session has been the better option for a while now. It already has much better scaling, refresh rate, color management and multi-screen support than the X11 session. Upstream KDE is transparently tracking the
remaining issues / lacking features with Wayland at [2].
- it shouldn't be needed because at least for those using a toolkit like Qt or GTK the apps will detect if they're running in a Wayland session and will fall back to their X11 implementation if needed. I haven't particularly looked at it but I'm not
aware of any prominent app that would be wayland-only so far.

For the next Debian 14 release:
Is the Wayland display protocol supported by default?
Is the Xorg display protocol retained, or is the xorg display protocol removed?

Future will tell, stay posted. 🙂
Debian 13 is just about to be released and 14 is years away.

We Debian follow where upstream KDE goes with this. One of KDE's leads, Nate Graham, has recently posted an overview of where we stand, what's left to do and some possible evolutions, you may want to have a look at his blog post [3].

TLDR is yes Xorg is on its way out and at some point the X11 session will go. To the best of my knowledge Wayland was created and is maintained by former Xorg developers and they are nearly exclusively working on the Wayland stack these days since the Xorg protocol cannot be made to support our current features and security
requirements.
And it doesn't matter because xwayland supports running X11 apps in a Wayland session and there is no plan to drop it.

The most useful thing to do by now is testing your workflows and applications in a Wayland session to ensure that upstream projects are aware of any remaining issues and can fix them until Xorg inevitably goes away.


[1] <https://wiki.debian.org/KDE>
[2] <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues>
[3] <https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/>


Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien

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Jul 21, 2025, 08:06 by libre@coucouf.fr:

these are interesting questions you are asking. Most of these should be answered in the Debian KDE wiki article [1] but are unfortunately currently not or with outdated answers.
Hopefully I'll find the time to update this for the Trixie release but really, anyone feel free to beat me to it. 🙂

I took a swing at updating https://wiki.debian.org/KDE . I'm grateful for feedback. I removed a lot of the "experimental" and "new technology" warnings, as it appears that it's all been mainlined.

I struggled with updating the version information on KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma and KDE Gear. I went off the package versions I could find, but I couldn't quite decipher the quirks in the numbering, so I probably made mistakes.

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Hi Aurélien,

Thanks for your timely reply. Your answer is very detailed and useful
for me.
Let us stay posted. Thanks again.

Dandan

在 2025/7/21 下午7:50, Aurélien COUDERC 写道:

Le 21 juillet 2025 12:15:47 GMT+02:00, zhangdandan <zhangdandan@loongson.cn> a écrit :

Hello Kde maintainers:

Hi Dandan,

these are interesting questions you are asking. Most of these should be answered in the Debian KDE wiki article [1] but are unfortunately currently not or with outdated answers.
Hopefully I'll find the time to update this for the Trixie release but really, anyone feel free to beat me to it. 🙂

So let me answer here.

I have the following questions to confirm with you. Looking forward to your reply.

For Debian 13 release, in the KDE Plasma 6 version:
Will Wayland be set as the default display protocol?

Yes, as was the case for Debian 12 / bookworm.

Is the Xorg display protocol supported (users can set xorg as default display protocol themselves)?

Yes, you can choose between Plasma (Wayland) and Plasma (X11) sessions on the SDDM login screen (or any display manager) from a default Plasma install of Debian 13.

After setting the display protocol to Xorg in the sddm login screen, is it possible for a kde application to cross-call the Wayland interface?

Not that I know of. But it doesn't matter because :
- as far as I'm concerned the Wayland session has been the better option for a while now. It already has much better scaling, refresh rate, color management and multi-screen support than the X11 session. Upstream KDE is transparently tracking the

remaining issues / lacking features with Wayland at [2].

- it shouldn't be needed because at least for those using a toolkit like Qt or GTK the apps will detect if they're running in a Wayland session and will fall back to their X11 implementation if needed. I haven't particularly looked at it but I'm not

aware of any prominent app that would be wayland-only so far.

For the next Debian 14 release:
Is the Wayland display protocol supported by default?
Is the Xorg display protocol retained, or is the xorg display protocol removed?

Future will tell, stay posted. 🙂
Debian 13 is just about to be released and 14 is years away.

We Debian follow where upstream KDE goes with this. One of KDE's leads, Nate Graham, has recently posted an overview of where we stand, what's left to do and some possible evolutions, you may want to have a look at his blog post [3].

TLDR is yes Xorg is on its way out and at some point the X11 session will go. To the best of my knowledge Wayland was created and is maintained by former Xorg developers and they are nearly exclusively working on the Wayland stack these days since the Xorg protocol cannot be made to support our current features and security

requirements.

And it doesn't matter because xwayland supports running X11 apps in a Wayland session and there is no plan to drop it.

The most useful thing to do by now is testing your workflows and applications in a Wayland session to ensure that upstream projects are aware of any remaining issues and can fix them until Xorg inevitably goes away.

[1] <https://wiki.debian.org/KDE>
[2] <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues>
[3] <https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/>

Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien

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Le 21 juillet 2025 19:53:40 GMT+02:00, Borden <borden_c@tutanota.com> a écrit :

I took a swing at updating https://wiki.debian.org/KDE . I'm grateful for feedback. I removed a lot of the "experimental" and "new technology" warnings, as it appears that it's all been mainlined.

Wow that was fast, thank you ! 🙂

I struggled with updating the version information on KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma and KDE Gear. I went off the package versions I could find, but I couldn't quite decipher the quirks in the numbering, so I probably made mistakes.

I've fixed what needed to, and removed the third numbers / patch number of the version to make it simple.

It looks much better now.

One remaining thing that would need a rewrite is the paragraph about simple / double click. The new default is double click for Trixie and people preferring simple can change it. It's available both on the welcome page of system settings and also in
another more specific page which I don't have the name of in mind.


Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien

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22 Jul 2025, 08:12 by libre@coucouf.fr:

I struggled with updating the version information on KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma and KDE Gear. I went off the package versions I could find, but I couldn't quite decipher the quirks in the numbering, so I probably made mistakes.

I'm grateful for that help. Thank you!

One remaining thing that would need a rewrite is the paragraph about simple / double click. The new default is double click for Trixie and people preferring simple can change it. It's available both on the welcome page of system settings and also in

another more specific page which I don't have the name of in mind.

I removed this bit entirely because this doesn't appear to be a Debian-specific quirk. Besides, it's the first thing you see when you open System Settings, so it shouldn't be hard to find. Therefore, upstream documentation should be more than able to
cover this.

By that logic, are there other troubleshooting sections that are outdated and/or redundant? Contrary to my edit comment, I didn't delete the colour profiles section. I think the only ones worth keeping are the instructions to reset Plasma's settings, GTK
theming conflicts and maybe enabling Baloo - if Debian goes out of its way to disable it?

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