The upcoming release of Fedora 34 operating system plans to default to Wayland display server in KDE Plasma spin.
This is going to be a big change considering a huge list of Wayland improvements and fixes landing in KDE Plasma 5.20.
Don’t worry, the X11 server continues to stay, it’s just the default will be as Wayland. Just like, Fedora already made Wayland default for the GNOME desktop environment.
Is Wayland ready?
Quoting the announcement –
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.
Fedora team
Wayland itself doesn’t work properly in many areas with specific applications – are one of those issues that users complain about. However, KDE plasma 5.20 is a huge release and currently under development. And it is specifically fixing major Wayland issues such as middle click-paste, screencasting problem in Wayland, some screenshot app like shutter doesn’t work in Wayland, and so on.
Although all these are improvement and fixed, the major applications are still to make changes to take advantage of the Wayland tech such as LibreOffice, etc. But these applications will work anyway as usual as it does in the X11 server without any issues.
For those who use NVIDIA GPU – good news for you. The KDE Plasma 5.20 on Wayland will work with NVIDIA GPUs with proprietary drivers. The team introduced a package kwin-wayland-nvidia which takes care of this and it needs to be manually activated though.
The X11 display server continues to stay as well in Fedora. Because other desktop environments use them and some of them have no Wayland support to date. For example Lxqt, Xfce desktops have no support plans for Wayland, although they are for minimal desktop environments only.
Fedora 33 which is due on Oct 2020 end, will still have X11 as default in its KDE Plasma spin. The Fedora 34 which is planned for release on May 2021 will have the Wayland as the default option while using KDE Plasma desktop.
