The FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical part of the development of the Fedora Linux distribution, has approved the delivery plan for a new branch of the KDE Plasma 6 user environment in the spring release of Fedora 40. In addition to updating the KDE version, the transition to a new branch determines the cessation of session support based on the X11 protocol and leaving only a session based on the Wayland protocol, support for launching X11 applications in which will be provided using the XWayland DDX server. Continuing delivery of the KDE Plasma 40 environment with an X5 session to Fedora 11 was considered inappropriate due to the lack of resources for independent maintenance of a separate obsolete branch in the context of switching the main KDE project to the development of Plasma 6 and deprecating KDE 5.
The deprecation of the X.Org server in RHEL 11 and the decision to completely remove it in the future major release of RHEL 9 are cited as reasons for the discontinuation of X10 session support. Factors contributing to leaving only Wayland support are also cited as the introduction of Wayland support in proprietary NVIDIA drivers. and the replacement of the fbdev drivers in Fedora 36 with the simpledrm driver, which works correctly with Wayland. Removing session support for X11 will significantly reduce maintenance efforts and free up resources that can be used to improve the quality of the KDE stack.
KDE Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6.0 and KDE Gear 24.02.0 are scheduled for release on February 28, 2024. Alpha testing of the KDE 6 branch will begin on November 8th. In the new branch, a transition to the Qt 6 library will be made, some basic settings will be changed, outdated features will be cleaned, and the basic set of libraries and runtime components of KDE Frameworks 6, which forms the KDE software stack, will be updated. By default, KDE Plasma 6 will offer a session using the Wayland protocol, a new task switching interface, and a floating panel display mode.
Additionally, we can note the approval of the November 7 publication of the Linux 39 release, which was originally scheduled for October 17, but was then delayed several times due to the presence of unfixed issues that were flagged as blocking the release.
Source: opennet.ru