Wayland change for Kubuntu and fork of the Xservers Xorg

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Kubuntu 25.10 will no longer offer an X11 session out of the box; however, it can still be retrofitted, unlike Ubuntu Desktop 25.10, which is to rely entirely on Wayland. The latter has once again inflamed the debates that have been smouldering for over a decade about the technology change from X11 or Xorg Server to Wayland & Co.; this time the main focus of discussion is the supposedly poorer support of the operating aids for limited users. After no one had been found for a while to continue maintaining the Xserver of Xorg, a heavily criticized fork called “Xlibre” has appeared following discrepancies, which will probably not be of any particular significance for now.

Kubuntu leaves X11 session aside

Less than two weeks after announcing the end of Xorg in Ubuntu Desktop 25.10, the developers of Kubuntu have now announced that they are dropping support for the X11 session in their KDE Plasma-based distribution. Rik Mills explained in the move that it is highly unlikely that they will be able to support the X11 session in the 26.04 LTS, and expresses doubts whether this is not already the case. However, users can upgrade everything necessary to run KDE Plasma with Xorg's Xserver by installing a package. It remains to be seen how many of the later Kubuntu versions will allow this.

The KDE developers have meanwhile announced that they will continue to maintain the X11 mode of KDE Plasma. However, uncritical errors will probably remain uncorrected unless someone pays for them; the X11 session will only receive new features if someone pays for them. But the KDE developers also want to remove the code for operation with X servers in the medium term. However, unlike the Gnome project, there is no timetable for this yet, as this is likely to happen in the next nine months; a developer recently answered some frequently asked questions about this in an FAQ.

Wayland critics discover user aids as a (limping!) counter-argument

The number of discussions surrounding the technology change from Xserver Xorg to Wayland has recently skyrocketed due to the aforementioned development. The argument against this was often based on user aids, which are supposed to enable users with visual impairments to use the Linux desktop – and allegedly do not work at all or only work worse in the Wayland operating mode of Gnome and KDE.

Initially, it seemed as if developers would not react to this; this is a common approach to spend time on more meaningful things than pigeon chess, concern trolls & co, which can happen quickly in the open-source world. In the end, however, there were numerous voices from programmers as well as some users who are dependent on operating aids.

The long and short of it is this: Support for accessibility features in Wayland and desktops based on it is far from perfect and definitely needs improvement. However, this was also the case with X11 mode. Some of the problems that occurred there could never be solved properly; Wayland has just managed to do this, which is why some things work better in the current Gnome 48 in Wayland mode or only there. Gnome 49 should bring further fine-tuning and thus, from the point of view of the central Gnome developers, remove the last good reason for keeping X11 mode.

Debut of the fork of the Xserver from Xorg

Meanwhile, the first version of the Xserver Xlibre was created on the occasion of the summer solstice. It is a fork of the X server Xorg, which is largely independent of the latest developments in Gnome, KDE and Ubuntu and was created in the last few weeks. This was triggered by discrepancies: The main developer of Xlibre wanted to make more far-reaching changes to the Xorg code after all kinds of minor corrections, many of which have since been removed.

This displeased the Xorg maintainers because, among other things, it would have changed the normally stable interfaces to drivers in an incompatible way. The later Xlibre creator was eventually banned. He repeatedly blamed this on a company that allegedly wanted to enforce Wayland via key positions at Xorg/Freedesktop.org and get rid of Xorg; in fact, however, employees of this company do not hold a majority on the responsible committee. The maintainer of Xlibre also attracts attention in all sorts of places with statements and approaches from the political right-wing spectrum, and is therefore criticized from many sides.

Either way, the fork will not have any major significance for now, as larger distributions usually wait for such forks and rely on the tried and tested. Which is also possible, as those responsible for Xorg have been looking in vain for some time for someone to release new versions that bring more than just corrections – but at the same time they are still taking care of plugging security gaps with new versions of Xorg and associated components.

(mack)