It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.
They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference.
They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling.
Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.
> Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.
They disabled it by default. You can enable it if you want.
Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things.
> Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option.
Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it" isn't news; that's been going on for decades. This habit of theirs is a big reason why I've been using KDE for a very long time.
Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that.
And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.
> Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream...
IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]:
There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.
This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.
I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts.
Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE.
That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest. If you can't run full KDE on X11 there will not be many KDE developers caring about X11 support. KWin for example has already gained many bugs on X11 that I expect to never be fixed. And now KWin for X11 is split into a separate project which will hopefully mean fewer further regressions but probably also not much further development which means bitrot as things around it change.
> That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest.
Given this statement from the announcement that I linked to previously
The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.
We cannot provide a specific date, as we’re exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.
I expect that I will get at least a year's notice before they stop actively working on the rest of the parts of KDE that interact with X11... whenever that ends up being. A year is more than enough time to find replacements for things that might eventually stop working one day.
Were I sixteen, I'd be very excited to preemptively move to something else. Now? The folks who work on it say that they'll keep it working for the forseeable future, and their behavior suggests that I'll get ample notice before they stop working on it.
The software in question works now (AFAICT) and will continue to work for quite a while. I am likely to get a significant amount of warning before they stop working on the software. I see no reason to switch. I have much better things to do with my time.
