Fedora 34 KDE Spin Planning Switch To Wayland

For four years now since Fedora 25 the default GNOME Shell desktop environment has been using Wayland by default. Next spring with Fedora 34, the KDE Spin is finally planning a similar migration to use Wayland by default with the KDE Plasma desktop.

The Wayland support with Plasma and related KDE components has improved in recent times with many bugs being ironed out and other improvements now that they have a Wayland-first mentality to X11. In early 2021 with Fedora 34 the plan is to switch from using an X.Org based session by default for the Fedora KDE Spin to now using the modern Wayland session.

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.

The change proposal for the Fedora KDE Special Interest Group is about the changing the default session with the SDDM display manager to prefer Wayland-based KDE Plasma desktop over the X11 session.

That will likely be approved barring any major issues coming up over the next few months.