KDE Plasma Login Manager Won’t Support Systemd-Free Linux or BSD Systems

astyle said:
Would be nice if people had the time to do some homework and have some links prepared before declaring an assumption for a fact (the part about new Plasma login manager relying on specifically systemd).
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It would be OK if FreeBSD KDE team does NOT switch to plasma login manager and stick with sddm. And as (as far as I know via freebsd-current, freebsd-hackers and freebsd-arch MLs) there are no plan to implement systemd nor logind on FreeBSD, I believe the switch would not happen.
 
rbranco said:
Neal Gompa is a nice fellow and the replies are clear: KDE will continue working on FreeBSD.
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Yes, but FreeBSD is now Tier 2 support because you have created a very important desktop application (login manager) that is incompatible with the system. If you put "KDE ❤️ FreeBSD" on your toot but tell users they have to use a third-party tool to log in and is it a tool that he hopes will continue to be maintained, but since it is not part of the KDE project cannot guarantee...
But that does not erase the fact that KDE has worked for FreeBSD for a long time and will continue to do so for now.
 
Alain De Vos said:
It will not QT6 is a masterpiece.
It's gnome which will drop things.
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KDE is dropping X11/Xorg support pretty soon.

At this point, I'm waiting for KDE Wayland to stabilize, so that it can take switching from one VTY to the next without crashing every few days. It seems like there's two versions of Wayland these days - one that KDE is working on, it supports Spectacle's screenshots. I really like it, but it crashes every few days. The other version is quite stable, it doesn't crash - but a lot of KDE's functionality is missing, and I'm not sure I want to spent time and effort replicating KDE's functionality that makes for a functional desktop for me. Proper copy/paste, screenshots, ability to choose which program is used to open a file from the filemanager, ability to do all of the above quickly, without having to write a ton of scripts that only work for me, in one particular compositor, in one particular version of it... and trying to maintain that library of scripts! 👿
 
You have not been following this very closely. They have already set the timeline for dropping X11 when 6.8 is released early next year no more X. Then after that they will go systemd only that is why the setup work is being done now for the PLM being systemd only it is the way they roll when doing these things, the death by a thousand cuts method. They get the new pieces slowly in place doing more for it while letting the old bitrot like they did with the Xorg support then they reveal their true intentions. I have watched them do it for decades doing this similarly in my twenty-five years of use of it before I dropped it for LXQt when the wayland only announcement was done.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Doom, i don't believe in it. First doom will come not from KDE but from GNOME.
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Does not matter to me if you do. I was just pointing out your Wayland comment was ill-informed, they are doing it. 6.8 will not work with X, Gnome trolls have already killed off anything but Wayland/systemd garbage combination. And I will be here to tell you I told you so when KDE does the exact same thing. They lay the ground work right now for it to happen, then they work their forums and blog postings to sell the new best thing since sliced bread systemd angle, as they do now on how great and modern it is, it makes their work so much easier, after that the next stage is dropping all pretense of allowing another method of login. I have seen it way to many time these last few decades on how they do it..
 
So, did KDE do something like this before?
I don't doubt something like this is in the works, but by who? Usually the "project" tries to keep some deniability, so someone on the outskirts floats a test baloon, maybe even in an unfriendly takeover attempt. Plasma is of no real importance for me, but I do care about is as far as KDE was to be the default for upcomming FreeBSD versions. Way to make friends...
 
Plasma 6.8 (Early 2027): Native X11 support will be completely removed, making the desktop Wayland-exclusive
The GNOME desktop will officially no longer run on X11 starting with the release of GNOME 50, which is scheduled for mid-March 2026
 
Crivens said:
So, did KDE do something like this before?
I don't doubt something like this is in the works, but by who? Usually the "project" tries to keep some deniability, so someone on the outskirts floats a test baloon, maybe even in an unfriendly takeover attempt. Plasma is of no real importance for me, but I do care about is as far as KDE was to be the default for upcomming FreeBSD versions. Way to make friends...
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Yes they do it all the time I have lived it for the as I said past twenty-five years or so using it. Usually it is the new shinny coming along then they take and adopt that dropping the old like hot potato. Throwing away all of that work that they mostly have working properly for even more bug fixes on that new shinny they now use. The Wayland and systemd are the latest examples of that they do abandoning decades of previous work done by countless volunteers. I am actually shocked they have not jumped on the AI enshitification band wagon yet. It is so unlike them to let that hype train pass by without jumping on board. I got fed up with this latest move when the Plasma 6 came out and I discover the monitor lottery was back on x11. Where the applications will just start on random seemingly monitor they had that solved in the 5 series, I reported it and their response was sorry about your luck we never really tested on x11 for regressions and we are not going to now then they came out with this Wayland only foolishness. Yes it is rather disappointing the way they do things but they do not care they will feed the usual platitudes and continue to work their blogs, websites to feed the new view of how things will be done to keep people onside. The socials as they say used to influence opinions I have seen in couple of postings where they were hiring for new business around KDE by Nate Graham this was very important bullet point listed in the requirements for the job.
 
This all seems very familiar - and many or most should have learnt the hard way by now, from the systemd debacle, that this kind of thing is often agenda driven.

What was so wrong with SDDM, that it had to be forked to a systemd dependent and by extension, Linux centric project? No amount of weasel wording can hide the agenda.

If the developers of PLM, can drop FreeBSD support as easily as dropping a hat and move entirely to systemd dependence - that's great for them, but that becoming the default option? That equates to systemd endorsement and a nod to the camp who find 'BSD irrelevant from KDE.
 
x11/kde and x11/plasma6-plasma are metaports.

And KDE is modularized in ports (massive kf6- and plasma6- ports).
More, x11/sddm port is maintained by FreeBSD KDE team.

So unless upstream KDE project completely drops sddm support to start KDE up (deskutils/plasma6-sddm-kcm may be the related component), I believe FreeBSD KDE team can define runtime dependency to x11/sddm (regardless by default or optional) instead for plasma login manager.

Note that I'm a user of x11/mate. 😁
 
Alain De Vos said:
Soon ... don't believe it. Wayland is not stable enough to drop X11.
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It was stable enough for me years ago with GNOME, but had inconsistencies that had me prefer X11.

I heard Fedora dropped X11 support early because of maintenance burden. If that's the same theme removing it from KDE, it seems questionable for OSs to want the burden (OSs provide stable working software to end-users, else it's beta testing on what's supposed to be a release/non-beta OS, or at least not the best service to end-users)

FreeBSD not having systemd, featuring KDE as "the" desktop, then KDE dropping a longstanding generic solution for a systemd one sounds odd on FreeBSD's side; KDE's upstream priorities (Wayland, systemd) don't seem to align.


I felt Xfce was more of a general DE cross-OS: Traditional, themeable, most modern desktop (eye-candy) with realistic stable features (X11), and no large Wayland or systemd dependencies. I started on 14.1 with Xfce and it's worked great 14.2, .3, 15.0, and 16.0-CURRENT. I can install from memstick in <5mins and get to a visible desktop in about 10 minutes post-install.

I have history Plasma 5 and GNOME same-time around 2014 with 2-in-1 tablets and HiDPI, and GNOME handled it so much notably better I stuck with it for years. Xfce didn't have the idea touch or HiDPI support back then and GNOME had auto-rotate/brightness; Plasma 5 didn't even have an on-screen keyboard (couldn't log-in from SDDM on the 2-in-1 undocked), yet (getting into that non-beta OS thing) Arch was happily shipping Plasma 5 fresh.

Why wasn't Xfce chosen before KDE?

Xfce recently announced Xfwl4 (Wayland compositor alternative to xfwm4): https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_15.html
 
T-Aoki said:
Reading (quite roughly, though) the linked article, I can't stop thinking that Wayland is initially designed PURELY FOR FPS GAMES and abused for other use-cases.
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If it was, GNOME didn't get the memo until at least mid 2025 🤣 (high CPU/GPU load would make the cursor go floaty/disconnected; article, and even then it doesn't sound like it solves the issue of somehow making the cursor dependent on guess-timers vs whatever X11 and Windows have been doing fine for years :p)

1000Hz was seemingly fine GNOME 48 or 49 though, but I have questions for whoever praised that prior (especially before GNOME 42)
 
(Cross-posted from another thread, as it seems relevant to the discussion here)
astyle

Post in thread 'Trying to run KDE 6 Plasma with Wayland....'

Found this via phoronix.com today:

This Week in Plasma: fixing all the things

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week the Plasma team focused almost entirely on bug fixing. And let’s let the results speak for themselves: we fixed 18 high and very high priority Plasma bugs, or 28% of all open ones! Lots of polishing for Plasma 6.6 to make it a great release.
blogs.kde.org blogs.kde.org
This blog entry does seem to talk about the same crashes that I complained about in this thread. This gives me hope that Wayland Plasma is stabilizing. No, I still have no idea how to troubleshoot the crashes on my end of things, but the visible symptoms (crashes) being described - they do sound very familiar.

Makes me look forward to Plasma 6.6, along with the new Plasma Login Manager...
 
You know who won't be dropping support for Xorg anytime soon? Trinity Desktop Environment. I'm going to try and get the latest version going on FreeBSD 15.0 It's such an excellent DE. :D

I wonder if the Plasma devs would consider not putting all their efforts in to a SystemD/Wayland dependent position over time? I don't see these kinds of moves being a good long term position. Alternatively, as in the example of TDE, I could see a fork in the near future for Plasma. Perhaps one or more of the devs could go the way of Timothy Pearson?

I guess only time will tell. But I don't imagine that everyone can be satisfied with having a project tied to SystemD in such a meaningful way. I still remember using SystemD tainted systems...give me anxiety just thinking about those start and stop jobs with infinite wait times...
 
T-Aoki said:
Reading (quite roughly, though) the linked article, I can't stop thinking that Wayland is initially designed PURELY FOR FPS GAMES and abused for other use-cases.
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The given reason was that no one (well, two persons) really understood X, it was hard to develop for, had to cater for a use mode that was no longer valid (i.e. fat server, thin clients).
As for being designed for fps games, not really, as by default wayland was always vsync on (no option to disable), it took them nearly 10 years to figure out that maybe games may not want vsync on. Then there is the reasoning that wayland is not a server but instead a (collection of) protocol(s). That didn't work out as expected also. Security, for reasons, was also a provided reason (i.e. why it took 13 years to be able to take a screenshot of the screen and why screen sharing is a pain).

In any case Wikipedia has the "stated" reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(protocol)#History
 
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