KDE Goals Update – June 2021

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2021-06-16 21:00:09

Akademy starts in a few days, and the Champions and I will be focusing on that. However, there are still some interesting updates we’d like to share with you.

With every recent Plasma update (and especially the just released version 5.22) the list of features that are X11 exclusive gets smaller and smaller.

Conversely, many users may not be aware that the opposite is also happening: every day there are more features available on Wayland that cannot be found on X11!

There are many resources available describing the security advantages of Wayland over X11, but the ageing protocol has some other shortcomings as well. For example, the last update we highlighted was the recently released VRR support in 5.22. Among other things, this enables an important use case for me: it allows each of my connected displays to operate at their highest refresh rate. I have a 144Hz main display, but occasionally I plug in my TV, which works at 60Hz. Because of limitations of X11, for everything to work, my main display needs to be limited to 60Hz when both of them are active. But not any more thanks to Wayland!

While the KDE developers always try to bring new functionalities to all users, the above example shows that sometimes, either due to X11 limitations or for other reasons, feature parity will not be possible.

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