In my opinion, the long overdue conversation to make Wayland the default video server on KDE Plasma in Tumbleweed has finally happened. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of support for it, but I’m confident this will happen soon. I have included excerpts from the mailing list discussion below as well as my YouTube video discussing it. Also keep in mind I have been asking for this for at least a good year now. There are more things in the discussion but the TLDR I have posted here hits the important parts imo.

The original posting by ULF:

Hi openSUSE 🐧 Team, one late Chirstmas wish. Is it possible to switch in the next builds from Tumbleweed, independent if it was installed with the old installer or the new Agama installer? Background, the only big KDE distro, which is still at X11 for KDE as default is openSUSE (especially not expeted from Tumbleweed): https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ Keep in mind, KDE will cancel beginning of 2027 X11 support!

And here are some of the replies, narrowed down as I see moving the conversation forward:

Neal Gompa:

Honestly, I’m a little upset that openSUSE hasn’t flipped the switch
yet. It’s bizarre that openSUSE Tumbleweed hasn’t done it.

But at least I can shed a little light on the complexity. Some of
this is related to how default login managers and sessions were
historically handled using the alternatives system and a lot of hopes
and dreams. As you can probably guess, this is pretty brittle. It also
is unnecessarily complex in the era of modern service management with
systemd and modern login managers having their own preference systems.

Shawn Dunn and I started sketching out a plan to clean this up[1], but
we couldn’t get any buy-in to get the work to land.

Now for the X11/Wayland session preferences, this is tied into
openSUSE specific patches to the stack that force Plasma X11 to be the
first item on the list and auto-selected. These exist for configuring
the openSUSE specific /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager file for autologin
and default logins. This particular house of cards doesn’t exist for
the Wayland side, but because of how SDDM is packaged and shipped,
“default.desktop” will be used by default, and that will never be a
Wayland session. Upstream SDDM sorts Wayland sessions above X11
sessions, and will pick the first one alphabetically by default. To
compound this, the desktop files representing the sessions do not use
the upstream names for X11, so in order for existing selections to be
upgraded into the new one, some work has to be done to deal with that
particular pile of tech debt. And of course, SDDM itself should be
running in Wayland, and it is not currently doing that.

It’s achievable, but the final complication is that neither Shawn nor
I have been able to communicate with the openSUSE KDE maintainers to
get things switched over.

Luca Beltrame:

I believe you might have a better response if you target the official :Unstable
repository. I, for one (although my own involvement since a few years has
reduced a lot due to a lot of reasons) wasn’t even aware it existed.

Neal

I’ll make new branches and clean up everything to submit to K:U:F,
then. Let’s see how it goes!

Joe Salmeri:

For KDE ( which we use ) there is a major showstopper for our
environment because support for headless multi-session RDP does not
exist for Wayland and we have servers which support multiple RDP users.

GNOME/GDM added Wayland support for this and in my testing it seems to
work well.

Plasma is supposed to be working on Plasma Login Manager to replace SDDM
) and one of the features it is supposed to have is headless
multi-session RDP support like GDM has but I have not been able to find
a date for when that will be released.

Hopefully TW does not switch before Plasama Login Manager is released
with that support as we would not be able to update our servers until it is.

Loren Burkholder

For KDE ( which we use ) there is a major showstopper for our
environment because support for headless multi-session RDP does not
exist for Wayland and we have servers which support multiple RDP users.

GNOME/GDM added Wayland support for this and in my testing it seems to
work well.

Plasma is supposed to be working on Plasma Login Manager to replace SDDM
) and one of the features it is supposed to have is headless
multi-session RDP support like GDM has but I have not been able to find
a date for when that will be released.

Hopefully TW does not switch before Plasama Login Manager is released
with that support as we would not be able to update our servers until it is.