This post represents my personal opinion. It does not need to represent any official opinion from any association I am involved with.

The Readme of the KDE Plasma Workspaces states clearly that our desktop is an X11 desktop environment:

KDE Workspace consisting of what is the desktop. The applications and libraries included aren’t required to b e portable and probably will only work with X11. On other desktops such as OS X and Windows, users wouldn’t r un these applications, but use the native ones instead. The typical application shouldn’t have dependencies i n workspace unless they are a component such as a screen-saver or panel applet.

So what does that mean? Our base system should work on every operating system supporting X11. Be at Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris. But how does the world look like, is this still the truth?

The world around us is changing and I would say that the statement is no longer true and soon needs to be adjusted to also include Wayland. This shows that we are at the point thinking beyond the X Windowing System. So what does that mean for the operating systems we support? At the moment Wayland is a Linux only system and given the current requirements it looks unlikely to be supported by non-Linux systems any time soon.

Wayland is of course only one example. There are more. Think about the deprecation of HAL or introduction of systemd. HAL we are still able to support in KDE thanks to our good hardware abstraction through solid. Systemd is not yet used, but I hope that this will change soon. Given these changes we must face the from a technology point of view all non-Linux are far behind Linux which means that on the long supporting the legacy technologies only for non-Linux becomes more and more a hurdle.

Personally I do not know any core developer of the KDE Plasma Workspaces using a non-Linux operating system. So you would expect that we have lots of bug reports for the non-Linux OS. Given that we already have hundreds of bug reports in KWin just about the stack on Linux which we use, there have to be even more for the non-Linux systems. No dev uses it, it gets not as tested as our Linux system, so there have to be bugs! So here the stats for KWin over the last 12 month:

Linux: 1054 opened bugs

FreeBSD: 4 opened bugs

Solaris: 3 open bugs

All three Solaris bugs are actually build errors on Solaris containing patches – they should have been opened on reviewboard. Due to miss of quality non of the patches was included in the software. From the four FreeBSD bugs, two are crashes lacking debug symbols – something that does not happen on Linux any more. One bug was actually also present on Linux, but seemed to only apply for legacy technology. So we have something like 250 bug reports for Linux for each non-Linux bug report.

For Plasma it’s 3529 bug reports for Linux compared to 30 non-Linux (only X11). From the seven Solaris bugs, six are again build failures. FreeBSD are mostly crashes again with missing backtraces and so on.

So this tells us that basically Solaris does not have any users and that it only creates work for us, because they use different compilers. Nevertheless we do not seem to accept the patches. So it’s great that Solaris wants to provide packages for our workspaces, but it should not create work. And yes reporting a bug and discussing it and even rejecting a patch is creating work.

And there is more we have to consider: KDE Plasma Workspaces are nowadays more than a set of applications for X11. It’s an integrated system providing a consistent user experience. Important parts of this experience is also our Oxygen design which does not only require compositing but also advanced OpenGL effects such as the Blur filter. Unfortunately free drivers are not able to provide these requirements on non-Linux systems due to lack of KMS and Mesa frozen at the last version before KMS. What we provide for non-Linux does not match what we want to provide.

The free desktops still have a considerably small market share, but as also the bug reports show the non-Linux users make less than one percent of our user base. If we now think about the global market share for non-Linux KDE Plasma systems we come to a number very close to 0. Our resources are spare and we should make the best out of it. Spending time on hardly used systems which are lacking behind in the technology we want to use and cannot provide the minimum requirements for our workspaces, does not sound like a sane idea to me.

To me it is clear for quite some time already that I won’t accept patches any more for non-Linux. Including another code path or even a build flag for non-Linux systems is not worth the increasing maintaining costs. If non-Linux systems want to include patches they should do it downstream.

Also for the inclusion of new technologies we should not wait for the non-Linux to catch up or do sacrifices in order to still support non-Linux. If a new technology brings us great advantages on Linux but means we have to stop supporting non-Linux because they do not provide the technology, I think it’s better to be really good on the one system.

Please remember: this is my personal opinion.