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TioDuke

Member

Registered: 2009-08-06

Posts: 25

Do I need these xorg-* packages now that plasmashell runs on Wayland?

I have been postponing passing from an X11 KDE session to Wayland/KDE for some time now. Now with the realease of version 6.8.0 support for X11 sessions seems to be finished.

I have had a couple of minor issues with things like conky and one application's icon tray (Antidote's Connectix) because it uses xembed. Both problems have been solved : by arrangind conky's configuration and by running Antidote's Connectx application inside an XWayland container.

Now that everything seems to be running smoothly I was wondering about "residual" xorg packages that are still installed on my system. Some of them are still required like xorg-xwayland and some are dependencies themselves like the xordgserver packages. From that list there are the following :

xf86-input-libinput
xorg-fonts-100dpi
xorg-fonts-75dpi
xorg-fonts-alias-100dpi
xorg-fonts-alias-75dpi
xorg-setxkbmap
xorg-xhost
xorg-xinit
xorg-xkbcomp
xorg-xkill
xorg-xmodmap
xorg-xrandr

I was wondering if it is safe to delete them. I would probably leave the fonts packages but I was really wondering about xinit xhost xkill xmodmap and xrandr, and worst of all xf86-input-libinput. Is it safe to uninstall them? Would they be needed by any application that runs on XWayland?

And finally, I imagine that the following configuration files might be destroyed without any problem:

.Xmodmap
.Xresources
.xinitrc
and Xauthority but I think this one is still required.

If someone has already done the migration and have any ideas about the packages I mentioned, I would be very interested to hear about your experience.

Thank you in advance.

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V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,420

Re: Do I need these xorg-* packages now that plasmashell runs on Wayland?

Most of these can be removed, Xmodmap however can and is likely actually read by libxkb, which is technically still in use even on Wayland. You can also keep them as they allow dealing with xwayland clients, should the relevant need arise.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,512

Re: Do I need these xorg-* packages now that plasmashell runs on Wayland?

xorg-xrandr is also useful for xorg-xwayland , xorg-xinit includes startx.

In case plasma or wayland fail hard are you able to use a root terminal and cli commands to troubleshoot or do you need a gui ?
If the 2nd I'd keep most of those programs and tweak .xinitrc to start a pure X environment so you have a fallback gui.

Edited for clarity.

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2026-10-19 09:20:51)

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

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Try clean chroot manager by graysky

gcb

Member

Registered: 2014-02-12

Posts: 229

Re: Do I need these xorg-* packages now that plasmashell runs on Wayland?

to see what's removable every now and then, i run a cycle of

pacman --query --deps --unrequired | cut -d\  -f1

and pipe that to pacman -R, after looking at the list.

a cycle, because often removing something that is uneeded will free up other things that only those packages dependend on. You can also use -Rs if you're brave, but i rater look at each step.