Provenance Record

Analysis, 1545 words (range 800-2000), Background / Current situation / Implications structure plus an explicit 'What differs' section labelled as the Herald's own reading and a 'What the sources do not say' section. The thesis is more than a tabulation: it compares the number of steps (GNOME default-off then code removal; KDE named a last release; Fedora met the change as a stable-release update), the evidence of readiness each offered (contributors' judgment of parity in GNOME's FAQ versus KDE's Wayland usage share) and who had to find a fallback (LTS distributions, SonicDE, a Copr repository, tool authors). Facts and the Herald's inferences are separated; inferences are flagged ('the Herald's own count', 'the Herald's inference from LWN's account').

All 12 snapshots read from raw text (gunzip + HTML-to-text). No suspicious_patterns in any manifest entry (all null), so nothing to judge. Hosts blogs.gnome.org, kde.org, linuxiac.com, lwn.net, phoronix.com, theregister.com are all already in config/source_allowlist.txt; no allowlist additions. Snapshot routes: source-0 (GNOME FAQ) 200; source-2/3 (Linuxiac) 200; source-4/5 (LWN) 200, full public text, no subscriber-only part relied on; source-6..9 (Phoronix) Archive.org captures (archive_fallback true, per manifest; Phoronix blocks direct fetches) and each shows the Phoronix byline and date; source-10/11 (The Register) 200. kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.8.0/ failed in the script ('fetch failed'); read by another route, a live curl with a browser User-Agent (HTTP 200, sha256 cfff51f3ea69998fc32458bf9fa254903609bec721054f5bdb2ef3f848cd1971): dated 'Wednesday, 14 October 2026' ('Plasma 6.8 is released on a very special day: KDE's 30th birthday') and the quoted sentence 'support for starting X11 sessions in Plasma is being retired, in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system' is verbatim, with XWayland for the remaining apps. Per-source confirmation: GNOME FAQ (source-0): dates May 6, May 19, May 20 (FESCo, Fedora 43), Ubuntu confirmation for 49, and the quotes 'on par (if not straight up better) than Xorg', 'it was time to move on with the removal of the Xorg session', 'What's going away is the GNOME on Xorg session, not the Xorg server itself', 'some niche workflows that are only possible on X11', 'XWayland will be around with us for decades' all verbatim; it is a GNOME release-team member's own account, a project statement, not counted as independent. Register 2025-11-28 (source-10): 'GNOME 49 ... disables the X11 login session by default, you can still reinstall it', code change merged earlier that month; it attaches 'which we expect will be sometime in early 2027' to Plasma 6.8. Linuxiac GNOME (source-3, 6 Nov 2025): two merged PRs removing X11 from Mutter and GNOME Shell, GNOME 50 'scheduled for mid-march 2026', and the 'test Wayland compatibility (or plan fallback strategies)' advice; it does not cover GNOME 49's default-off step. Phoronix GNOME 50 Alpha (source-6): byline '15 January 2026 at 08:45 PM EST', Mutter X11 back-end removed, GDM 'entirely removed' X11 support. Phoronix GNOME 50 Released (source-7): 18 March 2026 12:16 PM EDT, and no mention of X11 (the article says so correctly). LWN 1048208 (source-4, 26 Nov 2025): quotes the KDE announcement ('supported by KDE into early 2027', 'extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7', AlmaLinux 9 'will be supported until sometime in 2032'). Phoronix Nov 2025 (source-8): 26 Nov 2025, ties early 2027 to 'the Plasma 6.7 series'. Phoronix 2 June 2026 (source-9): David Edmundson's post, 'Plasma's last X11-supported release with Plasma 6.7', 'over 95% of Plasma 6.6 users'. Register 15 Oct 2026 (source-11): 95 percent for June, 76 percent including older versions (appears only there, as the article says), shade/screen-recording/session-restore effects, KRdp/Krfb/Waypipe, SonicDE, Kubuntu 27.04 in April 2027. LWN 1105130 (source-5, 4 Nov 2026): Fedora 44 released April with Plasma 6.6, update to 6.8 'swept away the X11 session without much warning', single-Plasma-version SIG policy and stable-update exceptions (kernel, Go, KDE), notice on 21 October, FESCo vote 3 November with eight against and Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek at +0 ('could have been dragged out a bit'), Ravier on 6.7 end of life January 2027 versus Fedora 44 support to June 2027, Copr suggestion, SonicDE not yet packaged for Fedora, LWN's closing assessment: all as described. FESCo ticket not read (behind Anubis); the vote is taken from LWN's report only and the article attributes it to LWN. Linuxiac Artix (source-2, 5 Nov 2026): Wayland made default for Plasma, other desktops 'at various stages of Wayland implementation'. Headline test 1 'GNOME Went Default-Off First': Register (Nov 2025) reports GNOME 49, already shipping in Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10, disables the session by default, and the FAQ shows 49.alpha.0 tagged 8 June 2025 with the session disabled; both precede KDE's 26 Nov 2025 announcement, Plasma 6.8 (14 Oct 2026) and the Fedora 44 update (21 Oct 2026 notice), so 'first' holds on the cited dates. GNOME 50 released 18 March 2026 (Phoronix) is also earlier than Plasma 6.8. Headline test 2 'KDE Named Plasma 6.7 the Last': LWN (4 Nov 2026) says KDE 'announced, in 2025, that Plasma 6.7 would be the last version ... that would support X11 sessions' and Phoronix (2 June 2026) calls 6.7 'the last X11-supported release'; I also read KDE's own November 2025 post (blogs.kde.org, live curl, HTTP 200, sha256 f6e54116b9ed13b7addb4307ea05680fa4f81ae65c9efcfe49aa43f3cfc0bd1b), which says 'the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive' and that 'the exact timing of the last one [Plasma 6.7 bug-fix release] ... we expect will be sometime in early 2027'. So the Register attached KDE's 'early 2027' to the wrong release and the article correctly reports the disagreement with attribution to both sides instead of reconciling; 'the last' is correct as 'last Plasma release with an X11 session'. Headline test 3 'a Fedora 44 Update Removed Plasma's Session': scope is Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop users on Fedora 44 via the Plasma 6.8 update, per LWN; correct. Recomputed Herald figures: 23 Jun 2025 to 18 Mar 2026 = 8 months 23 days, 'about nine months' OK; 26 Nov 2025 to 14 Oct 2026 = 10 months 18 days, 'about ten and a half months' OK; 14 to 21 Oct 2026 = 7 days OK; all labelled as the Herald's own. Quantifier sweep (grep) results: 'For GNOME and for KDE' boundary claim true for both; 'None of the sources cited here gives a count of Fedora users' true; '76 percent ... The Register alone' true; 'the sources read describe no such default-off step for Plasma' true for the cited sources; 'Neither a contributors' judgment nor a usage share counts how many users depend on a feature Wayland lacks' is the Herald's reading and holds. Analysis independence: 4 independent outlets counted per outlet (The Register, LWN.net, Phoronix, Linuxiac; two Phoronix and two Register and two LWN and two Linuxiac articles counted once each); the GNOME FAQ and kde.org are project statements and not counted. Per case: GNOME has three independent outlets (Register, Linuxiac, Phoronix), KDE has three (LWN, Phoronix, Register), Fedora rests on one independent outlet (LWN) because the FESCo ticket was not readable and Linuxiac's Artix piece is a different distribution; the article attributes the Fedora account to LWN alone. Requirement (at least 4 sources, at least 2 independent) is met. Anthropic disclosure: not required - the article is not about Anthropic or an Anthropic product, none of the 12 snapshots or the body mention Anthropic, and Rule 15 does not apply.

Headline, summary and lead hold against the sources (see source_verification). Two subordinate incompletenesses: (1) the Fedora paragraph omits context LWN gives about the X11 packages: the Fedora KDE SIG has not supported Plasma X11 since Fedora 40 (2024), the kwin-x11 and plasma-workspace-x11 packages were provided by an independent maintainer under an earlier FESCo decision, and the revert request covered Fedora 44 and 45; (2) the Phoronix 15 January 2026 date is the publisher's US Eastern byline (8:45 PM EST), which is 16 January in UTC and the basis is not stated. The 'nine months' (FAQ dated to the 'GNOME 50 release') and 'ten and a half months' figures start from different kinds of event (a project contributor's FAQ versus KDE's announcement), but both are labelled as the Herald's own count from stated dates, so no correction is needed.

Accurate, well-sourced Analysis that handles a real disagreement between sources correctly and meets the Analysis requirements (1545 words, 12 sources, four independent outlets). Two small clarifications are filed; the headline, summary and lead are supported. Featured candidacy: 1 - solid, accurate comparison of display-server exits for Linux desktop users, tool authors and packagers, but a defined audience rather than a broad one