In a blog post published yesterday titled “About Plasma’s X11 Session,” KDE developer Nate Graham clarified the current state of Xorg and Wayland and what the future holds for both in the Plasma desktop environment.
Long version short: While X11 support isn’t disappearing overnight, the writing is on the wall—Plasma’s long-term future lies with Wayland. Nate says, “The Plasma team isn’t emotional about display servers.” It’s simply a matter of practicality. Maintaining two different backends is a drain on resources, and focusing solely on Wayland will speed up progress across the board.
For now, the Plasma X11 session remains in maintenance mode. That means critical issues—like login failures or major regressions—will still be addressed. However, minor bugs are unlikely to get fixes unless funded, and new X11-specific features are off the table entirely.
Interestingly, X11-related bugs make up less than 1% of all open issues in KDE’s bug tracker, suggesting that most problems (and improvements) these days are platform-agnostic. So, while X11 isn’t getting new love, users still benefit from general Plasma development.
When will X11 support actually end? Well, there’s no hard deadline yet. The team estimates that X11 won’t be dropped within the next two years, but the real deciding factor will be when major distributions fully transition to Wayland.
Currently, 73% of Plasma 6 users (with telemetry enabled) are on Wayland, up from 60% across all Plasma versions. Even SteamOS, which recently shipped Plasma 6 with X11 as default, hasn’t stopped the upward trend—Wayland adoption continues to climb.
Distros like Fedora, Arch, and KDE Neon have already switched, and upcoming Debian and Kubuntu LTS releases are expected to follow suit. Once the holdouts move, X11’s days in Plasma will be numbered.
However, the team acknowledges that not everyone is ready to jump ship. Some users rely on niche tools like AutoKey or specialized input devices that still work better on X11. That’s why the session isn’t going away just yet—KDE wants to ensure that even the most dedicated X11 users won’t feel left behind when the transition finally happens.
Still, the data speaks for itself: most users are already on Wayland, and the gaps are shrinking. As Nate notes, “Long transitions like this are tough, but ultimately worth it so that we all get something better in the end.” To summarize, X11 remains an option for now, but its sunset is clearly on the horizon.
i can’t type on some games when i use wayland…thats why i always use x11 …maybe i should just remove my arch then?
Very sad! Functional sw gets written off and almost unusable wins