KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Fully Wayland, Ending Nearly 30 Years of X11 Sessions

Every beginning has an end. KDE is preparing a major shift in its desktop environment with the Plasma 6.8 release, expected around late 2026 or early 2027, which will become the first version to ship without the traditional X11 session. This move comes after nearly three decades of providing both X11 and Wayland options.

Today, in the post on the KDE Blogs titled “Going all-in on a Wayland future“, the devs announced that Plasma is moving fully to Wayland, with Xwayland taking over all legacy application support. KDE notes that most users have already transitioned, as Wayland is the default across many distributions and the Plasma X11 session has been slowly phased out elsewhere.

But no worries for now. X11 apps will continue to run through Xwayland, which already handles most workloads reliably. KDE has added compatibility features such as improved fractional scaling and optional X11 global shortcut support to smooth the transition.

For users who still require a full X11 session, KDE will maintain Plasma’s X11 session only until early 2027. Long-term support distributions remain an option too; for example, AlmaLinux 9 ships with Plasma’s X11 session and is supported until 2032.

KDE devs say that the dual-stack model has slowed progress across several parts of the desktop, and fully embracing Wayland enables faster iteration, more features, and deeper optimizations. The Wayland session already offers better gaming performance, including adaptive sync, optional tearing, and high-refresh-rate multi-monitor support.

On top of that, NVIDIA’s proprietary driver, previously a source of regressions, has also matured significantly, and older GPUs can fall back to Nouveau.

They also mentioned that on the accessibility side, some improvements are already exclusive to Wayland, such as touchpad gesture zooming and system-wide color filters. In light of this, KDE encourages users with specific accessibility requirements to report remaining issues as this area continues to evolve.

So, Plasma 6.8 will mark the final step in a long transition that began years ago. KDE previously split KWin into separate Wayland and X11 components in Plasma 6.4 to accelerate the migration, but the devs said that maintaining the full X11 session still limited development across the wider desktop. Dropping it removes those constraints.

In conclusion, the KDE team describes the change as necessary to keep Plasma stable, modern, and competitive. The project believes that focusing entirely on Wayland will deliver a better desktop for the majority of users.

For more information, see the announcement on the KDE Blogs.