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, 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.
Thankn you KDE for my lost day. I can’t use my keyboard layout no more and my work is frozen with one update just like in shitty windows. Just ruined my day
I wonder if the Trinity DE is an option for people who need X11? This may be the only viable option at some point.
I ditched KDE way back in early 2008 when version 4 was introduced and never went back to KDE. I became a GNOME user and then later, an Xfce user. But since it’s inevitable that Xfce will eventually go all-in on that bug-ridden Wayland, I’ve decided it’s time to say goodbye to Xfce in favor of LXQt with Openbox as the window manager. #ifitaintbrokedontfixit
“Ending Nearly 30 Years of X11 Sessions”
The initial release of KDE Plasma was in January 2008. How can KDE Plasma end X11 sessions after thirty (30) years?
My first thought on KDE Plasma back in 2008 was: Bloatware. I followed the development of KDE Plasma and quickly adapted my opinion about it: Bug-infested bloatware. It never changed. Who wants to work with such a desktop environment?
There are only few KDE Plasma applications available and non of them are unique in any way, except that they depend on bug-infested bloatware. It is quite obvious that independent software developers do not want to engage with KDE Plasma.
The claim that KDE Plasma 6.8 Will be Ending Nearly 30 Years of X11 Sessions, because its developers decided to Go Fully Wayland is untenable.
At least do your homework before trolling.
KDE started in 1996 as a project, firt release in 1997, check out the first post about it here:
https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Iat_s/m/zv_D_2ctS8sJ?pli=1
Or the timeline here:
https://timeline.kde.org/
I got rid of both sddm and xorg-server just today:
pacman -Q xorg-server sddm
error: package ‘xorg-server’ was not found
error: package ‘sddm’ was not found
Out of curiosity: Why did you get rid of sddn and what are you using instead?
At work we’re revamping our PC images and we’re having some issues which might get solved with a different login manager, now that you made think about it.
Thanks in advance for you insight.
Flip side, I’ll be installing xfce and teaching half dozen family members how to use it over the holiday weekend.
Goodbye KDE, thanks for the ride.
The worst thing is that it’s only a matter of time before Xfce becomes Wayland only 🙁
Wayland is unusable for me, and I’ll end up having to use Windows.
Luckily I am perfectly happy using fluxbox and/or fvwm2 on my machines. It’s managing home and remote family machines that is the issue.
I suspect just as x11 was forked, someone will fork wayland to x11 DEs as well.
Already happening. Labwc is a wayland compositor inspired by Openbox wm, and Sway is a wayland compositor inspired by i3 tiliing wm. Add waybar to them (similar to polybar and tint2 from the X world) and you can accomplish a lot.
@Josef Why can’t you use Windows now?
Because I last used Windows 2K and all my backup disks are on XFS. Plus, I believe that Xlibre will be the savior