After 30 years, KDE says goodbye to X11

KDE is officially announcing that the future Plasma 6.8 desktop environment release will be Wayland-exclusive. The platform will finally drop the decades-old X11 session. This is a massive change. After nearly three decades of running the KDE desktop on the X Server, the Plasma X11 session is gone.

For most people reading this, you probably won’t even notice. Wayland is already the default desktop session on the vast majority of distributions. Apparently, many distributions were already planning to drop the X11 Plasma session regardless of what the KDE team decided. This move is really about long-term development.

Cutting the X11 tether opens up huge opportunities for feature development, better optimizations, and a much snappier speed of development moving forward. If you’re worried about when exactly you need to update, the team is still supporting the Plasma X11 session until early 2027.

Developers can’t provide a specific end date yet because there are options that need to be explored for shipping extra bug fix releases for Plasma 6.7. That final release date will be locked down closer to the actual end of life, but expect it sometime in early 2027.

If you absolutely need X11 for specific legacy hardware or software that simply won’t cooperate, you aren’t stranded immediately. This is exactly what long-term support distributions are for. For instance, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will continue to be supported until 2032. You’ve got options if you need to stay put for a while.

A major concern for anyone transitioning is application compatibility, but the news here is very positive. Outside a few rare exceptions, your existing X11 applications will still work perfectly fine using the Xwayland compatibility layer. Xwayland does a fantastic job of keeping things running smoothly.

Also, you should remember that KDE has several extra compatibility features on top of Xwayland itself. This includes improved fractional scaling support and opt-in backwards compatibility for X11 global shortcuts and input emulation.

There are some specialized tasks that require adjustment, particularly third-party applications focused on things like taking screenshots or screencasting. Most of those applications have already been adjusted for Wayland, and the remaining ones are making progress quickly. You can also still use X11 forwarding since Xwayland supports it, and Waypipe exists to provide similar functionality for Wayland native applications.

If you’re running a completely different desktop environment, like GNOME, you don’t need to worry about KDE applications. This change only concerns the Plasma desktop environment’s own X11 login session. There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications when they are run outside of Plasma.

According to the developers, dropping the Plasma X11 session lets the team move faster to improve stability and functionality for the majority of users who are already running Wayland.

The transition has been long, but passing this final hurdle will give us a lot of positive changes over the next few years. Things like this happen, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a way back once this is done, so expect it to be a completely Wayland prioritized environment.

Source: KDE Blog