KDE Plasma going all-in on Wayland and will drop the X11 session completely

It was only a matter of time but it's nearly upon us - KDE Plasma with version 6.8 will be entirely dropping the X11 session to go full Wayland.

For a lot of users it won't make much of a difference, according to the blog post announcement as the "vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session". With this change they said it "opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development". Not surprising, since developing for and maintaining the Plasma desktop across two very different protocols can't be easy. At least they'll end up with more focused development.

So with this move support for all X11 applications will be "fully entrusted to Xwayland".

In the FAQ they mentioned the current Plasma X11 session will be supported still into early 2027, no exact timing as of yet though. If you really need X11, they're suggesting sticking to a long term support (LTS) distribution that ships older Plasma. If you are using X11 and sticking with it a while, the good news is that KDE applications will continue to run on X11. They're only dropping support specifically for the Plasma desktop itself.

There's still some significant issues they need to address though, which they're gradually working through to ensure Plasma on Wayland is truly good for everyone.

We're finally properly close to the year of Wayland on the desktop.