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.
I've been running KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland for more than a year now and for me it works mostly fine, besides initial issues with multi monitor setup (some apps not scaling properly or opening on a wrong monitor by default - Window Rules mostly work) and little annoyances with asking me each single time what window to screenshare once I do the screensharing.
Those are not any deal-breakers for me, though.
Quoting: MayeulCScreensharing / screencasting still don't work natively in Wayland, while it works on X11.Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharingNow I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.
Examples:
- Discord streaming your game screen to the other people in your voice call;
- Teams sharing your screen or a window it doesn't "own" while in a videocall;
- OBS capturing stuff from other program's GUIs and casting in Twitch or other streaming service.
I'm sure there are not the only edge cases. And I'm equally sure there are workarounds. But this is the behavior out of the box for me (Nobara 43, Plasma 6.5.2 on Wayland, ofc).
I understand program isolation and sandboxing. But if the walls of the sandbox are too tall, then one program cannot grab what another is showing, and redirect the stream appropriately.
And this is what I mean for lack of feature parity with X11. X11 can do all of the above by letting one software somehow peek at the private graphic structures of another.
Quoting: ScottCarammellWhuff, seems a bit premature to me but I guess I'm not as smart as the people working on this. Hopefully they'll fix non-mouse-controlled cursors not wanting to show up on Wayland by then or else X4 is cooked for me.
something starting to feel shady about KDE love affair with this broken pos compositor if you ask me. There's nothing wrong with your tale on this. I agree.
Quoting: einherjarThis article reminded me, that I switched to Wayland out of curiosity about half a year ago.
I just forgot about it, everything seems to work.
I use an AMD graphics card though, I have no idea how well it works with Nvidia.
Work's lole s***t and there n lies the problem. Seems as though he has chosen to forgot about half+ the marketshare.
No just the apox half of them now suffering a broken deskto. 🙄
Seriously dude.




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