KDE developer David Edmundson has blogged about the upcoming purge of X11, as KDE Plasma moves to a Wayland-only world. As previously announced last year, KDE Plasma is doing away with the X11 session as the Linux world moves on fully towards Wayland and now Edmundson has a new blog post up to talk a little about moving forward.
Edmundson mentions in the post that "As of today, the Plasma X11 session you can log into has been officially removed, and we will start a mass cleanup of X11-specific code soon". This change will arrive in Plasma 6.8 so that's when it will affect end-users who will wave goodbye to X11 where only Wayland will be a session login option.
For Plasma 6.8 they said "all X11-specific code paths in Plasma for Plasma Shell, System Settings, and device configuration will be gone".
Of course with the likes of XWayland, most apps will continue working as normal. Wayland the protocol and Plasma support for Wayland is working very nicely nowadays, I've been running it for quite some time now without problems gaming and in general day-to-day work. Nice and smooth.
Edmundson did note also that "Plasma Login Manager will continue to be able to log you into X11 sessions of other desktop environments".
The main point though is this gives the KDE team one area of focus, instead of trying to retain compatibility across two rather different systems - they can spend more time improving Plasma with Wayland and Plasma desktop as a whole.
Their own internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are already on Wayland, with it gradually increasing with each release so this will really only affect a small minority of holdouts and "basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore" so you pretty much have to move anyway.
Plasma 6.8 is due out around October 14th.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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But outside of gaming Plasma Wayland works on all systems I tested even on intel graphics from around mid 2000's.
Quoting: poisondRIP KDE😆
I'm on KDE on X at the moment, but Wayland is the future, and they're not doing this for fun.
Getting rid of old convoluted code every now and then is a good thing.
Dmitri Seletski 2 hours ago
I thought X11 libraries are still needed to for any proton and Linux games explicitly depending on X11?(X11 apps were running local X11 server within Wayland environment, or so i thought)
I know proton in some at least or may be most games now supports Wayland. But its not working with Wayland by default.
Is there emulation layer or anything in KDE or in wayland protocol itself?
Because if its the case, than yea, i agree with poisond, RIP KDE.
Liam Squires-Hand 2 hours ago
Quoting: Dmitri SeletskiI am a little confused.You're thinking of XWayland.
I thought X11 libraries are still needed to for any proton and Linux games explicitly depending on X11?(X11 apps were running local X11 server within Wayland environment, or so i thought)
I know proton in some at least or may be most games now supports Wayland. But its not working with Wayland by default.
Is there emulation layer or anything in KDE or in wayland protocol itself?
Because if its the case, than yea, i agree with poisond, RIP KDE.
And this means that in the (not too?) distant future, SteamOS and Steam themselves could support, or even move to, Wayland - with the obvious fallback of XWayland kept around just in case.
williamjcm 1 hour ago
Last edited by williamjcm on 4 Jun 2026 at 10:53 am UTC
Quoting: syylkPretty sure the KDE team somehow discussed and got the greenlight for this change from one of their most valuable customers: Valve.SteamOS 3.8 (Beta) already moved to Wayland, the desktop session defaults to Wayland now. Steam itself is still XWayland.
And this means that in the (not too?) distant future, SteamOS and Steam themselves could support, or even move to, Wayland - with the obvious fallback of XWayland kept around just in case.
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