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PayPalKDE 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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Quoting: Caldathrasyea, it's really bad for owners of old Kepler-based GPUs that are no longer supported by Nvidia and essentially stuck with nouveau or nvidia-470. according to this https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia you need at least nvidia-495 for the wayland session to work, and 555 for xwayland apps. This essentially locks them out entirely from wayland. hose people either need to find one of the ever-shrinking number of distros that continue to ship x11, or buy some new hardware ( a terrible prospect in the current economy)Quoting: kuunha- XWayland support remains present, so X11 applications (Including games) will continue to workExcellent summary. However, it does mean that KDE is abandoning anyone who has a video card whose drivers won't support Wayland. Not sure how this will impact Intel iGPUs or older AMD GPUs, but Nvidia will definitely be impacted. Those with older cards will have to fall back to the less robust Nouveau drivers or switch to a different desktop that still supports X11.
Quoting: Eikehttps://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/Quoting: dubigrasuWell, it was time to rip the bandage. That being said, hello (whatever X11 DE are still available), since I still need X11.Why?
It's not like I didn't give wayland a fair chance.
The project is just plain unusable for any desktop application without everybody inventing their own protocol extensions because the developers insist on keeping it unusable.
As for KDE, I tried again last week - they can't even position the tooltips correctly on wayland.
PlayingOnLinuxphone 3 minutes ago
Quoting: poisondAs for KDE, I tried again last week - they can't even position the tooltips correctly on wayland.That only happens to me on one application that is using XWayland with multiple windows on three or more monitors - an edge-case scenario. And to my knowledge someone is working towards Wayland support for it.