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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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 9 hours 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.
Quoting: poisondwhat I understand these issues/features mentioned by KiCad have been resolved on wayland its just now up to the app/toolkits to implement the support. When it comes to KiCad it uses wxWidgets which has been really slow to implement anythingQuoting: 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.
As much as it really sucks that anything below a 1650 just isn't gonna work anymore, there are still going to be plenty of desktop environments that'll still support X11. I highly doubt the likes of XFCE and MATE are going to shut X11 off any time soon.
ScottCarammell 7 hours ago
Quoting: dubigrasuYeah this bug still bothers the shit out of me. It also stops the controller cursor from displaying properly in X4 when using Wayland, even on Steam Deck.Quoting: EikeAh, for my OG Steam Controller. On wayland the mouse is not displayed (is present but invisible).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?
There are some workarounds, using gamescope or extest, but none satisfactory. Also some games are still running somewhat worse on wayland (although I could live with that).
All in all I find wayland ready to go, but with some nasty papercuts.
Quoting: pilkAs much as it really sucks that anything below a 1650 just isn't gonna work anymoreactually it's more complicated than that. Pascal, Volta, and Maxwell can still use Wayland, they're just stuck on 580 forever. That is the 10 series, 900 series, and some of the 700 series (745, 750(TI(but not OEM)). Anything that is Kepler-based or older will be stuck on the old 470 driver that doesn't support wayland. Most of the 700-series cards and below fall in this category, as well as some of the 900 laptop chips. look up "list of nvidia graphics processing units" on wikipedia if you want to dive into this mess. Look at the codenames. "GK" is Kepler, "GM" is Maxwell, "GV" is Volta and so on.
Last edited by Stella on 4 Jun 2026 at 10:56 pm UTC
They should focus on covering those types of things quickly now that X11 will poof.
Mountain Man 3 hours ago
Quoting: williamjcmHonestly, it's a goddamn shame X11 is being dropped, because Plasma Wayland is still lacking an off switch for its built-in drawing tablet support (preventing people from using official or other drivers as the two will interfere), and judging by [a blog post](https://nocoffei.com/?p=451) I've read a few days ago, Wayland in general is still lacking a lot of accessibility features meaning that people who need those features won't be able to use KDE Plasma anymore.There are issues like that.
And frankly, until Wayland finally becomes the default for many with no other option, these issues will be way too marginal for anyone to tackle.
Once it is default, though, the pressure - and therefore the chance of fixes of more marginal/edge case issues - will increase.
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