The KDE project has made the call.
Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.
↫ The Plasma Team
They’re following in the footsteps of the GNOME project, who will also be leaving the legacy windowing system behind. What this means in practice is that official KDE X11 support will cease once KDE Plasma 6.7 is no longer supported, which should be somewhere early 2027. Do note that the KDE developers intend to release a few extra bugfix releases in the 6.7 release cycle to stabilise the X11 session as much as possible for those people who are going to stick with KDE Plasma 6.7 to keep X11 around.
For people who wish to keep using X11 after that point, the KDE project advises them to switch to LTS distributions like Alma Linux, which intend to keep supporting Plasma X11 until 2032. Xwayland will handle virtually all X11 applications running inside the Wayland session, including X11 forwarding, with similar functionality implemented in Wayland through Waypipe. Also note that this only applies to Plasma as a whole; KDE applications will continue to support X11 when run in other desktop environments or on other platforms.
As for platforms other than Linux – FreeBSD already has relatively robust Wayland support, so if you intend to run KDE on FreeBSD in the near future, you’ll have to move over to Wayland there, as well. The other BSD variants are also dabbling with Wayland support, so it won’t be long before they, too, will be able to run the KDE Plasma Wayland session without any issues.
What this means is that the two desktop environments that probably make up like 95% of the desktop Linux user base will now be focusing exclusively on Wayland, which is great news. X11 is a legacy platform and aside from retrocomputing and artisanal, boutique setups, you simply shouldn’t be using it anymore. Less popular desktop environments like Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, and LXQt are also adding Wayland support, so it won’t be much longer before virtually no new desktop Linux installations will be using X11.
One X down, one more to go.
>”For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session”
Great to read this line. Because I expect that at least a few people will respond like always that Wayland is “not ready” or even that nobody is going to use it and that we should all just continue with Xorg. Like GNOME, the reason that KDE can drop X is because few of their users rely on it anymore.
It is really good to see that FreeBSD will be moving to Wayland as well (at least for Plasma). GNOME is making that a lot harder, not because of Wayland but because of Systemd.
As somebody that is typing on Plasma Wayland right now, I cannot wait to hear more about all these great features that they think going Wayland only will unlock. Good stuff I hope.
GNOME and Plasma are not 95% of desktop Linux users but they must be at least two-thirds. There are probably 10-15% of desktop users on either Cinnamon or XFCE so Xorg is not heading into the sunset quite yet. Cinnamon is still X11 by default and may be for most of 2026. XFCE is an interesting place where some distros ship it Wayland only (like SUSE) but most XFCE desktops are X11 as there is still no “native” XFCE4 compositor (XFWM4 itself has not been ported). Most of what is left will be old school window managers. Hyprland, Niri, and Sway have pulled many tiling fans over to Wayland but the dozens of other X11 window managers still represent a few percent of desktop users. A wildcard for 2026 will be how popular COSMIC becomes (Wayland only).
GNOME and Plasma dropping X11 is a big symbolic milestone to be sure but as the first sentence quoted above says, that moment will not actually be that eventful. At least 70% and probably 80% of desktop Linux users are already on Wayland and not going back.
Linux makes me constantly think of jurassic park:
“John, we have all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo.”
Pulling X has made since for years. Pushing a compatibility layer makes sense. But why did we wait 2 decades? Why do we ever wait so long for everything?
Btw wayland is nice. A bit more memory footprint. Feels snappy, tho.
People are scared of change,
People can’t agree on what/how to change.
People think “new” equates to the wild west where there’s no stability or support.
Old habits die hard.
The desire to be the “last man standing”.
Denial.
Those are just some of the things that come to mind.
There’s always going to be more people wanting something better than people who are committed to making it happen.
I like Wayland but I’m still waiting for the DEs to get the clipboard to work like it’s worked in Microsoft and Apple OSes since the mid 1980s.
“The other BSD variants are also dabbling with Wayland support, so it won’t be long before they, too, will be able to run the KDE Plasma Wayland session without any issues.”
Dude, please stop having extremely strong opinions on things you’re clueless about.
Please point out where this is wrong? There’s tons of work around bringing Wayland compositors to both OpenBSD and NetBSD, and FreeBSD is at the point already where it’s included in their handbook alongside X.org.
It’s only a matter of time.
“It’s only a matter of time.”
Easy to say from someone not actually doing the work. You’re just as bad as Michael from Moronix.
And youre commenting here? If you think the commentary isnt worth much Im sure you can find a site that is better for you
I see no wrong in the statement. Even if it requires a lot of effort, that will come, with time given that it seems to have the will from developers.
You should take a look at this to see where NetBSD is with Wayland. From the way I read it, it will take quite a while, if at all, for NetBSD to have a workable Wayland due to all the “Linuxisms” attached to Wayland.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and
I have read similar issues on OpenBSD, but I do not know where they stand in regards to Wayland.
I just hope this doesn’t interrupt FreeBSD’s plans to bring a KDE desktop option to their installer in the next release. Because that was planned to be the X11 session.
FreeBSD has removed the KDE / Plasma Packages from the ISO because the size of it has exceeded the maximum to fit on a DVD Medium and they wanted to keep it possible for people to install from the physical medium.
Seems stupid to build your plans around something that’s being deprecated. It’s not like the move to Wayland has been kept a secret.
Yes but, now that we talked about Aluminium, on Android you can run X11 apps. Can you run Wayland apps?
>”For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session”
I’m glad to hear it too. I updated to Gnome 49 a while ago and rebooted the computer. I read that X11 was force disabled but forgot about it.
It took me less than 60 seconds to understand that something was very wrong. All windows started on top left of my screen, wrong sizes, including splashscreen popups that are usually, well you know, centered on the screen. Half of the windows had weird (and unique) borders decorations (Spotify decorations are now straight from Windows XP era, anyone know what’s going on with that?). Lot’s of them don’t even have shadows, or inconsistent ones. Some applications I close into the app tray, when they are on the half right part of my screen, on restore they are top left.
Drag and drop, clipboard, work even less reliably than before. Applications not installed into the system have no more icons (sorry to be a developer, I don’t install the softwares I’m compiling). I’ve experienced the first computer crash of 2025. Then some more.
But hey, at least I no longer have black screens with most video games, like last time I tried wayland, so that’s that. And I’ve got to say, desktop as a whole is probably snappier, but is that really Wayland, or gnome developers that started actively sabotaging X11 session a while ago?
I’ll wait for someone to yell at me that everything is great now.
IIRC x started in the mid 80s.
The argument for/against X is legacy. Too much legacy, after all these decades, no?
Growing pains are to be expected.
….if you were to believe the hype, it is because wayland is ‘more secure’ and turns off inter-app snooping. (Does it, tho?)
I guess, if I were my usual cynically optimistic self, I’d say ‘welcome to the future. It isnt as fun as you thought it would be.’
But it’s what we got.
/puts it in my non existent pipe and smokes it
Your experience is pretty close to my own with Wayland, and add on top some applications just not working in Wayland at all. What really sucks is several of my friends have switched to linux this year, and on my advice installed distros with KDE, all of them ended up switching from Wayland to X11 because they had issues under Wayland, and now I feel like a chump for recommending KDE.
> . What this means in practice is that official KDE X11 support will cease once KDE Plasma 6.7 is no longer supported, which should be somewhere early 2026.
Its 2027, not 2026.
Running Debian 14 with MATE/Wayfire here. The sooner Wayland is mainstreamed for MATE in distributions the better. It works fantastically on large screens, on laptops it needs some fixes but the core system works well.
Wayland became good enough in recent months so it’s time for x11 to die
Please do not trivialize the tremendous effort it represents for BSDs Wayland porting. They are already dedicating too much for accommodating the dependency of SystemD for some Desktops, and now they have to put resources on Wayland. It is not that I like X11, but I do think Wayland should be more multiplatform oriented.
bemcl
I agree that linux devs who don’t care about other platforms have it a lot easier than other devs who are forced to care about linux. Whether we like the dominant standards or not, there’s no denying it’s strangling alternatives and pressuring us towards mono-culture. I wish systemd would stick to doing one thing and one thing well, but they want to take over more specialized daemons too and while some forks are resisting, as top dog redhat usually wins these things.
Today, Linux — driven in large part by Red Hat’s influence — is moving toward heavy integration, increasing complexity, and high levels of abstraction, whereas Unix emphasized extreme modularity and simplicity. I’m not a great fan of these over-engineered systems that no one truly understands anymore, especially knowing how many resources they require just to keep them running.
X11 was/is a very flexible protocol. Wayland is simplistic and leaves a large portion of “features” to a plethora of fragmented compositors. And… frankly, none are very “complete” in comparison. Sure. Death to X11, etc., but truth is truth. I’d like to see advancements in Wayland compositors (way too many) and maybe “one” will show signs of handling “everything” that X11 was capable of, but I think we’re years away from that. So… I get it, but it’s a step backwards for the end user, likely for years.
chriscox,
I agree, that is a real problem with wayland’s design. Contrary to the stereotypes, I am not a die hard X11 fan, it’s an old code base with lots of hacks. But unfortunately the engineering of wayland results in duplication of work and fragmentation of features. Whether you use gnome, kde, cinnamon, mate, xfce, cde, etc makes a difference as to what will work. I just ordered a pen tablet digitizer as an xmas gift for the kids, but whether or not it will work now and in the future is a real concern in a way that would not have been as much of a concern with X. The kids computer runs cinnamon and I’ve taken a bit of a gamble as to whether or not it’s going to work. The hardware is known to work on X releases, but it’s a bit stressful not knowing if a wayland upgrade will break it given the manufacturers don’t explicitly make any promises. I’m looking forward to the day everything just works on wayland regardless of desktop and I don’t have to worry about it, but I honestly hate that the rollout has been such a rocky path.
I’ve seen this argument before but what I haven’t seen is a plethora of end users actually being impacted in a meaningful way. I’m sure there are examples but the number of people who’ve moved to Wayland and moved back to X11 seem far smaller than those who moved and stayed (with or without complaints).
Unfortunately, X11 is no longer usable. I currently use a multi-monitor setup with different resolutions, and with X11 it’s impossible to handle it correctly. With Wayland everything works perfectly. It’s time to leave X11 behind.
I’m saying this from a practical point of view, because otherwise I would have to switch to Windows or use only one monitor, and that’s not an option. I understand Wayland still needs improvement, but X11 no longer meets current requirements.
Dropping X11 support entirely when so many things simply do not work with Wayland is going to kill linux adoption in the desktop space. People who have good stable builds using X11 are going to jump ship back to windows when everything breaks all of the sudden after what they thought was a normal update. It’s Windows 11 all over again. And if you think this is a good thing then you are clueless.
Thankfully, for those who aren’t on the Wayland train, there’s SonicDE to maintain an X11 version of the KDE components that drop support.
I honestly like this very much:
– To have a plan and a definition
– There is plenty of time to prepare for the shift
– There is time to fix the biggest annoyances
– Free resources to focus on Wayland
In case of anything, if x11 is still needed. there will be plenty of other offers or users can stay on 6.8 for a bit longer