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 2026. 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.