With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE’s history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE. Of course, this change won’t make it to people’s computers until 6.8 actually releases, but as far the code goes, the X11 session is gone. Once 6.8 is actually released, you will only be able to log into a Wayland KDE session.
This won’t affect KDE applications running in other X11 desktop environments, and of course, X11 applications will keep working in KDE as well thanks to XWayland. It’s also important to note that this won’t affect anyone sticking to older versions of KDE Plasma; it’s not like X11 session support will be yanked retroactively. From here on out, a lot of X11 code will be removed from KDE, and developers will be able to focus on just one code path, instead of accommodating the lowest common denominator in X11.
Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland, with a gradual increase every release. The metrics also show that basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore. The platform was already, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by KDE contributors.
↫ David Edmundson
The transition from legacy X11 to Wayland has been a long, painful journey, but I’m glad we’re finally reaching the destination. If you’re still having issues with KDE on Wayland, be sure you’re using an up-to-date distribution – not an LTS one – and see how that goes for you.
So long KDE. I’ll stick to X11 for a couple more years.
You could always be one of the select few that move to Sonic: https://sonicde.org/
But it appears that being the “best DE for Wayland” has helped KDE quite a bit:
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/history:
SonicDE is a nice idea but I’m not touching anything associated with the fascist and vibecoded X11 fork. I’ll stick with Xfce; its own Wayland implementation should be ready around the same time I’m ready for Wayland myself.
@Morgan
The FAQ for xfwl4 still says “aiming for sometime in the middle of 2026”
https://wiki.xfce.org/xfwl4_faq
And progress looks great:
https://gitlab.xfce.org/kelnos/xfwl4/-/boards
And in an April Mastadon post, Hachyderm said this about the current state of xfwl4: “it gave me a full xfce desktop right off the bat. Didn’t expect that. Things are a little off yet, but it is functioning. Impressive, most impressive.”
https://hachyderm.io/@kevinbowen/116356058499862185”
So, I was still expecting xfwl4 to ship in XFCE 4.22 around the end of the year.
However, Kevin Bowen of XFCE added this comment to the thread above: “Don’t quote me on this; but, we _might_ enter public beta for #xfwl4 later this year. I don’t expect it to be ready for our 4.22 release. But, good progress is being made.”
So, perhaps an XFCE 4.22 release is not in the cards. We will see.
According to my link above, the four most popular desktop environments on Arch Linux are KDE Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, and COSMIC (in that order).
Once Plasma 6.8 ships, three of the top four will be Wayland only. And XFCE is close to completing its Wayland-native compositor (window manager). The rest of XFCE already runs native on Wayland and some distros ship it running Wayland already. xfwl4 completes the migration: https://gitlab.xfce.org/kelnos/xfwl4/-/boards
So we have 4 to 5 years left. (Experienced XFCE zealot here.)
They’re in no hurry, as per usual.
I am glad they are taking their time rather than rushing through.
I’ve finished transitioning my Linux laptops and desktops and my FreeBSD desktops, but things are still a bit funky for me in FreeBSD laptop land.
I am also having troubles with my oddball setup (4x single link DVI driving an IBM T221) – very easy to do with X11 and I still don’t know how to do it with wayland (I need the four outputs/screens to be the same “canvas”) otherwise I am stuck in 14Hz land.
Much as i also want them to take their time to put out a quality product i feel like a lot of their speed has mostly been down to there not being a super high amount of XFCE devs. Those that are there also do seem to be on the older side too, not really a lot of younger people or new contributers to the project. Tbh i dont think ive even really heard of the devs trying to do much outreach of any sort, they dont seem to get much attention from or integrate with the wider Linux community these days for better or worse. They dont need to if their only goal is to keep current users but things like this really long transition could hurt them longer term
Shugo,
There’s no doubt they have fewer resources, however I actually believe that most of XFCE’s userbase appreciates their slower pace. It’s kind of a breath of fresh air compared to the “move fast break things” attitude that makes other desktops aggregating at times.
Most of us aren’t against progress, but there’s a reason the Pottering style of project management is so hated in the community. Linux contributors need to be technically skilled, but they can still be bad project managers if they’re not well rounded. Unfortunately they keep giving linux black eyes Linux can do better, but it takes a more selfless personality to put the community above oneself and aim to keep drama at a minimum.
I guess there’s a question as to which approach is most favored by survival of the fittest. It could be that the dictator management approach is simultaneously more hated yet more successful. While XFCE might not be able to displace bigger fish, I still feel their userbase has been relatively happy with them.
@Shugo
Much of XFCE already works on Wayland. All the apps but also the panel, the launcher, and other things. On one machine I even use some of these XFCE components with Niri (Wayland).. Distros like SUSE ship XFCE on Wayland by default using a Wayland compositor like Labwc. The missing piece is that XFCE has no Wayland compositor of its own.
The original plan was to make xfwm4 work on both X11 and Wayland. That plan has been abandoned which is where some of the time has gone. In January, it was announced that a single developer would be creating a new Wayland compositor from scratch in Rust using Smithay, which is also the basis for COSMIC. Progress has been pretty good and xfwl4 is getting close. I expect it to be in good shape to use when XFCE 4.22 ships. Which means you will be able to use XFCE as an entirely native desktop environment sometime around the end of this year.
XFCE users are fairly conservative. I do not think that it will take them so long to make Wayland a first-class option that it will hurt the project much. They may even switch over to Wayland as the default before Cinnamon (Linux Mint).
@Shuinbird
In XFCE, the xfwl4 Wayland compositor is being created from scratch. It does not share any code with the xfwm4 window manager which is being left alone and in place. xfwl4 is being designed to share things like settings and configuration as much as possible. So, you should be able to launch XFCE as either Wayland or X11 as you wish. As xfwm4 does not take much maintenance, XFCE may remain a viable choice on X11 for a long time. You can completely ignore the Wayland compositor if you want.
Most Linux distros will probably start to ship XFCE as Wayland by default. I think even BSD will go Wayland too but, with desktops like XFCE available, it may not be as much of a forced transition as it has been on Linux.
The real forced march will come when toolkits like GTK5 go Wayland only. But desktop Linux will be 99% Wayland by then and DE users on BSD will mostly be Wayland as well.
@Andreas
As an old XFCE user myself, I get where you are coming from. But even though xfwl4 (the Wayland compositor) was only started in January, I expect a first release in a couple of months. That is, if you want to build it yourself.
The next stable release of the XFCE project will be 4.22 around the end of the year. It will include xfwl4 for those that want to use Wayland. Of course, xfwm4 running on X11 will probably still be the default and perhaps still the better overall experience at first. Time will tell what happens in 4.24 and beyond.
@Andreas
Writing this comment in Firefox on XFCE using xfwl4 on Chimera Linux. I built the latest version of xfwl4 today and I am quite impressed. It is already the best compositor to use with XFCE if you want to use Wayland I would say. I am going to run it for a week or two and see if I run into any bugs (none yet).
An old article I know but I thought you might be interested to know that the official XFCE Wayland compositor (xfwl4) is essentially functional already. I would really surprise me if it does not ship in the next release of XFCE (expected in December).
I had to build a couple of 4.21 libraries to build xfwl4 but other wise I am using all the standard XFCE 4.20 stuff.
I’ll just wait for the next display server protocol, preferably one that is actually a graphics API and not a security framework.