KDE to drop X11 session in KDE Plasma 6.8

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.