KDE Plasma 6.8 to Drop X11 Support, Goes All-In on Wayland

A growing number of Linux desktop environments (DEs) are moving towards Wayland, the modern display protocol designed to replace the aging X11 window system.

X11 has been the foundation of Linux graphical interfaces for over three decades now, but it carries significant technical debt and security limitations that Wayland aims to address.

Projects like Fedora, GNOME, and KDE have been leading the charge on this by being among the first ones to adopt Wayland.

Now, KDE has announced it is sunsetting the Plasma X11 session entirely.

What's Happening: The KDE Plasma team has made it clear that the upcoming Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive and that the Plasma X11 session will not be included in it.

Support for X11 applications will be handled entirely through Xwayland, a compatibility layer that allows X11 apps to run on Wayland compositors. The Plasma X11 session itself will continue to receive support until early 2027.

Though, the developers have not provided a specific end date yet, as they are working on additional bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7.

The rationale behind this change is to allow the Plasma team to move faster on improving the stability and functionality of the DE. They stated that dropping X11 support will help them adapt without dragging forward legacy support that holds back development.

What to Expect: For most users, this change is said to have minimal immediate impact. KDE says that the vast majority of their users are already using the Wayland session, and it has been the default on most distributions.

Users who still require X11 can opt for long-term support distributions like AlmaLinux 9, for example, which includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until 2032.

The developers also note that gaming performance has improved on Wayland. The session supports adaptive sync, optional tearing, and high-refresh-rate multi-monitor setups out of the box. HDR gaming works with some additional configuration.

Plus, users of NVIDIA GPUs can breathe easy now, as Wayland support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver has matured significantly. Graphics cards supported by the manufacturer work well nowadays. For older NVIDIA hardware, the open source Nouveau driver can be used instead.

There are some issues that the Plasma team is actively working on addressing, things like output mirroring, session restore, and remembering window positions. But overall, they seem well-prepared for this massive shift.

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