The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.
The team behind the KDE Plasma desktop announced it is going all-in on a Wayland future. The Plasma version 6.8, “which we expect will be sometime in early 2027,” will completely drop X11 support.
You don’t need to worry just yet. Plasma 6.5 appeared less than a month ago, and it’s currently at version 6.5.3. That means there are the entire 6.6 and 6.7 release sequences to get through, which will probably take most of 2026 and some of 2027.
Or stylus users. If the stylus functionality won’t be fixed in Wayland when this change happens, I’ll have stop my regular donation to KDE and start looking for another desktop environment to support.
Or maybe all those things will work two years from now. And if some issues remain there’s still LTS support for a while in multiple distros, since this only affects future versions.
last i looked at what talon requires, their unresolved asks spanned 17 years of wayland development.
The requirements are generally things that were designed away on purpose from Wayland. Even if KDE plasma had a workaround solution, they would need to communicate with all other distros to make sure all distros have similar solutions so accessibility feature devs don’t have to make a version of their application for every distro, and KDE Devs themselves have said that they “don’t want to allow users to shoot themselves in the foot by letting the application bypass security features” as if application A knowing the coordinates of a window in application B has any security implication whatsoever.
Wayland is fundamentally designed without accessibility in mind at all, and will virtually never work with it. The current status is still after 17 years “tough shit” and that infuriates me.
True. Let’s hope and see.
I was surprised at the amount of things that just broke when I tried Wayland a couple of months ago, but that’s a lot of time to fix bugs and implement missing features.
Improvements for Input devices (particularly stylus and drawing tablets, but any kind of input) is one of the 3 overarching “goals” of KDE at the moment
Thank you, I didn’t know this, it’s comforting and gives a bit of hope!
This isn’t happening for another year or so, there’s time to get styli working
Good to hear! Keeping my fingers crossed.
Out of interest, which specific features / functionality is missing at the moment that you would be waiting for?
The main one is the Wacom stylus & screen, on a Thinkpad X1Extreme. I tried Wayland from a live Kubuntu 24.04, and in settings there was the message “Unsupported platform detected. Currently only X11 is supported”. At that point I didn’t check anything else. I also noticed that the desktop and windows weren’t so “crisp” as they were under X11, although I can’t exactly explain where the feeling came from; probably I would have chosen X11 even if the stylus had worked.
I suspect that I can actually login on a Wayland session even now; I’ll try it out as soon as I have time.