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 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.