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.
Plasma is so good recently
Agreed, the efforts to increase code reuse and remove cruft has helped a lot with stability.
I still have some odd behavior but it’s much more trustworthy than early 6.4 and 6.3
yes it has improved a lot within the past year. I went from hating it a year ago to using it as my second DE for gaming. I hate to use this phrase but “It just works”. And honestly once they roll out their workspace thing for multimonitor setups in Feb I might switch from Niri to it and make it my daily driver.
I was always a huge KDE fan, and preferred it over alternatives, but even I must admit, it had a bunch of very frustrating problems in the past. I hadn’t had any problems with it last many years, good to know it’s not just my experience, it means they’re really improved it and it’s not just me grew complacent
10 years ago, I tried KDE and I hated it. Infact, I always thought KDE sucked. About three years ago, I tried it again and it was surprisingly better. I love that I didn’t have to spend multiple hours to just get it tweaked right.
I can’t put my finger on why, it might just have been the default theme, but when I tried KDE several years ago, it felt dead. The way an abandoned website feels dead. Like how Team Fortress Classic servers feel dead. That has dissipated somehow.