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.
amazing writing. x11 will be dropped 2027 but dont worry yet because until then 2026 is happening. thanks, didnt expect that!
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.
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.
Im not sure about the politics or many of the reasons, but personally, not a fan of wayland. Its nothing crazy, just things don’t run as well on my hardware. X11 works in my experience, but honestly I don’t know enough to say why.
We’re around the teetering point where X11 still works pretty well especially on older hardware. Like if you’re rocking a GTX-1000 series graphics card I’d go Mint Cinnamon with X11, that’s probably going to be a better experience than Wayland. There’s certain things that X11 permitted that Wayland’s security model outlaws, which is a deal breaker for some, but Wayland is the future.
X11 has it’s issues but i don’t think Wayland is the way either.
Same for me. I’m still kinda new to Linux so I’m not an expert on the matter, but what I’m reading online is that it doesn’t work very well with Nvidia cards, which is what I use.
This is old news. Nvidia did have issues with wayland at first, but that was quickly fixed. Most of my machines have Nvidia graphics cards, and all of them run Wayland flawlessly. I suggest that you try it on your machine if you want to see how well it works in your case though, mileage may vary.
Alright. This Christmas holiday I’m gonna try to make the switch again. And it’s not bad for gaming either?
If you don’t have a preference, I recommend trying out Bazzite.
That’s an entirely different distro right? I’m finally starting to get things right with Arch so I’m not sure if I’m ready to jump ships quite yet, haha. But thanks for the advice! If Wayland messes with my system too much, I might just jump ships.
My 3090 works flawlessly
Yeah i swapped from win10 to Linux with my 3070 and its been nothing but a headache on wayland.
Some people in this thread are saying this isn’t true anymore so I might give it another go over the holidays. One thing I liked about Wayland was that I could have different resolutions for each of my two monitors. Something I can’t seem to get working on X11. Wish me luck!
Oh thats interesting. My three monitors are the same resolution so I never thought to even check if something like that was an issue.
There’s always Trinity or older versions of Plasma that you can use. I actually have the former, as I’m testing that out (since it has XLibre support too). Wayland is just wrong on so many levels, plus on top of that, it’s made by former X11 devs who want to murder X11 and force everyone onto a singular DE, whether it be KDE, GNOME, or anything else IBM and/or FreeDesktop wants to force down our throats.
This comments section is interesting since thats all I have heard about wayland before, and the comments here seem the opposite.
Im not sure i have a particular opinion on the outcome of the anti x11 stuff, but outside waydroid, I have no use for wayland personally.
Still, might try out some other options outside Plasma just to try them.
If you want some X11 by default options, feel free to let me know. I know of some alternatives that help out a lot with the best of both worlds (that being WIP Wayland, though X11 is still usable regardless).
Sure, spam me with cool Linux stuff, I just might like it!
The day talon voice users are forced to dump KDE plasma
I wonder if Trinity had implemented support for Talon Voice and stylus support, since it’s X11 only (or XLibre supported if one wanted to use that).
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.
