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!
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.
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.
Plasma is so good recently
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.
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.
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?
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.
True. Let’s hope and see.
last i looked at what talon requires, their unresolved asks spanned 17 years of wayland development.
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.
