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.
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!
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.
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?