A group of developers has created SonicDE, a new desktop environment that restores and extends X11 capabilities from KDE Plasma. The project emerged after KDE announced plans to remove the X11 session from Plasma 6.8.
SonicDE began as a KWin patchset called kwin-x11-improved. Joseph Crowell merged it with the full KWin/X11 source in September 2025 under the name KDE-Lite and rebranded it SonicDE by December.
The project now includes 40 GitHub repositories. Its core components are sonic-win for window management, sonic-workspace for environment functions, and sonic-desktop-interface for the shell. Additional forks handle networking, audio, screen locking, and login sessions.
SonicDE ships with a Silver theme and login screen. It is built to remain independent of any init system and aims to support BSD systems alongside Linux.
Packages are available for Arch Linux-based distributions, Debian, Devuan, Artix Linux, and Vendefoul Wolf. Work continues on builds for Gentoo, NixOS, OpenMandriva, and FreeBSD.