The KDE project has announced that its upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop environment will eliminate the X11 session entirely, adopting Wayland as the exclusive option. This move follows similar decisions by GNOME and Budgie developers. The change aims to enable new features, optimizations, and faster development.
The KDE project revealed on November 26, 2025, plans to transition fully to Wayland for KDE Plasma 6.8, ending nearly three decades of reliance on X11. As stated in the announcement, “After nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive!”
This decision aligns with recent shifts by other desktop environments like GNOME and Budgie toward Wayland-only futures. Currently, most Linux distributions shipping KDE Plasma default to the Wayland session, though the X11 option remains available for specific needs.
KDE Plasma 6.8 is scheduled for release in October 2026. At that point, the Plasma X11 session will be removed, with Xwayland handling compatibility for X11 applications within the Wayland session. Support for the X11 session in Plasma will continue until early 2027, extending to users of the KDE Plasma 6.7 release expected in June 2026. Outside of Plasma, X11 support will persist in KDE applications.
The groundwork for this transition began with KDE Plasma 6.4, where the KWin window and compositing manager was separated into distinct X11 and Wayland variants. KDE developers express confidence that NVIDIA GPU users and Linux gamers will encounter no significant Wayland-related issues.
Overall, the shift is expected to unlock opportunities for enhanced features, performance improvements, and accelerated development in the long term.