this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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KDE Plasma 6.8 (Fall 2026) will be Wayland only (blog.davidedmundson.co.uk)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by hello_hello@hexbear.net to c/libre@hexbear.net
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In Plasma 6.8, there will be no X11 session in the login screen. There will only be a Wayland session available to log into.

In 6.8, all X11-specific code paths in Plasma for Plasma Shell, System Settings, and device configuration will be gone.

This means that the next distribution releases (Fedora 45, Ubuntu 26.10, and Debian 14 in 2027) will ship KDE plasma with only Wayland.

Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland, with a gradual increase every release. The metrics also show that basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore. The platform was already, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by KDE contributors.

This number is most likely sampled by the opt-in telemetry and crash reporting diagnostics. So it could not include those on older plasma releases with X11 or have switched to another desktop for X11.

What do you think? GNOME has already removed X11 from GNOME 50 this year and now KDE is following not that far behind. hat-kid-dance

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[–] MostImportantElection@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago

A good article that was written recently about how Wayland still lags behind X11 in terms of accessibility: https://nocoffei.com/?p=451

[–] marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

XWayland is good enough for legacy apps at this point so there's no reason whatsoever to hold onto the ridiculous mess that is x11. Wayland still needs some obscure features parity, sure, but at this point there's not a good argument against it unlike some other 'modernize linux' changes.

Plus there's always LXDE for legacy hardware.

[–] Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Like someone else has commented, the main thing that seems missing that is important is accessibility. Apparently people that need screen readers or other aids are just hosed as I understand it.

It might be a chicken-and-egg situation though, where nobody focuses on Wayland in this area as X11 is familiar and (still) working, so more display managers moving over might also eventually shift the (probably very limited) Dev resources over. At least I hope so.

[–] marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today 7 points 1 week ago

Screen readers have been solved for a while via OrCA's updates which cover gtk+ and qt applications under wayland, though all of linux really needs better accessibility to compete in that arena. That being said yes as the zeitgeist essentially forces developers off of x11 more will take their knowledge to wayland which will even further speed up the (unfortunately) niche areas of development that might be missed.

There's also government funding for accessibility improvements in linux (like the Newton project from the German government) which should help solve several of the challenges.

[–] Beaver@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

The transition away from X11 had me worried, I felt like the ground was moving out from under me. But XWayland has been working well enough for my necessary legacy apps.

[–] SockOlm@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago

I don't really care what's on the backend, if xorg is no longer maintained I don't see a reason why they should keep supporting it

[–] Inui@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I've been using Bazzite which ripped out x11 a while ago in anticipation of this, so I'm unaffected. If developers want to move to a new protocol that isn't held down by decades of tech debt, then great. There are a few situations I've seen of people having legitimate issues with Wayland missing features, which will be solved in time, and a whole lot more people complaining for the sake of it to the point of using an x11 fork made by a fascist.

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago

The x11 fork guy also isnt an x11 fork he just made x12.

Removing X11 is a net good since it'll force everyone to a new status quo of sorts and leave all the chuds in the dust.

[–] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

At this point my biggest issues with Wayland are that it doesn't remember and restore window positions and "keep on top" doesn't work for e.g.: Firefox popup video window or mpv. I know KDE said they're going to implement window position saving into KWin eventually but why doesn't "keep on top" work?

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There's a workaround in KDE to allow for PiP on top:

It's waiting on the xdg_pip to be merged (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/132) which should be soon (it's hard to tell).

Session restore has been finalized in plasma 6.7 so it's basically a matter of time till apps update to it.

[–] imogen_underscore@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

good news!