KDE Desktop says goodbye to X11 mode and fully commits to Wayland
In early 2027, and thus a little more than a year after Gnome, KDE also wants to remove support for X11 and fully rely on Wayland.
(Image: Screenshot Tim SchĂĽrmann)
KDE Plasma will only be able to generate the user interface using Wayland from version 6.8 onwards. The project intends to maintain support for the desktop's X11 mode until early 2027 via the 6.7 version line. This means the second major desktop in the Linux space is following the example of the Gnome project, which is dropping support for operation with the X server Xorg these days. Consequently, the user interface in the versions of Fedora Linux Workstation and Ubuntu Desktop released a few weeks ago now only runs in Wayland mode.
KDE applications continue to work with X servers
KDE developers emphasize that applications written for X11 will continue to run as usual with Xwayland. Furthermore, the move away from the over 35-year-old X11 applies only to the Plasma user interface, not to KDE applications: these are intended to continue running under X11 environments. From there, applications executed remotely via ssh can then be displayed locally using Xwayland – as before. Alternatively, this is also possible with Waypipe without X11.
In a detailed FAQ accompanying the announcement KDE developers address some common questions, clearly aiming to counteract some Wayland myths. For example, the Nvidia driver is said to now offer good Wayland support. Accessibility support is a broad topic, making definitive statements difficult, but X11 and Wayland modes are on a comparable level. For support on BSD variants, the FAQ refers to FreeBSD, which has included Wayland for some time. The developers also want to resolve known issues with Wayland mode (some of them soon), but at the same time do not promise to eliminate all of them.
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Long-term Linux distributions as a fallback
There is no exact timeline for the end of X11 support in Plasma yet. For users who continue to rely on X11 operation with Xorg, the developers recommend using a Linux distribution with long-term support. They explicitly refer here to AlmaLinux 9, which includes KDE Plasma and is expected to receive security updates until 2032.
(afl)
