KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Drop X11 Session, Ending a 15-Year Wayland Transition

KDE has removed the X11 session from Plasma’s development branch, making Plasma 6.8 — due in roughly five months — the first release that boots only into Wayland. All X11-specific code paths in Plasma Shell, System Settings, and device configuration will be stripped out. XWayland stays, so legacy X11 applications continue to run, and KDE apps used on other desktops will keep working under X11 indefinitely. SDDM can still log users into X11 sessions belonging to other desktop environments.

The data backing the cutover is striking: KDE’s internal telemetry and Sentry crash reports both show over 95% of Plasma 6.6 users already on Wayland, with effectively no developer activity left on the X11 side. The lone holdouts are users still on the older Plasma 5.27 LTS, who won’t be affected since the change isn’t retroactive. Maintainer David Edmundson frames the dual code paths as a ceiling on what the project can ship, and argues a single Wayland target unlocks performance work and features that were previously blocked by lowest-common-denominator constraints.

Plasma 6.7, shipping in days, is the final release with an X11 session. KDE is explicitly soliciting bug reports from anyone whose workflow still forces them back to X11, acknowledging that scripts and niche tooling may need to change and that not every gap will close before 6.8.