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After GNOME and Budgie developers announced that they would go Wayland-only for future releases, it’s time for the KDE Plasma developers to do the same, stating that it will open the door to new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development in the longer term.

It’s true that most of today’s distros that ship the KDE Plasma desktop environment default to using the Plasma Wayland session for most scenarios, but the Plasma X11 session is also there for those who need it.

So, starting with the KDE Plasma 6.8 release, which will be out sometime in October 2026, the Plasma X11 session will be removed, and Xwayland will be used by the Plasma Wayland session to support X11 applications.

“For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session, it’s the default on most distributions, and some of them have already dropped — or are planning to drop — the Plasma X11 session independently of what we decide,” said the KDE project.

The KDE project also says that they plan to support the Plasma X11 session until early 2027, about six months from the release of KDE Plasma 6.8, for users using the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.7 release, due out in June 2026. They also said they’ll support X11 in KDE applications outside of Plasma.

A first step into going Wayland-only was already made with the KDE Plasma 6.4 series, as the KWin window and composite manager was split into separate X11 and Wayland versions. Moreover, the KDE developers are confident that NVIDIA GPU users and Linux gamers won’t have any major issues with Wayland.