KDE to Drop X11 Support in Future Plasma Desktop Release

KDE has announced a major shift: future versions of Plasma Desktop will go Wayland-only. X11 sessions will no longer be supported starting in 2027.

With the February 2024 release of KDE Plasma 6, Wayland became the default display server. Initially, developers didn’t plan to remove X11/Kwin support before Plasma 7. However, this year the Kwin codebases were split – one for X11 and one for Wayland – as reported here.

(Image via KDE)

Now, KDE has officially announced that xorg/X11 will be completely removed. The plan is to make Wayland exclusive in Plasma 6.8. that release is still some time away. Currently, the latest version is KDE Plasma 6.5, released in October 2025, and it does still support X11 sessions. KDE suggests that Long Term Support (LTS) distributions shipping with older Plasma versions will be a good option for users who require X11 support.

don’t worry, you can still use the Xwayland compatibility layer.