The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.
The team behind the KDE Plasma desktop announced it is going all-in on a Wayland future. The Plasma version 6.8, “which we expect will be sometime in early 2027,” will completely drop X11 support.
You don’t need to worry just yet. Plasma 6.5 appeared less than a month ago, and it’s currently at version 6.5.3. That means there are the entire 6.6 and 6.7 release sequences to get through, which will probably take most of 2026 and some of 2027.
So what exactly is wrong with X11? I find X to be absolutely great, and it is great for me to use POSIX apps across multiple architectures and systems.
Like what is it about Wayland that absolutely shits on X11 and makes people want to ditch X?X11 doesn’t support a number of modern features well (e.g. fractional scaling) and has a fundamentally insecure operational model that makes it hard to prevent keylogging/screengrabbing, and the developers found it so hard to evolve & work with over time that they decided to start over with a more modular and conservative approach.
While it was a painful transition, I believe it’s worth it. But I don’t think that the accessibility story has developed enough to make the deprecation of X11 a good idea…
Dude honestly get a life and stop that block evasion. I’m tired of blocking you on every instance.
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If block evasion was my goal, I’d just randomize each account name, it’d be far more efficient
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This is an old account
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Hm yes how horrible, 2-3 clicks and a mere second to add an account to your block. The horror.
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amazing writing. x11 will be dropped 2027 but dont worry yet because until then 2026 is happening. thanks, didnt expect that!
Plasma is so good recently
Agreed, the efforts to increase code reuse and remove cruft has helped a lot with stability.
I still have some odd behavior but it’s much more trustworthy than early 6.4 and 6.3
Im not sure about the politics or many of the reasons, but personally, not a fan of wayland. Its nothing crazy, just things don’t run as well on my hardware. X11 works in my experience, but honestly I don’t know enough to say why.
running GDM on two laptops, same models etc. Wayland glitches out all the time compared to x11.
- windows flickering in/out of existence
- random screen flickering
- random screen artifacts
- DPI scaling issues
- screen sharing doesn’t work
x11 just works. like, no problems. I get it, new stuff etc, but Wayland has a long way to go before I switch.
My first time installing Linux it had a weird issue where whenever I opened a graphical app or game, it would randomly blur the screen, never knew when it would happen it just was inevitable. Swapping to x11 made the problem go away. Still no idea why it happened.
We’re around the teetering point where X11 still works pretty well especially on older hardware. Like if you’re rocking a GTX-1000 series graphics card I’d go Mint Cinnamon with X11, that’s probably going to be a better experience than Wayland. There’s certain things that X11 permitted that Wayland’s security model outlaws, which is a deal breaker for some, but Wayland is the future.
X11 has it’s issues but i don’t think Wayland is the way either.
Same for me. I’m still kinda new to Linux so I’m not an expert on the matter, but what I’m reading online is that it doesn’t work very well with Nvidia cards, which is what I use.
My 3090 works flawlessly
Yeah i swapped from win10 to Linux with my 3070 and its been nothing but a headache on wayland.
Some people in this thread are saying this isn’t true anymore so I might give it another go over the holidays. One thing I liked about Wayland was that I could have different resolutions for each of my two monitors. Something I can’t seem to get working on X11. Wish me luck!
Oh thats interesting. My three monitors are the same resolution so I never thought to even check if something like that was an issue.
There’s always Trinity or older versions of Plasma that you can use. I actually have the former, as I’m testing that out (since it has XLibre support too). Wayland is just wrong on so many levels, plus on top of that, it’s made by former X11 devs who want to murder X11 and force everyone onto a singular DE, whether it be KDE, GNOME, or anything else IBM and/or FreeDesktop wants to force down our throats.
This comments section is interesting since thats all I have heard about wayland before, and the comments here seem the opposite.
Im not sure i have a particular opinion on the outcome of the anti x11 stuff, but outside waydroid, I have no use for wayland personally.
Still, might try out some other options outside Plasma just to try them.
If you want some X11 by default options, feel free to let me know. I know of some alternatives that help out a lot with the best of both worlds (that being WIP Wayland, though X11 is still usable regardless).
Sure, spam me with cool Linux stuff, I just might like it!
The day talon voice users are forced to dump KDE plasma
I wonder if Trinity had implemented support for Talon Voice and stylus support, since it’s X11 only (or XLibre supported if one wanted to use that).
Or stylus users. If the stylus functionality won’t be fixed in Wayland when this change happens, I’ll have stop my regular donation to KDE and start looking for another desktop environment to support.
Or maybe all those things will work two years from now. And if some issues remain there’s still LTS support for a while in multiple distros, since this only affects future versions.
True. Let’s hope and see.
I was surprised at the amount of things that just broke when I tried Wayland a couple of months ago, but that’s a lot of time to fix bugs and implement missing features.
Improvements for Input devices (particularly stylus and drawing tablets, but any kind of input) is one of the 3 overarching “goals” of KDE at the moment
Thank you, I didn’t know this, it’s comforting and gives a bit of hope!
This isn’t happening for another year or so, there’s time to get styli working
Good to hear! Keeping my fingers crossed.
Out of interest, which specific features / functionality is missing at the moment that you would be waiting for?
The main one is the Wacom stylus & screen, on a Thinkpad X1Extreme. I tried Wayland from a live Kubuntu 24.04, and in settings there was the message “Unsupported platform detected. Currently only X11 is supported”. At that point I didn’t check anything else. I also noticed that the desktop and windows weren’t so “crisp” as they were under X11, although I can’t exactly explain where the feeling came from; probably I would have chosen X11 even if the stylus had worked.
I suspect that I can actually login on a Wayland session even now; I’ll try it out as soon as I have time.
I don’t think Kubuntu 24.04 had Plasma 6 because it was an LTS release. In Plasma 6.3 they completely reworked the settings page for graphics tablets, and they’ve also changed how fractional scaling works so it should be less blurry (if that was what was making it blurry for you before).
Thank you for the info. I’ll try a live USB with Kubuntu 25.10 or 26.04dev and check it out. Now that you mention that, the blurriness was indeed related with scaling (though not fractional).
