KDE Commits to Wayland: X11 Support Will Be Fully Dropped in Plasma 6.8
The KDE developer community has now definitively charted the future of its graphical environment: support for X11 will be fully discontinued with the release of Plasma 6.8, expected in early 2027. With this decision, KDE commits entirely to Wayland, following the path already taken by GNOME, where a similar transition is well underway.
Users, however, need not rush. The current stable branch, Plasma 6.5, was released only recently and has already advanced to version 6.5.3. Ahead lie versions 6.6 and 6.7, which will fill the remaining time before the end of the X11 era. GNOME, too, is accelerating its own deprecation timeline. Although GNOME 49—shipping with Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10—disables X11 login by default, it can still be re-enabled manually. Yet recent commits have removed X11 support entirely, confirming warnings issued back in June by developer Jordan Petridis.
Despite the drive toward a complete transition, Wayland still has rough edges. KDE’s list of known issues highlights ongoing difficulties with screenshots, screen sharing, remote VNC control, window layout restoration, touch and trackpad gestures, and accessibility limitations—particularly in speech recognition and screen-reading tools. Even so, more and more distributions now make Wayland the default session, accelerating the discovery and resolution of lingering shortcomings.
Meanwhile, one of the oldest UNIX desktops is experiencing an unexpected renaissance. CDE, a project first launched in 1993, continues to evolve—this week’s release of version 2.5.3 introduces support for multi-button mice and a series of bug fixes. Despite its venerable age, CDE remains available in distributions such as SparkyLinux, which offered it out of the box in 2024, and efforts are underway to adapt it for OpenBSD in 2025. Curiously, its modern clone, NsCDE, has seen no new releases since 2023, making the original more active than its successor.
Alternative environments also continue to advance in the text-based realm. The widely used terminal multiplexer tmux has been updated to version 3.6, bringing numerous fixes and a notable enhancement aimed at improving the user interface. Those seeking minimalist text-based desktops may also wish to explore new projects such as desktop-tui, written in Rust, and TVTerm, a C++ environment built atop a modern reinterpretation of the classic Turbo Vision library.
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