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I am excited for every release of KDE. Makes me happy to see its so active always.
Also looming forward to no more x11. Wayland has always given me a better experience.
KDE Plasma 6.8 will be the first KDE Plasma release to remove the X11 backend, going Wayland-only. In KDE Plasma 6.8, there will be no X11 session on the login screen.
This is a big change. I will now need a separate DE for x11.
Whatcha using that needs x11 still?
Substance Painter, ZBrush and Houdini are all most likely will still benefit from x11 in one way or another. They all work on Wayland as well, but some particular features either don't work at all or are buggy. There is Blender, Ucupaint, etc, they can do all the same things, but not on the same level.
Word! I do not use those at all in most cases and not much in others. I haven't noticed major issues on wayland so this helps me get a better idea.
Xwayland doesn't work with the applications you need?
There are many apps that has certain features broken on xwayland but work correctly on x11. For example, a very widespread issue in Substance Painter is that on xwayland color picker mode makes the whole screen black but works correctly on x11.
That's probably the nature of X11 that allowed all sorts of offspec hacks but xwayland is mainly written to spec.
I mean you can still use Plasma, you just will be stuck at version 6.7
It will work for a while but it will lag behind in terms of integrations, features, and eventually it will also reach EOS/EOSL and might not even get bugfixes backported anymore.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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