After a return from sleep broke KDE’s X11 support on my Arch desktop with Nvidia driver (they’ve broke out X11 support to a separate package preparing for the phase out and to nudge people to Wayland), I went ahead and installed XLibre on my desktop, also installing XFCE and Cinnamon desktop environments, both of which work great, though I’ve been enjoying Cinnamon more. I don’t think the X11 support is up to snuff with KDE anymore, and we’ll wait to see how the KDE fork to SonicDE goes for supporting X11. Also, KDE is dropping X11 support in early 2027 with version 6.8. Consequently, I won’t be running Wayland, and we’ll have to see where apps fall on natively coding for Wayland, or depending on xwayland compatibility. Worst case we’ll see a layer of compatibility for Wayland apps to run on X11, though I’d like to see IBM/Red Hat fail with their Wayland push and trying to kill X.Org (X11). They can keep their agentic AI integration graphics layer to themselves and those who actually desire it. Plus, KDE was getting a bit too woke for me anyway, and people not concentrating on sexual perversion and politics, just writing good code, do a better job anyway.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-2025-Wayland-Success
By Michael Larabel in KDE
In addition to today’s blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition “nears completion” as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027.
Headlining the KDE highlights for 2025 by Nate Graham was the work on the Wayland transition. This year saw Wayland work around HDR / color management, P010 video color support, better drawing tablets, improved accessibility, overlay planes, RandR emulation, screen mirroring, support for custom modes, pre-authorization for portal-based permissions, clipboard and USB portals, and support for a variety of newer Wayland protocols. Wayland’s xdg-toplevel-tag, color-representation, fio, xx_pip, and other protocols were implemented this year.
Nate Graham commented on the ongoing Plasma Wayland work:
“Now, Plasma’s Wayland support isn’t perfect yet (any more than its X11 support was perfect). In particular, the two remaining major sources of complaints are window position restoring and headless RDP. We’re aware and working on solutions! I can’t make any promises about outcomes, but I can promise effort on these topics.
This admittedly somewhat messy and plodding transition has taken years, and consumed a lot of resources in the process. I’m looking forward to having it in the rearview mirror, and 2026 promises to be the year that enables this to happen! Expect a lot of Wayland work in 2026 to make us ready for the end of the Plasma X11 session in 2027.”
The current plan is for Plasma 6.8 to become a Wayland-exclusive in dropping X11 session support but retaining XWayland client support.
Outside of the Wayland activities, KDE Plasma this year gained support for rounded bottom window corners, panel cloning, various UI/UX enhancements, and a lot more features.
Learn more about the great successes of KDE in 2025 via this blog post.