Thirty years after Matthias Ettrich's famous newsgroup post, KDE is throwing itself a birthday party — and uninviting X11. Plasma 6.8, scheduled for October 14, will be the first release with no X11 desktop session at all. Plasma 6.7 still ships it as an optional install; in 6.8 the login screen goes Wayland-only.

Honestly? For most of us this changes nothing. KDE's telemetry puts more than 95% of Plasma 6.6 users on Wayland already, and developers stopped testing the X11 session long ago. Your X11 applications will keep working through XWayland — what's retiring is the session itself, the full desktop running on X.org, plus the X11-specific code being scrubbed out of Plasma Shell, System Settings, and device configuration.

But if you're in the remaining 5% — or you just want to be sure — run this checklist before 6.8 lands on your distro.

1. Check which session you're actually on

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

If it prints wayland, you're already done with the hard part. If it prints x11, keep reading — and consider switching now, while 6.7 still gives you a fallback.

2. Screen sharing and remote desktop

This was the migration's biggest pain point for years, and it's largely solved — provided your tools speak the portal protocol. In a Wayland session, screen capture goes through xdg-desktop-portal (with the KDE backend), not X11 screen scraping.

  • Browsers (Firefox, Chromium): screen sharing in Meet/Teams/Zoom-web works via PipeWire portals.
  • OBS: uses the portal natively now.
  • Zoom/Teams desktop clients: historically flaky; test your version before you need it for a real meeting.
  • RustDesk/AnyDesk: check current Wayland support for unattended access — this is the one that still bites people.

If something in your remote-access chain still assumes X11, that's your migration project, not the desktop.

3. Global hotkeys, automation, and clipboard managers

Wayland deliberately doesn't let apps snoop on each other: no global key grabbing, no reading other windows' contents, no positioning windows by coordinates. Tools built on those X11 superpowers need new approaches:

  • Global hotkey daemons → KWin has its own shortcut system; check whether your use case is covered there first.
  • Clipboard managers → need Wayland-aware builds.
  • Window-tiling scripts (wmctrl, xdotool) → mostly don't work; KWin scripting is the replacement.

Audit anything in your autostart that smells like X11-era automation.

4. Input methods

If you type in CJK languages or use advanced input features, confirm your input method framework (Fcitx5, IBus) is running in Wayland mode. Fcitx5 on Plasma Wayland is well-supported these days, but "it worked on X11" isn't proof — test it in the new session.

5. NVIDIA users: driver check

The NVIDIA + Wayland story has improved enormously, but it's still the combination most likely to surprise you. Make sure you're on a recent proprietary driver, and test suspend/resume plus multi-monitor — the two things that historically broke first.

6. Color management and HDR

One of the quiet wins of the transition: Plasma 6 has real HDR and color-blindness correction support that X11 could never do properly. If you do photo or video work, the Wayland session is where the color pipeline actually works. Calibrate there.

7. Accessibility: dwell clicking finally lands

New in 6.8 and worth knowing even if you don't need it: native dwell-clicking on Wayland, replacing the X11-only KMouseTool. Hold the cursor still over a target and the click registers — configurable per action (left, right, double-click, drag), integrated with KWin and exposed through System Settings. For users with limited hand mobility, this closes one of the last real gaps the X11 session was covering.

8. Inventory your X11-only apps

Run your daily apps and check which ones are still X11 under the hood:

xlsclients

XWayland isn't going away — 6.8 keeps it for apps. But XWayland apps can have rougher edges (scaling on HiDPI, drag-and-drop quirks), so knowing which of your apps still live there tells you where to watch for papercuts, and which upstreams to nudge toward native Wayland.

The birthday extras: Oxygen returns, KDE 3 rises again

6.8 isn't only a funeral. The revived Oxygen theme gets more polish, and the Union theme engine preview can now style QtWidgets apps like Dolphin and Kate (still preliminary, per KDE's own warning).

And for the nostalgics: a new project called Klassik is rebuilding the KDE 3 desktop experience on top of modern Plasma 6 — Qt 6, Qt Quick, KDE Frameworks 6, with Wayland and fractional scaling support. Not a fork or a port of the old Qt 3 code: it reimplements the K Menu, Quicklaunch, task manager, lock/logout buttons, and clocks as native Plasma components, rewrites the KDE 2/3 QStyle for Qt 6, and ports old KWin decorations to the modern KDecoration3 API. The 2002 look, running on the 2026 stack. Thirty years in, KDE is confident enough to wear its old clothes — on Wayland.

The bottom line

The X11 session survived nearly three decades. Its retirement isn't KDE being aggressive; it's KDE admitting what the telemetry already said. Run the checklist, fix the two or three things that are actually yours (remote desktop, hotkeys, input method), and the birthday release will feel like any other upgrade.

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