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About Plasma’s X11 session
Quoting: About Plasma’s X11 session —
Yes, the writing is on the wall. X11’s upstream development has dropped off significantly in recent years, and X11 isn’t able to perform up to the standards of what people expect today with respect to support for multi-monitor setups, high DPI monitors, HDR, VRR, other fancy monitor features, multi-GPU setups, screen tearing, security, crash robustness, input handling, and more.
As for when Plasma will drop support for X11? There’s currently no firm timeline for this, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen in the next year, or even the next two years. But that’s just a guess; it depends on how quickly we implement everything on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues. Our plan is to handle everything on that page such that even the most hardcore X11 user doesn’t notice anything missing when they move to Wayland.
Linuxiac:
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KDE Confirms Ongoing Plasma X11 Support, But the Future Is Clearly Wayland
In a blog post published yesterday titled “About Plasma’s X11 Session,” KDE developer Nate Graham clarified the current state of Xorg and Wayland and what the future holds for both in the Plasma desktop environment.
Long version short: While X11 support isn’t disappearing overnight, the writing is on the wall—Plasma’s long-term future lies with Wayland. Nate says, “The Plasma team isn’t emotional about display servers.” It’s simply a matter of practicality. Maintaining two different backends is a drain on resources, and focusing solely on Wayland will speed up progress across the board.
For now, the Plasma X11 session remains in maintenance mode. That means critical issues—like login failures or major regressions—will still be addressed. However, minor bugs are unlikely to get fixes unless funded, and new X11-specific features are off the table entirely.
Another One From BB (Bobby Borisov):
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GNOME Moves On: What the End of the X11 Session Means
Just days after KDE developer Nate Graham shared an update on the future of X11 in the Plasma desktop, GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has followed suit. In a new post, he offers insight into what users can expect once the X11 session is removed in the upcoming GNOME 49 release, scheduled for October.
First things first: Xorg isn’t being abandoned outright. It remains maintained and is receiving necessary security patches and bug fixes. However, active development has effectively halted, with most of its original contributors now focused on Wayland.
The consensus among developers is clear—X11’s architectural limitations make further progress impractical without breaking compatibility.
LWN:
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Graham: about Plasma’s X11 session
KDE contributor Nate Graham recently wrote about the KDE Project's plans for Plasma's X11 session. He notes that the project will continue to ensure that Plasma "
continues to compile and deploy on X11
" and isn't horribly broken. Major regressions will probably be fixed, eventually, but the writing is on the wall: [...]
ZDNet:
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X11's dying days mean you'll be forced to switch to Wayland | ZDNET
Wayland is the Linux display server that has been in the slow, steady process of taking over X11 to deliver a more modern, robust, and secure GUI for Linux. Wayland offers better performance, better handling of complex GUIs, and even vastly improved security.
Although Wayland has been around for quite some time, the problem has been that Linux distributions and desktops have been slow to change from the long-in-the-tooth X11.
That changes now because one of the most popular Linux desktop environments, GNOME, has announced plans to disable the X11 session option in GNOME 49 and remove all X11 code in GNOME 50.