The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.
The team behind the KDE Plasma desktop announced it is going all-in on a Wayland future. The Plasma version 6.8, “which we expect will be sometime in early 2027,” will completely drop X11 support.
You don’t need to worry just yet. Plasma 6.5 appeared less than a month ago, and it’s currently at version 6.5.3. That means there are the entire 6.6 and 6.7 release sequences to get through, which will probably take most of 2026 and some of 2027.
Im not sure about the politics or many of the reasons, but personally, not a fan of wayland. Its nothing crazy, just things don’t run as well on my hardware. X11 works in my experience, but honestly I don’t know enough to say why.
running GDM on two laptops, same models etc. Wayland glitches out all the time compared to x11.
x11 just works. like, no problems. I get it, new stuff etc, but Wayland has a long way to go before I switch.
My first time installing Linux it had a weird issue where whenever I opened a graphical app or game, it would randomly blur the screen, never knew when it would happen it just was inevitable. Swapping to x11 made the problem go away. Still no idea why it happened.
We’re around the teetering point where X11 still works pretty well especially on older hardware. Like if you’re rocking a GTX-1000 series graphics card I’d go Mint Cinnamon with X11, that’s probably going to be a better experience than Wayland. There’s certain things that X11 permitted that Wayland’s security model outlaws, which is a deal breaker for some, but Wayland is the future.
X11 has it’s issues but i don’t think Wayland is the way either.
Same for me. I’m still kinda new to Linux so I’m not an expert on the matter, but what I’m reading online is that it doesn’t work very well with Nvidia cards, which is what I use.
This is old news. Nvidia did have issues with wayland at first, but that was quickly fixed. Most of my machines have Nvidia graphics cards, and all of them run Wayland flawlessly. I suggest that you try it on your machine if you want to see how well it works in your case though, mileage may vary.
I couldn’t wait for Christmas and just spent the evening trying to switch to Wayland to no avail… I keep losing signal after I log in.
Alright. This Christmas holiday I’m gonna try to make the switch again. And it’s not bad for gaming either?
If you don’t have a preference, I recommend trying out Bazzite.
Yeah i swapped from win10 to Linux with my 3070 and its been nothing but a headache on wayland.
Some people in this thread are saying this isn’t true anymore so I might give it another go over the holidays. One thing I liked about Wayland was that I could have different resolutions for each of my two monitors. Something I can’t seem to get working on X11. Wish me luck!