KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates • The Register
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.
This sets a time frame for KDE to catch up with GNOME, the other major FOSS desktop environment. The next release, GNOME 50, is set to go Wayland-only but it’s not quite there yet. Although GNOME 49 – as found in Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 – disables the X11 login session by default, you can still reinstall it. GNOME developer Jordan Petridis predicted X11’s removal from the code back in June, and the code change was merged earlier this month.
We still often see reports of significant issues with Wayland, and to be fair, the KDE project maintains its own list. We’ve heard about problems with screenshots and screen sharing, remote control using VNC, saving and restoring window layouts, problems with touchscreen and trackpad gestures, as well as accessibility issues with speech recognition, screen readers, and more. However, the situation is improving. Some distros are making Wayland the default, leading to more people filing bugs and this helps to isolate the issues.
CDE lives
Meanwhile, going to the opposite extreme, KDE 1.0-beta1 was in 1997, a year after the project was founded. As Xfce’s creator, Olivier Fourdan, put it: “I started the project in late 1996, before GNOME or gtk+ even existed.” KDE’s name was a reference to CDE, and Xfce’s origins are even more direct: it was a direct recreation of CDE, although it wasn’t initially open source.
The Common Desktop Environment to which they paid homage had already been around since 1993. In 2012, we reported it had become open source, and a decade later, we compared it to modern FOSS recreation NsCDE.
No less than 32 years after the project started, this week CDE 2.5.3 appeared, with better support for multi-button mice and a bunch of bug fixes. The Reg FOSS desk has only seen one Linux distro that offers CDE, the Debian-based SparkyLinux, which we looked at in 2024. That is very much alive – it put out version 8.1 earlier this month. An effort to bring CDE to OpenBSD started earlier this year too, reviving an earlier port from around 2018.
Almost ironically, the revived CDE seems to be livelier than the modern recreation: NsCDE hasn’t seen any activity since 2023.
Tmux gets polished too
If that’s still too much graphical shiny for your tastes, there are some even lighter-weight options that have new releases out.
A few months ago, we offered a survey of terminal multiplexers, out of which tmux emerged looking good. The development team has applied a bit of T-Cut, polished it further, and released version 3.6. The release notes contain a lot of bug fixes, but there is a more visible new feature:
Since we wrote that round-up, we’ve discovered even more options in the field of text-mode windowing environments.
Julien Caposiena’s desktop-tui is in the ever-more-trendy Rust, and development seems active. The project only began in September and there have been six releases so far.
If you favor the more traditional C++, then there is TVTerm, which uses a modernized version of Borland’s MIT-licensed Turbo Vision 2.0. ®
