KDE Plasma 6.5 recently launched , bringing with it a host of fixes and quality of life updates, along with some visual tweaks to make the desktop experience feel more polished. Now, however, KDE has officially announced that it will officially stop supporting the X11 session as of the release of KDE Plasma 6.8, which is slated to launch sometime in late 2027 or 2028. KDE has confirmed that the X11 session will still be supported until 2027. Anyone who still relies on X11 for legacy app or feature support at that point in time will be required to use XWayland for those apps. KDE says that dropping X11 support will allow the development team to "move faster to improve stability and functionality," without the bloated X11 protocol holding back development.

At the time of writing, there are still compatibility issues with XWayland, and performance is a common complaint for Linux users, especially those who game on their Linux PCs using tools like Proton or WINE. One other major point of contention when it comes to Wayland is compatibility and performance on NVIDIA GPUs, and in cases where the proprietary NVIDIA driver doesn't offer support for Wayland—almost exclusively an issue with very old NVIDIA GPUs—KDE recommends using the open-source Nouveau driver. Curiously, KDE's in-house applications, like Kate and Kdenlive, will continue to support X11, although it's unclear how long this support will be offered. In the meantime, KDE plans to fill in some of the other gaps in its Wayland session, like incomplete accessibility options, and encourages users to submit bug reports for missing features or special requirements.