On 14 October 1996, Matthias Ettrich posted a proposal for a 'Kool Desktop Environment' to a Usenet newsgroup. Thirty years later, KDE is one of the two reference desktops of the Linux and Unix world, and its focus has shifted from building a desktop to retiring one.
Heise reports that Plasma 6.8 ships only a Wayland session: the legacy X11 session is gone. The change completes a transition KDE began accelerating with Plasma 6 in early 2024, when Wayland became the default while X11 was kept as a fallback for users with problematic hardware or applications.
For most people the shift will be invisible. Applications built for X11 continue to run through XWayland, and the desktop compositor handles scaling, multiple monitors and input in ways X11 found increasingly awkward. Wayland brings modern security isolation between windows, better multi-monitor behaviour on mixed-DPI setups, and a cleaner path to features such as per-window colour management.
The rough edges are known and documented: screen readers and some accessibility tooling lag behind, remote-desktop workflows that depended on X11 forwarding need alternatives, and certain proprietary drivers — historically Nvidia's — behave less predictably. KDE's argument is that keeping X11 alive indefinitely costs development effort that is better spent on the new stack.
KDE is also more than Plasma. The project spans the KDE Frameworks and the Gear application suite — from Kate, Kdenlive and Dolphin to related tooling — plus Plasma Mobile and hardware partnerships such as the KDE Slimbook. Thirty years in, KDE's unusual governance as a non-profit community, KDE e.V., remains its distinguishing feature: a desktop built by contributors rather than owned by a vendor.
