Title: KDE Plasma 6.8 retires X11 session
Author: Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2026-10-15
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: kde-plasma/kwin-x11

Support for starting X11 sessions is going to be retired with the upcoming
Plasma 6.8 release[1]. While stabilisation is still a few months out, users
of testing keywords will get it now.

This is in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system, which
offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively
developed. The small number of individual applications that still require
X11 will continue to work via the XWayland compatibility layer.
KDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future.

KDE Plasma 6.7 is the final release[2] to support X11. We intend to keep it
available in ::gentoo until at least 2027-01-31, but without any commitment
beyond that.

Users must make use of this time to either move to Plasma's Wayland session
or find an alternative. And while the 6.8 feature development window is
closed, late upstream feedback may still end up in your corner cases[3] being
fixed by Plasma 6.9.

Packages discontinued in KDE Plasma 6.8:

- kde-plasma/kwin-x11
- kde-plasma/kgamma [4]
- kde-plasma/plasma-login-sessions (obsolete, consumed by plasma-workspace)
- kde-plasma/wacomtablet [5] (obsolete for configuring xf86-input-wacom)


Notes for the common case of users upgrading
============================================

For users of a Plasma profile, no specific upgrade steps are necessary. After
an upgrade to 6.8, there will be no more Plasma X11 session available, only
Wayland. It may be a good time to revisit the Gentoo KDE Wiki[5], anyway.

Plasma profile will simultaneously switch SDDM, the current default login
manager for Plasma, to Wayland via USE="kwin" in gui-apps/sddm-gentoo-config
which automatically sets up /etc/sddm.conf.d/01gentoo.conf accordingly.

After that, there may no longer be anything left depending on xorg-server,
so it could be cleaned up in a subsequent emerge --depclean:

    emerge --depclean --pretend xorg-server xorg-drivers

*Please note*: This does not imply any global changes to X USE flag.
Disabling X globally is not necessary for this change, and we advise against
doing so. It can cause all sorts of unintended side effects from historically
ambiguous usage - besides, not every "X11" library is obsolete in Wayland.


Notes for users wishing to remain on X11-capable Plasma
=======================================================

In order to stay on Plasma 6.7 as 6.8 becomes available on your system, use
the resulting list of the following command in order to mask[7] the upgrade:

    for p in `qlist -IC kde-plasma/`; do echo ">=${p}-6.8"; done

For SDDM to keep using X11, set USE="-kwin" on gui-apps/sddm-gentoo-config[8].


[1] https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.8.0/
[2] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6#Future_releases
[3] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
[4] https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/wayland-and-kgamma/
[5] https://userbase.kde.org/Kde_wayland_for_artists#Support_for_Graphics_Tablets
[6] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE
[7] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Knowledge_Base:Masking_a_package
[8] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.use