KDE is marking its 30th birthday by showing X11 sessions the door. The newly released KDE Plasma 6.8 is Wayland-only, though X11 applications can still run through XWayland.
The change arrives right on schedule after last month's beta. KWin handles both window management and display-server duties. That means X11-based screen-recording tools, for example, won't work any more. You can't "shade" windows – roll them up into the title bar and back – and that's not planned to come back.
Restoring saved sessions can also behave differently. Applications cannot freely position their own windows under Wayland, leaving placement to the compositor.
Saying that, there are lots of tweaks and refinements in this release. The Spectacle screenshot tool can now include system audio and microphone input in its screen recordings. Plasma 6.8 integrates with non-KDE tools better. For instance, KDE's browser integration now supports the Flatpak version of Microsoft's Edge browser.
GTK2 applications also get better dark-theme matching. Internationalization is getting better – for example, the Clock understands the Bikram Sambat calendar, and Amharic is now supported in KDE's on-screen keyboard. The System Monitor app has better tracking of VRAM usage as well as main memory, and can pin tasks to certain CPU cores. There's better multi-monitor handling: screens are color-coded as well as by make and model, which is helpful if you have multiple identical monitors. There are more authentication options in KDE's VPN support too.
The Union theming system is in beta, though not enabled by default. KWin can also apply matching effects to windows with client-side decorations, such as Valve's Steam client. Plasma's High Dynamic Range (HDR) support is better: it follows ICC color profiles, and understands Hybrid Log Gamma. On Nvidia GPUs, Plasma 6.8 enables triple-buffered output, resulting in smoother animations and transitions. Speaking of animations, more system effects – such as desktop "peek" and window "aperture" (when windows slide to the edge of the screen out of the way) – now respect the global animation settings.
The Wayland-only session requires alternatives to remote-access tools that depend on an X11 desktop session, but the built-in Remote Desktop server, based on KRdp, has been improved. It's faster, it can adapt to slower connections on the fly, the clipboard is now bi-directional between host and remote system, and an exclusive mode can lock the host's screen while providing a virtual display sized to the client's window. KRdp uses Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol, but there's also Krfb if you prefer VNC instead. If you really need individual remote Wayland applications over SSH, then Waypipe is the way to go.
The full changelog has all the details of the changes. Kubuntu 27.04 – recently announced as being codenamed "Tenacious T-Rex" – should include Plasma 6.8 when it arrives in April next year.
KDE's internal metrics showed more than 95 percent of Plasma 6.6 users running Wayland in June. Including older versions, adoption was about 76 percent. Even so, we suspect that some users won't be happy with this change. With 6.8 out of the door, and on its way into fast-moving distros near you, the SonicDE project, which aims to continue development of the X11-capable KWin from Plasma 6.7, may start to pick up more interest.
The KDE Project started with founder Matthias Ettrich's announcement on the de.comp.os.linux newsgroup on October 14, 1996.
Before KDE, there were some commercial proprietary Unix desktop environments that were ported to Linux. For instance, Caldera OpenLinux 1.0 shipped with Visix's Looking Glass – you can see a tiny screenshot of it in the OpenLinux 1.1 announcement – but none ever went FOSS. Xfce is slightly older – as founder Olivier Fourdan described in this 2009 article: "I started the project in late 1996, before GNOME or gtk+ even existed."
The XForms Common Environment was released first, but in those early days, what was then called XFce wasn't open source. It also started out as a recreation of CDE, which was finally open sourced in 2012. This makes it an early equivalent of NsCDE, which we compared with the real thing in 2022.
In its early days, the Qt C++ toolkit that KDE chose caused problems, which led to the establishment of the KDE Free Qt Foundation in case something bad happened to its creators. Qt's licensing situation improved in 2000, when Qt 2.2 became available under both the GPL and QPL, resolving the GPL-compatibility concerns surrounding KDE's foundations. Even holdout Red Hat started bundling KDE.
Thirty years on, KDE remains one of the great survivors of the free desktop. Long may it continue. ®