Three X11 Session Exits Compared: GNOME Went Default-Off First, KDE Named Plasma 6.7 the Last, and a Fedora 44 Update Removed Plasma's Session

Overview

Three recent changes in the Linux desktop ended the X11 session by different routes. GNOME disabled its X11 login session by default in GNOME 49 and, in the GNOME 50 alpha, removed X11 backend support from Mutter and X11 support from GDM. KDE announced in November 2025 that Plasma 6.8 would drop the X11 session and released Plasma 6.8 on 14 October 2026. On 3 November 2026 the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) voted against reverting the update that carried that removal to Fedora 44. Reporting from The Register, LWN.net, Phoronix and Linuxiac shows that the three differed in how many steps the exit took, what evidence of readiness was offered, and who was left to find a fallback. The comparison below is the Herald’s own reading of that reporting.

Background: how each project staged the exit

GNOME disabled the session first, then removed the code. An FAQ on a GNOME contributor’s blog, whose URL dates it to 23 June 2025, says the release team discussed the X11 session in meetings on May 6 and May 19, that Fedora’s steering committee approved removing the GNOME on Xorg session for Fedora 43 on May 20, and that Ubuntu confirmed it would follow along for GNOME 49. The FAQ’s stated reason is that Wayland functionality was “on par (if not straight up better) than Xorg”, so the contributors decided “it was time to move on with the removal of the Xorg session”. It is the project’s own account rather than an independent one, and it limits the scope of the change: “What’s going away is the GNOME on Xorg session, not the Xorg server itself.”

Independent reporting follows the same two steps. The Register reported in November 2025 that GNOME 49 disables the X11 login session by default but that it can still be reinstalled, and that the code change removing X11 had been merged earlier that month. Linuxiac described two merged pull requests that removed the X11 codebase from Mutter and GNOME Shell, with GNOME 50 then scheduled for mid-March 2026. Phoronix wrote on 15 January 2026 that the GNOME 50 alpha removed the X11 backend from Mutter and “entirely removed” X11 support from GDM while XWayland kept X11 clients running, and reported GNOME 50’s release on 18 March 2026.

KDE named a last X11 release. On 26 November 2025, LWN.net quoted KDE’s announcement as saying the Plasma X11 session would be supported “into early 2027” and that KDE was exploring extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The announcement also pointed users who still need X11 to long-term-support distributions, citing AlmaLinux 9, which “will be supported until sometime in 2032”. On 2 June 2026, Phoronix reported that a blog post by KDE developer David Edmundson described Plasma 6.7 as the last X11-supported release and said over 95% of Plasma 6.6 users were already on Wayland. The Register gave the same 95 percent figure for June and added that, including older versions, adoption was about 76 percent.

The accounts of the timetable were not uniform. The Register’s November 2025 report attached the phrase “which we expect will be sometime in early 2027” to Plasma 6.8. The KDE text quoted by LWN.net and described by Phoronix ties early 2027 to Plasma 6.7 instead: to the timing of the last 6.7 bug-fix release in LWN.net’s quoted text, and to continued support with the 6.7 series in Phoronix’s report. Plasma 6.8 itself arrived on 14 October 2026.

Current situation: Plasma 6.8 reaches users

KDE’s announcement says that “support for starting X11 sessions in Plasma is being retired, in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system”, and that the small number of apps that still require X11 continue to work through XWayland. The Register lists what the removal means for tools: X11-based screen-recording tools stop working, the “shade” feature that rolls a window up into its title bar is gone and is not planned to return, restored sessions can behave differently, and applications cannot freely position their own windows under Wayland. It adds that remote-access tools which depend on an X11 desktop session need alternatives, naming the built-in Remote Desktop server based on KRdp, Krfb for VNC and Waypipe for individual remote Wayland applications over SSH, and it names SonicDE, a project that aims to continue development of the X11-capable KWin from Plasma 6.7.

Fedora shows the downstream effect. LWN.net reports that Fedora 44 shipped in April 2026 with Plasma 6.6 and later received an update to Plasma 6.8 that “swept away the X11 session without much warning” for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop users. According to LWN, Fedora’s KDE special interest group keeps one Plasma version across all Fedora releases, which departs from the general rule against major updates in stable releases, and exceptions to that rule exist for packages such as the kernel, the Go toolchain and KDE. In date order: Plasma 6.8 came out on 14 October; according to LWN, the group sent a notice to Fedora’s devel mailing list on 21 October, and FESCo voted on the reversion request at its 3 November meeting, rejecting it with eight members against and one casting +0 and saying the update “could have been dragged out a bit”. FESCo member Timothée Ravier said keeping Fedora 44 on Plasma 6.7 was not realistic, because Plasma 6.7’s end of life was expected in January 2027 while Fedora 44 will be supported until June 2027. LWN’s own assessment is that the pending removal could have been communicated more explicitly during the Fedora 44 cycle and that it is also reasonable for the group not to go to great lengths to preserve X11 support once upstream dropped it. The Herald previously reported the committee’s decision.

Distribution defaults are moving too. Linuxiac reports that Artix Linux 2026.11 transitions KDE Plasma to Wayland, and that Wayland support there remains limited to Plasma because other desktop environments are at various stages of Wayland implementation. The Register says Plasma 6.8 should arrive in Kubuntu 27.04 in April 2027.

What differs: the Herald’s reading

What is cut is the session, not the X11 applications. For GNOME and for KDE, the sources describe the same boundary. GNOME’s FAQ says XWayland “will be around with us for decades” and that the Xorg server remains maintained, and KDE’s announcement keeps XWayland for apps that need X11.

The number of steps differs. The Register’s account of GNOME includes a release, GNOME 49, in which the session was present but off by default. The sources read for this analysis describe no such default-off step for Plasma; KDE instead named the last release carrying the session and said it was exploring extra bug-fix releases for it. By the Herald’s own count from the dates above, GNOME’s path ran about nine months from the June 2025 FAQ to the 18 March 2026 release, and KDE’s about ten and a half months from the announcement LWN.net reported on 26 November 2025 to the 14 October 2026 release.

The evidence offered differs. GNOME’s public rationale is a judgment by its contributors that the Wayland session is functionally on par, qualified in the FAQ by “some niche workflows that are only possible on X11”. KDE’s is usage data: more than 95 percent of Plasma 6.6 users on Wayland, about 76 percent counting older versions, per The Register. Neither a contributors’ judgment nor a session-usage share counts how many users depend on a feature Wayland lacks. The Register’s 2025 report listed reported problems with screenshots and screen sharing, remote control using VNC, and saving and restoring window layouts, and noted that KDE maintains its own list of Wayland issues.

The cost landed in different places. Upstream, the projects published their plans months ahead. In the Fedora case, a routine update on a stable release was where users met the change, and the Fedora KDE group’s mailing-list notice came, by the Herald’s count, seven days after the Plasma release.

Implications for developers and packagers

For tool authors, the practical list is the one The Register gives: capture, remote-access and window-management tools that assumed an X11 session need a Wayland route. Linuxiac advised authors of extensions, window managers and tooling that assumed X11 session support to test Wayland compatibility or plan fallbacks.

For packagers, the Fedora case suggests that the date that matters downstream is when a distribution ships the upstream release, not the date the upstream announced it, because an update-policy exception can bring the change into a release users installed with the feature present. That is the Herald’s inference from LWN’s account.

For users who still need an X11 session, the sources name several fallbacks. KDE pointed to long-term-support distributions, and LWN says SonicDE preserves X11 support and is packaged for quite a few distributions but not yet for Fedora, that Ravier suggested a Copr repository carrying Plasma 6.7, and that quite a few other desktops and window managers still support X11.

What the sources do not say

None of the sources cited here gives a count of the Fedora users who lost the session. The 76 percent figure comes from The Register alone; the Herald did not read KDE’s underlying metrics. Phoronix’s release-day report on GNOME 50 does not mention the X11 change, so the GNOME removal rests on pre-release reporting.