KDE is finally killing X11, and I'm not as sad as I thought I'd be

Published May 14, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Korbin is a Linux system administrator who spends most of his time in a terminal figuring out how things actually work. Over the last decade he's written hundreds of articles about Linux configuration, troubleshooting weird problems, and using open-source tools in the real world. He also works a lot with Windows systems and networking, especially in mixed environments where things don't always behave the way the documentation says they should. Writing things down is how he makes sense of it all and hopefully saves someone else a few hours. A few years ago, I would've had serious objections to the retirement of X11 on a major Linux desktop. The X Window System has been a cornerstone of Linux desktop environments for decades, powering every type of system from lightweight machines to enterprise workstations. For a long time, it was an important component of the Linux stack that represented the openness and flexibility users love the operating system for. Wayland made for a popular punching bag in its early days. You probably remember all the forum threads and article headlines that'd pop up about it. They were usually about a broken workflow, missing features, or other lists of grievances. Some of those complaints are still circulating. A few of them were mine. But seeing KDE's announcement about their intent to eventually drop support for X11 made me realize how far Wayland has come, and how little I still rely on X11 for anything. Now that Wayland has addressed most of its early shortcomings, and KDE put in the work to make it more viable for power users, X11 is becoming a technical relic that KDE doesn't want to spend time maintaining. Related X11 probably should have retired sooner It's a system held together by duct tape X11 isn't a modern piece of software by any measure. The protocol dates back to 1987 and has remained relevant all these years because of relentless extension. But those extensions are the very problem. They've turned X11 into an extremely flexible protocol, while simultaneously making it deeply insecure. X11 has a flaw in its design philosophy where it assumes that any application running on the desktop is friendly. Apps running under it can capture keystrokes from other apps, take full screenshots, or inject keyboard and mouse input into other apps, all without needing to ask for permission. It's not the type of architectural problem that can be patched out, only worked around. Wayland was designed to address this problem by isolating each app and routing inter-app communication through a compositor, which can control what each application is allowed to see and do. For a long time, Wayland's approach of isolated apps and increased security came at the cost of broken screen sharing, incompatibility with games, and a long list of tools that didn't work properly. The fix for a lot of the issues was to log out, switch to X11, and log back in. For a while, I kept X11 sessions around as a fallback for whenever something broke, which happened often enough that I never felt fully committed to Wayland. Wayland has come a long way since then, with KDE in particular working aggressively to fix those problems that kept people reaching for X11. A Wayland session under KDE Plasma 6 is very stable now. Some features that slowed Wayland adoption for power users, like buggy custom window rules, virtual desktops misbehaving, and terrible-looking fractional scaling, are in much better shape than even two years ago. I've been running KDE Plasma as my daily driver on my Linux system, and the number of Wayland-specific problems I run into has dwindled down to nearly zero. Screen sharing through a browser works without any extra configuration on most modern distros, and gaming through Steam has improved a ton. I used to have problems with dual monitors on mixed refresh rates, but that issue quietly disappeared as well. What about X11-only apps and remote desktop? Most of the important tools have already crossed over The biggest downside to X11 disappearing is that a lot of remote desktop apps and headless sessions use it. VNC servers, X11 forwarding over SSH, and XRDP all rely on it, and there's no perfect equivalent for them in Wayland. But even that space is slowly shifting over to Wayland, with tools like GNOME Remote Desktop gaining traction and RDP support growing. It's not as straightforward as X11 was, but it's getting there. Most users on KDE Plasma probably aren't going to be doing serious headless remote session work through it anyway, and those who are should be able to find viable alternatives. KDE isn't preventing anyone from doing remote administration work by dropping X11; they're just no longer committing to maintaining a legacy display system that can't keep up with modern security expectations. The complete transition away from X11 may still be inconvenient for some niche setups, but it's a small number of people that will be affected, and there will still be alternative tools that can do the job. Wayland won, and the Linux desktop is better for it X11 had a remarkably long run — far longer than anyone could've anticipated, considering how much computing has changed since the late '80s. If you've been avoiding a Wayland session because of bad experiences with it a few years ago, the latest version of Plasma is worth another look. A lot has changed since then, and KDE has become one of the only Linux desktops worth recommending.