KDE's 30th-Anniversary Release Ends New X11 Sessions, With XWayland as the Cushion

KDE marked its 30th anniversary on October 14 by releasing Plasma 6.8 and retiring the desktop environment's native X11 session support. The anniversary release also arrived with a movie premiere. Before anyone panics about their old software: legacy X11 applications still function through the XWayland compatibility layer, and KDE applications will also continue supporting X11 under other desktop environments. What is being retired is the option to start a new session on the old protocol inside Plasma itself — not X11 programs. That distinction is the whole craft of a platform handoff. The thing users depend on keeps working through a translation layer, while the part developers were carrying quietly goes away.