The Plasma 6.8 beta landed last week as 6.7.91, and it is the release where the long-signposted change finally shows up in the login screen: there is no X11 session anymore. KDE’s announcement of the switch said what is going away is the Plasma X11 session, not X11 application support, which stays through XWayland. In the FAQ that shipped with it, the project answers the question directly: the Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.

What testers can try now

The beta announcement and the wiki’s running feature list are specific. kup joins Plasma as the data-integrity piece of the release, making automatic backups to an external disk simple. The Union theming system enters the second half of its public tech preview, and this time it reaches QtWidgets applications: Dolphin, Kate and the rest can use the “Breeze (Union)” application style alongside QtQuick apps, with the intent that both look as close to Breeze as possible. KDE asks testers to compare against Breeze before reporting so bugs land in the right tracker. On the graphics side, triple buffering is now the default on NVIDIA GPUs.

The rest of the list

Two sections matter more than their line count suggests. Remote desktop, a classic reason people cling to the X11 session, gets bi-directional clipboard syncing, better performance, and an “exclusive mode” that locks the server’s screen and hands the connecting client a fresh virtual screen. Spectacle’s screen recording gains audio capture, higher quality and lower latency. Elsewhere: a built-in dwell clicker and other accessibility work, a manual-switch-only option for wallpaper slideshows, CPU affinity and total VRAM monitoring in System Monitor, screen arrangement by arrow keys in System Settings, an HDR path through the HLG transfer function, and EAP-TTLS for Strongswan VPNs. KWin also moves onto plasma-wayland-protocols 1.23.0, which carries a memory-leak fix.

What the switch means

Wayland-only at login reads differently on different machines. The project is unequivocal about the direction, and the supporting work has run for years; on the other side, anything still pinned to the X11 session itself keeps older Plasma lines, with the support window above. What testers are being asked to do now is the boring part: run the beta on the setups most likely to break, especially the X11-dependent corners, and file what does.

My read

The X11 session’s retirement has been telegraphed for a year; the beta is where the words become a login screen. Anyone with an X11-only workflow should treat this window as the test: run it, break it, file it, while the session itself still exists on older lines. For everyone else, the interesting part is how much of this release is unglamorous infrastructure, from remote desktop to backups. Wayland-only lands when that scaffolding does.

Source: the 6.8 beta announcement, the feature list and KDE’s Wayland plan.