Definition
Plasma is kde’s desktop shell and window-management stack, shipping as versioned releases (e.g., Plasma 6.x) atop wayland or historically X11.
Key Points
- Plasma 6.8 (2026-10-14): Ends X11 session support; focuses engineering on Wayland compositor path (2026-10-15-kde-plasma-6-8-x11-farewell)
- KDE applications remain X11-capable on other desktops; SDDM can still launch non-Plasma X11 sessions