// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
KDE is Going Wayland Only So This New Project Gives You KDE With X11
When KDE announced that Plasma 6.8 would be dropping the X11 session entirely, not everyone was happy about it. Wayland has been the default on most major distributions for a while now, but there's still a significant chunk of users with reasons to stay on X11.
One such case is of a group of developers who took the code that KDE itself is walking away from and started building an X11-first desktop around it. That project is SonicDE.
Their goal is to maintain and actively develop the parts of KDE Plasma's X11 stack that are being left behind, while cutting out Wayland dependencies and pushing X11 support forward rather than just holding the line.
The work can be traced back to a KWin/X11 patchset called kwin-x11-improved, which was later merged with the full KWin/X11 source by Joseph Crowell in September 2025 under the name "KDE-Lite," and rebranded as SonicDE by December.
It is a collection of KDE Plasma and KDE Frameworks component forks, each rebuilt with X11 as the focus. The project now spans 40 repositories on GitHub, with the team working through the KDE stack and stripping out what's not needed.
The most prominent of those is sonic-win, a fork of KWin/X11 that handles window management and compositing. It's the most active repository in the project and the one where most of the foundational work is happening.
Alongside it are sonic-workspace, derived from plasma-workspace, and sonic-desktop-interface, forked from plasma-desktop. The former provides the core environment components, while the latter handles the desktop shell. Together with sonic-win, these three form the backbone of what SonicDE actually is as a desktop.
The project covers a lot of ground beyond the core trio of components.
For networking, sonic-network-manager is there; sonic-audio-applet-pulse covers PulseAudio volume management; sonic-screenlocker takes care of screen locking; sonic-screen manages display configuration; and login sessions are handled by sonic-login-manager.
From left to right we have SonicDE on EndeavourOS, Artix Linux, and Vendefoul Wolf.