// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
These Projects are Keeping X11 Dream Alive on Linux
By now, you must know that mainstream Linux desktop environments, and by extension, distributions, are moving away from X11.
If you don’t know what an X11 session is, it is a desktop session that uses the X Window System, typically through the X.Org Server (Xorg). The server handles graphical output and input communication between applications and the display, while other components manage windows and compositing.
The newer, increasingly favored approach on Linux is a Wayland session.
Wayland is a display protocol, and its compositor acts as the display server, handling graphical output, input, window management, and compositing.
KDE has confirmed that Plasma 6.7 is the last release with a native X11 session, while GNOME has also removed its own X11 session. Of course, X11 applications can still run in Wayland sessions through the Xwayland compatibility layer.
Though not everything is lost for people who prefer X11. Several projects are emerging to keep the experience alive, with some maintaining or forking the existing X.Org Server, while others go as far as rewriting an X11 server from scratch.
This list covers eight of them, spread across desktops, X servers, and a layer that runs X11 apps on a Wayland compositor. Each one is open source and has shown development activity within the past few months.
SonicDE is a desktop that branches off KDE Plasma 6 and puts X11 first. It began in 2025 as a patched KWin/X11 called kwin-x11-improved. That grew into sonic-win, a window manager and compositor that keeps KWin/X11 going with code borrowed from KWin/Wayland and its own fixes.
Beyond the window manager, SonicDE is forking the KDE pieces it builds on and stripping out Wayland-only code. A Vulkan backend is in progress, and the developers plan to keep X.Org Server compatibility going while that remains feasible.
There's also conveniences, such as global hotkeys for push-to-talk and OBS recording toggles, and screen recording inside remote desktop apps like TeamViewer. Packages are available for Arch-based distributions, Artix, Manjaro, Gentoo, Void, and Slackware, among others.