21 Years. One Bug Report. One Merge.
KDE Bugzilla #107302 was filed sometime around 2005. For two decades, KDE users with multi-monitor setups had to live with the same virtual desktop mirrored across every screen — switch desktop on one monitor, all monitors switch. A deeply annoying constraint that every tiling WM and even Windows has solved ages ago. Developer Hynek Schlindenbuch finally closed it: KDE Plasma 6.7, shipping June 16th, adds proper per-screen virtual desktops.
The feature is opt-in, which is the right call. Enable it and each monitor maintains an independent virtual desktop stack. You can have your terminal on workspace 2 of your left monitor while your browser stays on workspace 1 of the right one. Multi-monitor power users know exactly why this matters. The rest of you will figure it out the moment you try it.
I use Arch, btw. And yes, this is already in the KDE-git builds if you can't wait until June.
Wayland Finally Grows Up: Session Restore
The other headline in 6.7 is Wayland session management, implemented in KWin by developer Vlad Zahorodnii (KDE Bugzilla #436318). This is the protocol that allows applications to remember their window sizes, positions, and states after you restart the system. Under X11, this worked — imperfectly, but it worked. Under Wayland, relaunching your system meant manually repositioning everything. Every. Single. Time.
Now KWin implements the session management protocol at the compositor level. The catch: toolkits, libraries, and apps need to implement their side of the protocol too. Qt and GTK are already moving on it, but your random Electron app? Give it a few release cycles. The KDE blog was refreshingly honest: "The next step is for toolkits, libraries, and apps to implement support. We're getting there!"
This is how Wayland improvements actually work — it's not one patch that fixes everything, it's a protocol foundation that the rest of the ecosystem builds on. Slower than X11 would've been, more correct in the long run.
The X11 Clock Is Ticking
Here's the part worth paying attention to: KDE Plasma 6.8, due late 2026, will drop the X11 session entirely and go Wayland-only. GNOME already did it with GNOME 49 last year. Ubuntu 25.10 removed X11. Fedora 43 dropped it. The dominoes are falling in sequence.
The numbers back up the decision. Wayland is now the default in 52.7% of Linux desktop environments. In the January 2025 Arch Linux survey (n=3,923 respondents), 80% were running Wayland vs 20% on Xorg. Hyprland — a Wayland-only compositor — is the desktop environment of choice for 26% of Arch users. The compositing community has voted.
For those of you still on X11 because of specific tools — legacy WINE dependencies, weird multi-monitor hotplug behavior, certain remote desktop setups — KDE 6.7 is your last version that ships X11 support by default. Use the time to test your workflow on Wayland now, not after the migration is forced.
What Else Is in 6.7
Beyond the two headliners: the Kicker application menu now highlights newly-installed packages (useful if you're like me and run `pacman -Syu` every morning and forget what you just installed). Discover gets a better grid and list layout with higher information density. Drag-and-drop to Favorites in Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard widgets. You can now set a default calendar app system-wide.
None of these are revolutionary. But the aggregate of small polish is what separates a good desktop environment from a great one. KDE has been relentlessly closing quality gaps since Plasma 6.0 launched in February 2024 with Wayland as default, and 6.7 continues that trajectory.
The Bigger Picture
We're watching the end of X11's 40-year dominance in real time. The migration has been messy — XWayland compatibility shims, protocol gaps that made Wayland feel regressive for power users, driver weirdness that the NVIDIA open kernel module is only now sorting out. But the gap between Wayland and X11 in day-to-day usability is nearly closed.
KDE Plasma 6.7 shipping per-screen virtual desktops and Wayland session restore in the same release is symbolic. These were two of the last major reasons power users were pinning their `xorg` packages. One by one, the excuses are running out.
June 16th. Update your mirrors.
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