KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8, but the X11 session isn't invited

Plus, Klassik recreates the KDE 3 desktop experience on Qt 6

KDE Plasma 6.8 is nearly here, bringing the revived Oxygen theme and dropping its X11 session. For those who prefer an older look, a new project called Klassik recreates the KDE 3 experience using modern Plasma technology.

KDE has released the second and final beta of Plasma 6.8, while developers have already begun landing changes for Plasma 6.9, according to the latest This Week in Plasma update.

Barring delays, the release is scheduled for October 14, KDE's 30th anniversary, as we mentioned ahead of the Akademy conference.

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Plasma 6.8 will also be the first release without an X11 desktop session, a change we warned about last November. Plasma 6.7 still offers the session as an optional installation, but, from 6.8, the desktop itself will run on Wayland. X11 applications will continue to work through XWayland.

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KDE's anniversary celebrations will also include a feature-length documentary about the project from Irish video producer Cult.Repo. A trailer is already available.

The beta continues the public preview of the Union theme engine, which can now style QtWidgets applications such as Dolphin and Kate, although KDE warns that the support remains preliminary. The revived Oxygen theme is also receiving further polish for Plasma 6.8.

KDE 3 returns in Klassik form

If all that new shiny is not your speed, a newly announced project called Klassik may be more appealing.

Klassik is not a fork or port of KDE 3. It recreates the old desktop's appearance and behavior within Plasma 6 using Qt 6, Qt Quick, and KDE Frameworks 6, with support for Wayland and fractional scaling.

KDE 3.0 appeared in April 2002, and the series ended with KDE 3.5.10 in August 2008. Klassik reimplements elements of that desktop on the libraries used by Plasma 6 rather than attempting to revive its original Qt 3 code.

Klassik reimplements the early-noughties panel, K Menu, Quicklaunch and Task Manager, along with the lock and logout buttons, and even the old clock. To be perfectly honest, this is not an era of the KDE desktop that The Reg FOSS desk is especially nostalgic for, but we're sure it will have strong appeal for some longtime KDE users.

We're delighted to see decades-old Qt designs recreated using modern tools. The Lomiri desktop remains in development, but as a converged environment for touchscreens and PCs it is not a direct replacement for Canonical's old Unity desktop. We would still love to see someone give the lightweight, Qt-based Unity 2D similar treatment; its source remains on Launchpad – for now.

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Another candidate would be the old Xandros Desktop. Xandros acquired Corel LinuxOS and produced a KDE-based desktop that The Register rather liked 20 years ago. PCMag Australia still hosts screenshots from 2007, and to this day it remains one of the cleanest KDE arrangements we've seen.

Four forks to fondle

Klassik is not the only attempt to preserve an earlier KDE experience. Four actual forks or derivatives also cater to users unimpressed by the project's more recent direction.

The oldest and best-established is the Trinity Desktop Environment, or TDE. Klassik looks somewhat similar, but TDE isn't based on the modern KDE libraries and Qt6 – the project maintains its own fork of Qt3, called TQt. The latest release is version 14.1.6, released in April this year. The TDE wiki lists 14 distros for which the current version is already available. We last looked at TDE in May 2025. The Spanish Vendefoul distro, which we mentioned in July, runs TDE on top of XLibre.

If you're happy with modern KDE Plasma, but don't want Wayland, then the new Sonic desktop may appeal. This is a new fork, and development on GitHub is active. It has its own fork of the KWin window manager, called Sonic-win, which retains X11 support.

If KDE 3 is uncomfortably modern, then the MiDesktop project is reaching back further still. This is a fork of KDE version 1.1.2, the last release of KDE 1 and the project's final release of the 20th century. MiDesktop uses the Osiris toolkit, a fork of Qt 2.3.2.

The one we don't quite fathom is the Katana desktop. This is a fork of KDE 4, the first version with the new Plasma desktop. KDE 4.0 appeared in 2008 and its final release was KDE 4.14 in 2014.

KDE 4 proved notoriously divisive, especially in its early releases. As far as we can see, The Register didn't cover the 4.0 release, but we did report on version 4.1 later the same year. We are a little surprised anyone would want to revive it. Apparently its maintainers may now feel similarly: the GitHub repository shows no commits or releases in the past three years. ®