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.
SonicDE: X11 Plasma Restored
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.
SonicDE also ships a Silver theme, forked from the Klassy theming utility for Plasma, alongside a matching silver-sddm login screen. Together, they give the desktop a consistent look rather than just resembling a stripped-down Plasma install.
What users actually get is an X11 desktop that behaves the way longtime KDE users expect, while still inheriting improvements from the upstream Plasma components it forks from.
And since SonicDE is being built to be init system agnostic from the start, it isn’t locked to systemd. BSD support is one of the stated goals too, so the project is thinking well beyond Linux users.
Availability of this?
It is already packaged for Arch Linux-based distributions, with additional builds available for Debian, Devuan, Artix Linux, and Vendefoul Wolf. The official website has the links for the packages for those distros.
Also good to know is that the developers are already packaging SonicDE for Gentoo, NixOS, OpenMandriva, and FreeBSD, so keep an eye out on their socials and GitHub page for updates.
This article first appeared on Read More