KDE News Archives

There is just over one week to go until the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop release. Some last minute fixes continue flowing into Plasma 6.8 as well as early feature work continuing for Plasma 6.9.

KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image.

Even with this week's KDE Akademy conference and releasing KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, KDE developers still found time to land last minute changes for Plasma 6.8 plus ongoing early work toward Plasma 6.9.

Following the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta from earlier this month, the second and last beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop is now available for testing.

At the KDE Akademy 2026 conference going on right now in Graz, Austria the three KDE goals for the next two years were unveiled.

Following last week's Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9.

Along with KDE Plasma 6.8 beta releasing this week, there were some other interesting Plasma changes this week worthy of a shout-out.

Ahead of the stable release of Plasma 6.8 due out on 14 October that also marks the 30th anniversary of the KDE project, out today is the much anticipated beta release.

Merged today to the latest KDE KWin compositor development code is support for Wayland's important commit-timing protocol that is useful for video playback as well as for gamers relying on Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync support.

It's been an exciting start to the month of September for KDE Plasma developers with continuing to land last minute improvements for Plasma 6.8 ahead of its official release in mid-October.

In preparations for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in abandoning the X11 session, another feature gap compared to X11 has been addressed.

With the end of the month comes a new monthly status report from the KDE Linux project as their in-house distribution project.

In addition to the Union QtWidgets initial release happening this week, a number of other improvements also landed in the past few days in making Plasma 6.8 all the more exciting.

Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE's fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support.

KDE developer David Edmundson is out today with a blog post around improvements that have been ongoing for the Plasma 6.8 release in improving the KDE remote desktop experience. As part of ensuring a good Wayland experience and hitting all the needs fulfilled by X11, Plasma 6.8 is seeing improvements for its remote desktop functionality.

This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8.

With today's release of KIO-Snapshot, KDE software now has stable integration of Btrfs file-system snapshots.

KDE Gear 26.08 was released today to deliver the latest collection of KDE application updates.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements.

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software.

It's been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October.

KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland.

With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations.

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling.

Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop.

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too.

Nate Graham and John Veness are out with the latest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting developments taking place in the KDE Plasma desktop space.

The KDE Plasma 6.8 will be introducing support for server-side drop shadows with the feature recently having been merged to KWin.

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop.

Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases.

A security disclosure has been made public today for a yet-to-be-patched arbitrary code execution vulnerability with the KDE Plasma desktop.

With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month. Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux.

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 is out today as the latest point release to deliver bug fixes for the Plasma 6.7 desktop that debuted earlier this month.

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

Following last week's major Plasma 6.7 release, Plasma 6.7.1 is now available today with an initial assortment of bug fixes.

With KDE's Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release.

Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.

Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes.

Open-source developer Jakub Okoński has been working on comparing the gaming latency between Linux and Windows and in turn working to drive some improvements into KDE's KWin Wayland compositor so the latency is more competitive with the gaming experience under Microsoft Windows 11.

KDE developers continue with last minute bug fixes ahead of the Plasma 6.7 desktop release later this month as well as preparing early feature work toward Plasma 6.8 and also landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

KDE developers are sticking to their plans for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in dropping X11 support. Meanwhile it turns out 95% of current Plasma 6.6 users are running already on Wayland.

With the end of the month comes a new KDE Linux status report from prominent KDE developer Nate Graham.

KDE released Plasma 6.7 Beta 2 this week while the current Plasma 6.6 stable series continues seeing fixes as does Plasma 6.8 for what will be the follow-on feature release to Plasma 6.7.

Building off the KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta release earlier in May, a second beta was declared today in preparing for the Plasma 6.7 stable debut in mid-June.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for next month's Plasma 6.7 stable desktop release due out in mid-June while also beginning more feature work toward Plasma 6.8.

This week marked the release of the KDE Plasma 6.7 beta and even so there were some last-minute features being squeezed into this popular Linux desktop option. Plasma's built-in remote desktop server enhancements and improved Plasma notification effects are among the changes topping out this week.

With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release.

In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7.

KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing additional Plasma 6.7 desktop features ahead of the stable release due out in mid-June.