Final beta: Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 is the second and last beta before the stable release.
Union theming: The new Union theme engine enters the latter half of its public tech preview and now supports QtWidgets applications, including Dolphin and Kate.
KWin memory leak fix: KWin now depends on Plasma-Wayland-Protocols 1.23, addressing a Wayland resource leak that could cause RAM usage to grow dramatically over long uptimes.
Wayland improvements: Adds dwell-click support, commit-timing protocol support, improved remote desktop functionality, and server-side drop shadows.
Performance: Includes VRAM usage optimizations and additional KWin/desktop efficiency improvements.
Multi-GPU & displays: Improves multi-GPU handling and multi-monitor behavior.
New tool: Introduces kscreenctl for managing display configurations.
General polish: Numerous additional fixes and refinements are included across Plasma.
Release date:Plasma 6.8.0 is scheduled for 14 October 2026, coinciding with KDE’s 30th anniversary.
KDE’s new Union theming system gained initial support for styling QtWidgets-based apps (Akseli Lahtinen). It’s a first draft with known visual glitches, but a notable milestone. Plasma 6.8 is taking shape.
New features
Plasma 6.8: Union theming for QtWidgets apps; built-in RDP server adapts quality to available bandwidth for steadier frame rates; Strongswan VPN now supports EAP-TTLS authentication.
UI improvements
Plasma 6.7.5: Discover only offers .deb install on systems that natively support the format.
Plasma 6.8:
Clipboard history now indicates when copied text was marked secret, instead of silently hiding it.
Screen-recording indicator appears only during actual recording.
Overview effect easier to trigger via four-finger touchpad swipe.
Digital Clock calendar event text fully selectable.
Less awkward dialog design for drawing-tablet pen button config.
Bluetooth widget’s “Configure” button moved to the standard location.
Enterprise Wi-Fi connection jumps straight to credential entry.
System Tray icons stay visible until their popup closes.
“Keep selection and clipboard the same” no longer disables unrelated settings.
Mass crashes now produce a single System Tray icon listing all crashes, not dozens.
Frameworks 6.30: Better contrast for in-window Kirigami dialogs in dark themes; System Monitor graph legends request tabular numerals for alignment.
Bug fixes
Plasma 6.6.7: Security fix — screen locker failed to lock under a specific screen-off + grace-period configuration.
Plasma 6.7.5: Discover no longer hangs on update checks with the Snap backend and no upgradeable Snaps; non-KDE app crashes on dialog close fixed; pointer-movement regression in VMs with non-accelerated drivers fixed; RTL languages no longer block force-quit in System Monitor; malformed panel edit-mode tooltip fixed; DrKonqi no longer crash-loops until memory exhaustion.
Plasma 6.8: Fixed Plasma’s second-most-common crash (during logout); Plasma Search “Defaults” button and non-default highlighting work correctly; all Kickoff widgets can return results for uninstalled apps; logout sound no longer needlessly delays logout.
Performance & technical
Plasma 6.7.5: Improved HDR appearance with ICC profiles.
Plasma 6.8: Better performance/power efficiency for full-screen content on Intel and NVIDIA GPUs with HDR, ICC profiles, or Night Light; HLG transfer function support in KWin; screen-casting latency cut by one frame; lower resource use for notification/Activities thumbnails and the Trash widget; Spectacle omits the alpha channel when unused; disabling a System Tray widget frees memory immediately; showConfigurationInterface() works in Plasma scripting; Plasma launches with a plain background if all wallpaper plugins are broken or missing.
Frameworks 6.30: KWallet log spam removed along with the non-functional feature causing it.
KDE Gear 26.12.0: System Settings’ Proxy page rewritten in QML, enabling Plasma Mobile support with a near-identical design.
Contributing
KDE asks for help with the weekly report (via its Matrix room), general project involvement — noting donated time matters more than money and non-programmers are welcome — and financial donations covering operations, salaries, and contributor travel. Work is featured here by pushing commits to merge requests on invent.kde.org.
The KDE Plasma 6.5 stable release is scheduled for October 21, 2025. A beta version of Plasma 6.5 was released on September 18, 2025, allowing for public testing.
A very handy tool to convert screenshots in to text. If you have for example a scanned document or PDF you can easily copy the contents just using Spectacle.
A package dependency is Tesseract, that you can find in AUR.
There is also this pull request that adds native support for this functionality.
