KDE releases Plasma 6.8 and abandons new X11 sessions — Ars Technica

On October 14, the day of its 30th anniversary, KDE released the Plasma 6.8 desktop environment and ended native support for launching new X11 sessions. KDE called the new version an “anniversary edition” intended to prepare Plasma for the future. Ars Technica reports on the update.

Transition to Wayland

Plasma will transition fully to the Wayland system. At the same time, legacy applications created for X11 will continue to work through the XWayland compatibility layer. KDE applications will also continue to support X11 in other desktop environments. Users who remain on Plasma 6.7 will retain their existing X11 sessions for now. Earlier, in 2025, GNOME officially abandoned X11 sessions by default.

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New features in Plasma 6.8

Plasma 6.8 expanded support for window decorations in third-party applications, including shadows and rounded corners, and also updated the Union theme system. Triple buffering was enabled by default for Nvidia graphics cards. The Kup backup utility was integrated into Plasma, and the kscreenctl command-line tool for configuring displays was added.

The updated System Monitor allows users to pin processes to specific CPU cores through the graphical interface. KDE also redesigned its built-in remote desktop server: it received clipboard synchronization, an Exclusive Mode for locking the server's physical display and creating a virtual display, as well as adaptive stream transmission for more stable operation on slow networks. Along with the release, KDE presented the documentary film The KDE Documentary — A Story of Free Software Underdogs.