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.

Plasma 6.8 also saw work completed for improving the performance and power efficiency for full-screen content when using an Intel or NVIDIA GPU with either HDR, ICC profiles, and/or the night light effect. The change to KWin is for offloading single-plane OETF to the CRTC post-blend gamma LUT. This allows direct scan-out for more scenarios rather than falling back to shader composition, reducing color banding, and improving utilization of the DRM/KMS hardware color pipeline.

Another Plasma 6.8 enhancement for KPipeWire is reducing screen-casting latency throughout Plasma and KWin by one frame.

Plasma 6.8's Trash widget is also now less resource intensive. The Trash applet drops its DIrModel usage to instead rely on KCoreDirLister for less overhead when just needing to count the number of items in the trash. It also avoids updating the displayed counter of items in the trash while it's still counting.

Plasma 6.8 is set to fix the second most common crash occurring for the Plasma desktop. This second most common crash would happen for users on log-out. This ended up being due to a crash within the QConcatenateTablesProxyModel destruction.

Another one of the new features with Plasma 6.8 is its built-in RDP server now automatically adjusting its quality level based on the network's available bandwidth.

Meanwhile for Plasma 6.7.5 is improving the way HDR content looks when using an ICC display profile.

More details on these improvements and more to KDE Plasma can be found via the latest issue of This Week in Plasma.