KDE Plasma 6.8 has been released, arriving on the 30th anniversary of the free, open-source desktop environment’s founding.

Changes are, as you’d expect, varied across the stack.

A new backup tool, Kup, is included as part of Plasma 6.8 to make automated backups to external media easier, while Spectacle, the screenshot and screen capture tool, is now able to record system audio and microphone alongside screen contents.

When running the Steam desktop client, it now renders shadows and rounded corners for better visual consistency with other apps run-on the desktop. Accessibility is boosted by a new ‘click dwell’ option to activate a click when mousing over a UI element and waiting.

Cultural accessibility broadens as the Hindu Bikram Sambat calendar can now be used in the Digital Clock applet, and the on-screen keyboard now can now be used in Amharic.

Under-the-hood changes see NVIDIA GPUs use triple-buffering by default, HDR play nice with ICC colour profiles and Plasma Shell start up faster and use less memory when running lots of widgets.

Finally, if you’ve wanted to assign an application or process to a specific CPU core(s), you can do so via the updated System Monitor in Plasma 6.8. Right-click on a process and choose the “select affinity” option, then uncheck any cores you don’t want it to use.

Following GNOME’s lead, Plasma 6.8 drops support for running on X11/Xorg desktop sessions. The change doesn’t affect the ability to run legacy apps as those work via XWayland, and newer versions of KDE apps will continue to work on X11 desktops.

For more detail on the changes check, the KDE wiki lists the notable changes.

KDE Plasma 6.8 will be available to install in rolling-release distros in the coming days, while users of the Ubuntu-based KDE neon will receive it as a software update in the coming weeks.

Due to the timing of the final release, Kubuntu 26.10 does not ship with Plasma 6.8. Instead, Ubuntu’s official KDE flavours offers the latest point release in the KDE Plasma 6.7.x series.

Images: KDE

(via LWN)