Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!This week, Plasma contributors put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.8, which is due to be released early next week, on October 14th.A lot of the work was behind the scenes, and that’s why this week’s update may look a bit light. But nevertheless, here’s the bigger stuff that we thought was worth reporting on specifically:Notable UI improvementsPlasma 6.8When the Weather Report widget isn’t able to fetch any weather data, its tooltip now explains this, rather than being a tiny empty square. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1154)Improved keyboard navigation using arrow keys in KRunner. (Christoph Wolk, milou MR #110)Plasma 6.9You can now disable the notification that Spectacle shows when it begins recording the screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, spectacle MR #596)System Settings’ Printers page now asks you to check your firewall when it can’t find any network printers. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #526465)The virtual desktop thumbnails in KWin’s Overview effect are now more harmonious and visually pleasing. (Abdallah Hammad, kwin MR #10036) New Old Notable bug fixesPlasma 6.6.7Plasma’s on-screen keyboard now correctly dodges floating panels. (Devin Lin, plasma-desktop MR #4056)Plasma 6.7.6When using upower-1.91.4 or later, if your keyboard doesn’t have a backlight or doesn’t support controlling its backlight via software, the Brightness & Color widget will no longer show a spurious control for it anyway. (Tristyn Russelo, KDE Bugzilla #525916)Plasma 6.8Discover’s feature to automatically apply updates now always works for Flatpak apps. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519082)Fixed key repeat with the Slow Keys accessibility feature. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #523419)Fixed an issue that could cause lags and stutters when tiling windows while using certain NVIDIA GPUs with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522424)Fixed Tab key navigation in KRunner. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #387951)Frameworks 6.32Fixed a case where Qt-based apps using blur could crash when a tooltip disappeared while you were typing. (Anton Karasev, KDE Bugzilla #522547)Country flags used to distinguish keyboard layouts now look better when using a scale factor over 100%. (Zhora Zmeykin, kguiaddons MR #235)Notable in performance & technicalPlasma 6.9You can now control the brightness level of backlit keyboards that are connected after login. (Tristyn Russelo, powerdevil MR #691)How you can helpKDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned herePush a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.