Celebrating thirty years of KDEPlasma 6.8 is released on a very special day: KDE’s 30th birthday. Today we celebrate three decades of the KDE community providing the world’s greatest free and open-source software.Plasma 6.8 is no exception, offering enhancements across much of the user experience and beneath the surface.6.8 is all about launching Plasma into the future: adding changes you’ll notice right away, combined with major but subtle improvements designed to set the stage for decades of service to come.Dive in and find out what the desktop environment of tomorrow looks like!Join KDE’s 30th anniversary celebrations!Watch the KDE Documentary The Story of Free Software Underdogs,tonight, October 14th at 19:00 CEST.1-time DonationBecome a MemberA script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.Improvements you can use todayBetter accessibilityPart of our continued effort to bring digital control to everyone, a new “dwell clicker” feature can send a mouse click when the pointer stops moving. Designed especially for users with mobility issues, an external app is no longer required to use your system in this way; now it’s built right in!Serving more users worldwidePlasma 6.8 gains support for the Bikram Sambat calendar in the Digital Clock, and the Amharic language in the on-screen keyboard. These are just two more additions of the dozens incorporated into Plasma over recent versions in our effort to make Plasma a truly universal desktop.Bikram Sambat calendarAmharic on-screen keyboardSystem monitoringGain an extreme level of control over your system with Plasma’s System Monitor. In Plasma 6.8, you can assign compute-intensive tasks to only the CPUs of your choosing from directly within the monitor, and keep your machine running smoothly.You can also monitor your VRAM more easily, as it now shows the load as an easy-to-read percentage.Remote desktopWe’ve invested a great deal of time into polishing the experience provided by Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server. In Plasma 6.8, you’ll be able to enjoy the following improvements — with more in the pipeline:Much better performance and quality that prioritizes latency and responsiveness by adapting to slow networks and rapidly-updating screen content.Exclusive mode optionally locks the server’s screen and provides the client with a virtual screen that exactly matches its window size.Bi-directional clipboard synchronization makes it easier to exchange content between the server and client.These features will only take effect in remote desktop client apps that support them.Screen casting and recordingSpectacle can now optionally include both system audio and microphone input in its screen recordings, making it possible to narrate a recording or accurately record everything that’s going on.Plasma’s screen sharing portal dialog lets you create a virtual screen to share, instead of an existing display. In Plasma 6.8, you can now specify the resolution of the virtual screen instead of being limited to only 1920 × 1080.In addition, the quality of screen recordings and screencasts has been improved.Nicer-looking third-party app windowsWe’ve added support for window rules that add desktop shadows, outlines, and rounded corners to client-side-decorated windows that can’t provide these visual niceties themselves. Plasma 6.8 ships with one such rule for Steam, making it feel more at home in Plasma.BeforeAfterWindow managementWe’ve added new global shortcuts to help power users manage their open windows with the Task Manager widget. By pressing Meta + Ctrl + Page Up or Page Down, you can cycle between the previous and next tasks. By also holding Shift, you can move the active task backwards and forwards.Setting the stage for decades to comeThemingFour months ago, Plasma 6.7 included an alpha release of the new Union theming system, demonstrating its ability to style Qt Quick applications.Plasma 6.8 builds on this with a beta release of Union, including not only refinements for Qt Quick theming, but also the ability to style Qt Widgets applications! This includes KDE’s more traditional desktop applications, such as Dolphin, Kate, and Konsole.Dolphin themed with Union’s Breeze style. Can you tell the difference?While Union is not quite ready to be used by default, Plasma 6.8 brings it ever closer to being a single source of truth for styling all of KDE’s products, and more. To learn more about the current state of Union, read the blog posts from Arjen and Akseli.To try Union, ensure the union package is installed (name may differ depending on your distribution), apply “Breeze (Union)” in System Settings → Colors & Themes → Application Style, then restart your apps or the system.Apps are expected to look nearly identical to how they do with the traditional Breeze theme. If you’ve found a Union-specific issue, please report it.If you’re interested in experimenting with creating your own Union style, you can find out more in Union’s documentation.Wayland30 years is an impressive milestone for a community like KDE. But even older is the venerable X Window System (or “X11”), first released in 1984! After 42 years of faithful service, support for starting X11 sessions in Plasma is being retired, in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system.Compared to X11, Wayland offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively developed.The small number of individual apps that still require X11 will continue to work via the “XWayland” compatibility layer.KDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future.Performance, colors, and graphicsAs part of the backend improvements included in Plasma 6.8, we’ve made changes to help Plasma load faster and use less memory. Discover’s update notifier now uses less memory, too.With KWin, NVIDIA GPUs now use triple buffering by default, and all users will have better-looking HDR when using an ICC color profile. We’ve also added support for the HLG transfer function, which means that certain media and applications that did not previously work in HDR are now working as expected.But that’s not all…Plasma 6.8 is chock-full of smaller changes, including:A new kscreenctl tool makes managing displays from the command-line easier and also offers the potential for scripting and automation.Kup, the KDE backup tool, has been polished up and is now released as a part of Plasma.We have added EAP-TTLS authentication support for StrongSwan VPNs.You can enable and disable auto-starting apps without having to delete and recreate their entries.Use the arrow keys to move screens pixel-by-pixel in Display Configuration.The system shows a warning notification when trying to print using an unavailable printer.Copying secrets such as passwords to the clipboard now clarifies why they are not included in history.Emojis in the Emoji Selector can now be shown at different sizes.…and countless bug fixes and small tweaks to make Plasma better than ever!To see a high-level overview of all user-facing changes, see the Plasma 6.8 wiki page.To see the full list of all changes, read the complete changelog.