KDE News Archives

It's been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October.

KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland.

With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations.

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling.

Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop.

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too.

Nate Graham and John Veness are out with the latest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting developments taking place in the KDE Plasma desktop space.

The KDE Plasma 6.8 will be introducing support for server-side drop shadows with the feature recently having been merged to KWin.

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop.

Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases.

A security disclosure has been made public today for a yet-to-be-patched arbitrary code execution vulnerability with the KDE Plasma desktop.

With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month. Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux.

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 is out today as the latest point release to deliver bug fixes for the Plasma 6.7 desktop that debuted earlier this month.

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

Following last week's major Plasma 6.7 release, Plasma 6.7.1 is now available today with an initial assortment of bug fixes.

With KDE's Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release.

Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.

Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes.

Open-source developer Jakub Okoński has been working on comparing the gaming latency between Linux and Windows and in turn working to drive some improvements into KDE's KWin Wayland compositor so the latency is more competitive with the gaming experience under Microsoft Windows 11.

KDE developers continue with last minute bug fixes ahead of the Plasma 6.7 desktop release later this month as well as preparing early feature work toward Plasma 6.8 and also landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

KDE developers are sticking to their plans for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in dropping X11 support. Meanwhile it turns out 95% of current Plasma 6.6 users are running already on Wayland.

With the end of the month comes a new KDE Linux status report from prominent KDE developer Nate Graham.

KDE released Plasma 6.7 Beta 2 this week while the current Plasma 6.6 stable series continues seeing fixes as does Plasma 6.8 for what will be the follow-on feature release to Plasma 6.7.

Building off the KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta release earlier in May, a second beta was declared today in preparing for the Plasma 6.7 stable debut in mid-June.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for next month's Plasma 6.7 stable desktop release due out in mid-June while also beginning more feature work toward Plasma 6.8.

This week marked the release of the KDE Plasma 6.7 beta and even so there were some last-minute features being squeezed into this popular Linux desktop option. Plasma's built-in remote desktop server enhancements and improved Plasma notification effects are among the changes topping out this week.

With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release.

In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7.

KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing additional Plasma 6.7 desktop features ahead of the stable release due out in mid-June.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland.

KDE Linux continues making progress as the in-house Linux distribution to best showcase the latest KDE Plasma desktop innovations.

We are now just one month out from the planned release of Plasma 6.7 in mid-June. Feature activity continues to be brisk for Plasma 6.7 while KDE developers also continue landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 series.

KDE developers continued to land more feature changes for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. It's a busy spring of fixes, optimizations, and shiny new features for Plasma 6.7.

KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn't published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks.

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release, KDE Gear 26.04 is out today for shipping all the latest updated KDE desktop applications.

A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops.

KDE Plasma developers continue working on new features for Plasma 6.7 while continuing to land more fixes and hardening for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

KDE Linux as the in-house, leading-edge Linux distribution for showcasing the latest KDE Plasma innovations has promoted itself as being an atomically updated Linux distribution. But these atomic updates didn't quite work out as planned recently with some users finding their system(s) unbootable. But improvements are being made now for better robustness moving forward.

It's been another busy week in the KDE space as Plasma developers continue working on new feature activity for the big Plasma 6.7 release.

Framework Computer as the company behind the modular Framework laptops and incredible Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop has stepped up their support for the KDE community.

Merged today was the very first step toward implementing Vulkan support within KDE's KWin compositor as an alternative to OpenGL rendering.

Krita 6.0 debuted today as the Qt6 port of this digital painting program aligned with KDE/Qt development. Krita 6.0 also brings improved Wayland support while Krita 5.3 is being simultaneously released for running on the mature Qt5 toolkit.

In addition to releasing Plasma 6.6.3 this week, KDE developers remain quite busy working on new features for the Plasma 6.7 desktop while also already queuing some changes for the next Plasma 6.6.4 point release.

In addition to GNOME OS seeing recent improvements, KDE Linux continues seeing more enhancements too for this leading reference platform for showcasing the KDE Plasma desktop.

KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

The KDE/Qt-aligned digiKam software for managing RAW digital photos is out today with the big digiKam 9.0 release.

Nate Graham and John Veness are out today with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma. Notable for KDE Plasma 6.6.x~6.7 development this week were a lot of bug fixing -- including multiple crash fixes -- and some UI polishing too.

KDE Plasma 6.7 development continues heating up following the Plasma 6.6 desktop release earlier this month.

Following last week's Plasma 6.6 release, KDE developers today shipped Plasma 6.6.1 as the first point release with an assortment of different bug fixes.