The KDE community has announced Plasma 6.8 on its 30th anniversary, permanently ending native X11 desktop sessions in favor of Wayland while maintaining compatibility for legacy applications via XWayland.
The release also brings the Union theming system to beta, enables default triple buffering for NVIDIA users, and includes memory optimizations across the desktop and update notifier.
The end of an era for X11
The biggest change in this release is the end of support for running the environment in traditional X11 sessions, making Wayland the only supported display system. The team clarifies, however, that X11-based applications will continue to function normally via a special compatibility mechanism, while KDE applications will retain support for X11 for the foreseeable future.
New features and improvements
KDE's new display system, called Union, is entering beta with version 6.8. There are significant improvements in the area of remote access, as the integrated system adapts better to slower connections and gains an optional feature that locks the physical screen during connection. Meanwhile, the screenshot and recording application Spectacle can now record system audio and microphone simultaneously.
Better performance and options for NVIDIA
Plasma's startup process and memory consumption have been optimized, while the memory used by the update notification has been reduced. For NVIDIA graphics card users, the system now automatically enables triple buffering, along with color improvements and support for additional high dynamic range display formats.
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The system monitor now allows assigning specific processes to specific processor cores and displays graphics memory usage as a percentage. Additionally, a new auto-click feature has been added that activates when the mouse pointer stops moving.
Plasma 6.8 will receive six maintenance updates before the release of Plasma 6.9, which is planned for late February 2027.
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