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

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii wrote a blog post today around the recent work he's done on KWin server-side drop shadow support. This feature is for application windows that neither draw drop shadows themselves or ask the compositor to draw drop shadows. With this new feature, you can force the compositor to add drop shadows for those windows if not present.

With KDE Plasma 6.8, this new feature can be enabled via the new “Window manager draws titlebar, frame, and shadows” window rule. KWin will also automatically add drop shadows to X11 windows that lack server-side decoration and client-side drop shadows. Here's a comparison shown by Vlad of Discord with no effect and then enabling server-side drop shadow on the right window:

More details for those interested in this server-side drop shadows feature for KDE Plasma 6.8 via [1]Vlad's blog .



[1] https://blog.vladzahorodnii.com/2026/07/16/server-side-drop-shadows/