Following the [1]KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta from earlier this month, the second and last beta of the upcoming [2]Plasma 6.8 desktop is now available for testing.

With this second beta they are promoting their modern Union theming system being in the second-half of their public tech preview phase. [3]Union with Plasma 6.8 now themes QtWidgets-based apps , including the likes of the Dolphin file manager and Kate text editor.

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 with the KWin compositor is also now depending upon Plasma-Wayland-Protocols 1.23 in order to address a memory leak. The memory leak from the KWIn Wayland compositor would leak one kde_output_device_mode_v2 resource per advertised mode on every client re-bind. After nearly two weeks uptime, the user reporting the bug found kwin_wayland consuming around 2.2GB of RAM compared to the typical ~0.3GB for his system.

KDE Plasma 6.8 at large delivers many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, improvements for the Union theme engine, better remote desktop support, multi-GPU handling improvements, the new kscreenctl tool, server-side drop shadow support, multi-monitor improvements, and a lot of other polishing throughout.

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 can be downloaded from [4]KDE.org . Plasma 6.8.0 stable is expected out on 14 October that will also mark the 30th anniversary of the KDE project.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.8-Beta

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Plasma+6.8

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Union-QtWidgets

[4] https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.7.91/