The easiest way to try it out is with a live image booted off a USB disk. Docker images also provide a quick and easy way to test Plasma.
\nDownload live images with Plasma Download Docker images with Plasma\nWednesday, 14 October 2026
\nPlasma 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.
\nPlasma 6.8 is no exception, offering enhancements across much of the user experience and beneath the surface.
\n6.8 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.
\nDive in and find out what the desktop environment of tomorrow looks like!
\nPart 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!
\nPlasma 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.
\nGain 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.
\nYou can also monitor your VRAM more easily, as it now shows the load as an easy-to-read percentage.
\nWe’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:
\nThese features will only take effect in remote desktop client apps that support them.
\nSpectacle 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.
\nPlasma’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.
\nIn addition, the quality of screen recordings and screencasts has been improved.
\nWe’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.
\nWe’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.
Four months ago, Plasma 6.7 included an alpha release of the new Union theming system, demonstrating its ability to style Qt Quick applications.
\nPlasma 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.
\nWhile 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.
\nTo 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.
\nIf you’re interested in experimenting with creating your own Union style, you can find out more in Union’s documentation.
\n30 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.
\nCompared to X11, Wayland offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively developed.
\nThe small number of individual apps that still require X11 will continue to work via the “XWayland” compatibility layer.
\nKDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future.
\nAs 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.
\nWith 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.
\nPlasma 6.8 is chock-full of smaller changes, including:
\nkscreenctl tool makes managing displays from the command-line easier and also offers the potential for scripting and automation.\nTo 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.
\nDistributions have created, or are in the process of creating, packages listed on our wiki page.
\nNote that packages of this release might not be available on all distributions at the time of this announcement.
\nPackage download wiki page\nYou can install Plasma directly from source.
\nCommunity instructions to compile it Source Info Page\nYou can give us feedback and get updates on our social media channels:
\nDiscuss KDE on the KDE Forums.
\nYou can provide feedback direct to the developers via the #Plasma Matrix channel, Plasma-devel mailing list or report issues via Bugzilla. If you like what the team is doing, please let them know!
\nYour feedback is greatly appreciated.
\nKDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information or become a KDE e.V. supporting member through our Join the Game initiative.
\nKDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE’s full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Windows, Haiku, and macOS.
\nTrademark Notices.
\nKDE<sup>®</sup> and the K Desktop Environment<sup>®</sup> logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V..
\nLinux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.
\nAll other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.
\nFor more information send us an email: press@kde.org
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