KDE turns 30 today, and they’re celebrating it with a brand new KDE Plasma release: version 6.8 is here. On the accessibility front, 6.8 brings a new dwell clicker function (meaning a click will register if the pointer is held still for a short while) and support for the Bikram Sambat calendar and the Amharic language. I always love it when I see support for new languages and scripts, especially when, as is the case here, it’s a language spoken as a first language by 25 million people.
The Plasma remote desktop has also been improved with bi-directional copy/paste, performance and quality improvements, and more, and you can now record microphone and audio while screen recording with Spectacle. In System Monitor, you can now assign processes and tasks to specific processors/cores, which is a great feature for people running intensive tasks but who would still like to, you know, do other things while those tasks are running.
KDE 6.8 drops support for X11, focusing entirely on Wayland. Of course, X11 applications will remain usable thanks to Xwayland, and KDE’s applications will continue to support X11 in case you’re using them outside of KDE. This release also further expands the Union theming system, now adding support for styling Qt Widgets. Union is still in beta, so you’ll have to enable it to test it. There’s a ton more, too, but these are some of the highlights.
KDE Plasma 6.8 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.
