For those of us sticking with XLibre (X11) over AI hook Wayland (Wayland should give you pause the way IBM/Red Hat took over X.Org to kill the project leading to the fork XLibre), October 14th is a monumental day as KDE is dropping X11 support. It’s still my favorite desktop environment on Linux, and we have SonicDE as a fork of KDE to keep X11 support alive and remove Wayland components. I personally think KDE is purposely doing things to hamper SonicDE as there is some breakage after certain releases taking a little bit of time for SonicDE to fix, as they haven’t taken over all the packages which I believe will become a requirement. Consequently, If there is breakage I’ve been falling back to Cinnamon or XFCE4. There is good support in Cinnamon for KDE Connect and phone integration and I could happily use it as my main desktop environment. Still it bums me out that when about 50% of Linux users are still using X11, KDE is trying to force them over to Wayland which isn’t feature complete and offers no real benefits over X11, even after these many years of development.
https://linuxiac.com/kde-plasma-6-8-gets-final-fixes-ahead-of-october-14-release/
KDE Plasma 6.8 receives final fixes for NVIDIA performance, Flatpak updates, KRunner navigation, and accessibility ahead of its October 14 release.
By Bobby Borisov
With KDE Plasma 6.8 scheduled for release on Wednesday, October 14, the KDE development team is putting the finishing touches on the desktop environment update.
One notable fix addresses an issue affecting certain NVIDIA GPUs running proprietary drivers. Under specific circumstances, tiling windows caused lag and stuttering, which is now corrected for Plasma 6.8.
Another important fix concerns KDE’s Discover software manager. Its automatic update function did not always work reliably with Flatpak applications. With Plasma 6.8, this issue has been addressed, ensuring Flatpak updates are applied as expected when automatic updates are enabled.
KRunner, KDE’s built-in application launcher and search utility, is also receiving attention. Developers improved navigation with the arrow keys and fixed an issue affecting Tab-key navigation, making it easier to move through search results and interact with the launcher using the keyboard.
On the accessibility side, a bug affecting key repeat when the Slow Keys feature was enabled has been resolved. Slow Keys helps users who have difficulty pressing keys accurately by requiring a key to be held down for a specified period before it is accepted.
There is also a small improvement to the Weather Report widget. Previously, when the widget could not retrieve weather information, hovering over it displayed a tiny empty tooltip. In Plasma 6.8, the tooltip will instead explain that the weather data could not be fetched, giving users a clearer indication of what went wrong.
Beyond Plasma 6.8, developers have also addressed a few issues in other KDE components. Plasma 6.7.6 will correct an unnecessary keyboard-backlight control appearing on unsupported hardware, while Frameworks 6.32 will fix a potential crash in Qt applications involving blurred tooltips and improve the appearance of keyboard-layout country flags when display scaling exceeds 100%.
Finally, KDE has already started landing improvements for Plasma 6.9. These include an option to disable Spectacle’s notification when screen recording begins, improved virtual desktop thumbnails in KWin’s Overview effect, a firewall troubleshooting hint when network printers cannot be found, and support for adjusting the brightness of backlit keyboards connected after login.
For additional details, see KDE’s latest “This Week in Plasma” report.
Last but not least, October 14 is shaping up to be another notable day for KDE. Alongside the Plasma 6.8 release, KDE will also premiere “KDE: The Documentary,” a film that looks back on the project’s history, from Matthias Ettrich’s original 1996 Usenet call for a Linux desktop environment through the major challenges and turning points that followed.