KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8, remote upgrades, and an X11 farewell

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• Ars Technica
  KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8, remote upgrades, and an X11 farewell

  Marking the 30th anniversary of KDE on October 14, the project released Plasma 6.8, debuted a movie, and retired Plasma's native X11 session support. The announcement from KDE dubs the new Plasma 6.8 as the "30th Anniversary Edition" and describes the update as preparing Plasma for the future. Legacy X11 applications will still function via the XWayland compatibility layer , and KDE applications will also continue supporting X11 under other desktop environments. After 42 years in service, the X11 protocol is losing another major desktop environment. Plasma will fully adopt the Wayland system and put support for starting new X11 sessions in Plasma to bed. Users opting to stay on Plasma 6.7 will keep their existing sessions for now. The move was expected, with GNOME officially dropping X11 sessions by default in 2025 . The new Plasma 6.8 brings many improvements, including increased support for adding window decorations (like shadows and rounded corners) to third-party apps, and a more streamlined Union theming system . Other notable additions include Nvidia triple buffering being enabled by default, Kup backup integration (KDE's backup utility—now integrated into Plasma), and kscree

  Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:21:06 GMT

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1. 2026-10-15 22:21Ars Technica — KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8, remote upgrades, and an X11 farewell