Marking the 30th anniversary of software developer KDE on October 14, the company released Plasma 6.8, debuted a movie and retired Plasma’s native X11 session support. KDE’s announcement dubs the new Plasma 6.8 the “30th Anniversary Edition” and describes the update as preparing Plasma for the future. Legacy X11 applications will still work via the XWayland compatibility layer, and KDE applications will also continue to support 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 add support for starting new X11 sessions in Plasma. Users who choose to stay on Plasma 6.7 will keep their existing sessions for now. The move was expected, with GNOME officially dropping X11 sessions as the default in 2025.
The new Plasma 6.8 brings many improvements, including increased support for adding window decorations (such as shadows and rounded corners) to third-party apps, and a more streamlined Union Theme system. Other notable additions include Nvidia Triple Buffering, which is enabled by default, Kup Backup integration (KDE Backup Utility – now integrated into Plasma), and kscreenctla command-line utility that allows power users to adjust display configurations.