Two weeks after 6.8.2, KDE has just released Plasma 6.8.3, the third maintenance release in the 6.8 series. Many of the changes focus on KWin, the KDE window manager, with fixes for NVIDIA and AMD multi-GPU setups, rendering issues, and frame scheduling with triple buffering.
There’s also a fix for an issue where the mouse cursor would be aliased in screen recordings, plus improved handling of missing rendering devices.
KWin now deals with display power management a lot more reliably by simply ignoring the wake-up events when the system goes to sleep. Other fixes include window resizing, the maximize guides, monitor detection when using the Zoom effect, and the display mode selection, which will now avoid interlaced modes if a progressive mode is preferred.
Plasma Workspace gets a fix for a segfault that would occur when opening application launchers via keyboard shortcuts. It also fixes a multi-monitor issue where cloned panels would end up on the wrong screen rather than the screen they were assigned to.
For desktop panels, there was a fix for a freeze that could occur if the panel layout spacing was set to zero. The Show Desktop widget now correctly restores focus to minimized windows, and moving through the virtual desktops via the Pager no longer inadvertently activates the Show Desktop widget.
The update also addresses several desktop interaction issues, including incorrect handling of fast drag, Folder View, and application launchers within an activity. Kickoff gets a fix for scrolling, and KRunner gets a fix for keyboard navigation when using its Vim-style shortcuts.
Power management gets a fix for screens staying dimmed when Plasma loses control of their brightness. The Battery Monitor widget will now only show charge limit information for the system battery, not for any other battery-powered device (which would be misleading).
KDE’s Spectacle screenshot utility includes fixes to image handling when taking screenshots of displays that have the same scaling factor, as well as improved sizing of screenshots that are combined. It also skips QR code scanning in background mode.
Visual corrections include fixes for menu rendering glitches in the Oxygen theme when fractional scaling is enabled, improved text legibility, and a KWin color-processing fix involving sRGB. Plasma fixes wallpaper resets after major screen-resolution changes and improves default display scaling for handheld devices and tablets.
Other changes relate to digital clock formatting, calendar date handling, audio volume notifications, and a number of widgets. Plasma will now display an error message if a desktop shell package fails to load rather than just silently not loading.
For more information, see KDE’s official announcement or the complete Plasma 6.8.3 changelog. The next update in the 6.8 series, Plasma 6.8.4, is scheduled for December 1st.
KDE Plasma 6.8.3 will become available through the software repositories of rolling-release Linux distributions as their maintainers package the update. Users of distributions with fixed release schedules will receive it according to their respective update policies.
