KDE developers have shared another round of improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release planned for October 14, including better performance on systems with external GPUs, configurable virtual displays for screencasting, more precise monitor positioning, and adjustable emoji sizes.
Among the substantial changes is a performance improvement for systems using external GPUs. According to KDE developer Xaver Hugl, the optimization addresses how KWin handles rendering and presentation when displays connect to GPUs other than the one primarily used for rendering.
The change should reduce unnecessary data transfers between GPUs and improve performance in multi-GPU configurations, especially on laptops connected to external graphics enclosures or docking stations. KDE describes the performance improvement as significant.
Plasma 6.8 will also make virtual screens created for screencasting more flexible. Until now, these virtual displays used a fixed resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels. Upon the upcoming release, users can change their size and resolution.
Display Configuration is receiving another refinement. While editing a monitor layout, users can move screens one pixel at a time using the keyboard’s arrow keys.
KDE’s Emoji Selector will gain a control to increase or decrease the displayed emoji size. The change does not affect how emojis appear after insertion but should make browsing and identifying them easier inside the selector.
Spectacle, KDE’s screenshot utility, is also getting several Plasma 6.8 improvements. Its settings page will show image-quality controls only when the selected file format supports adjustable quality, and will remove irrelevant options for formats where the setting has no effect.
In addition, KDE developers have fixed an issue that could cause very large screenshots captured with Spectacle to become corrupted after being pasted into another application.
The Remote Desktop page in System Settings will provide clearer instructions, while Plasma’s scripting interface is being extended to let scripts control whether a panel uses the floating appearance.
Lastly, KWin will recognize the dedicated “Pick up phone” and “Hang up phone” keys available on certain keyboards. Users will be able to assign these keys to shortcuts and use them to trigger supported actions, rather than having the keys remain unrecognized by the desktop.
More details about the ongoing development work are available in KDE’s latest “This Week in Plasma” report.
