KDE developers continue shaping the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release, scheduled for October 14, with this week’s work bringing a notable improvement for remote desktop users: fully bi-directional clipboard sharing.
With the change, remote desktop sessions will no longer be limited to sending clipboard contents only from the server to the client. Instead, clipboard data will be shared in both directions, making copy-and-paste behavior much more natural when working through KDE’s remote desktop implementation.
Moreover, Plasma 6.8 is getting several smaller usability improvements across the desktop. Events in the Digital Clock widget will now show their descriptions directly instead of requiring users to hover over them. The Mouse and Touchpad pages in System Settings are gaining spinboxes next to their scrolling-speed sliders, allowing finer control than sliders alone.
Discover is being improved to display all external links that applications provide through their metadata. KDE has refined the logout screen so its interactive controls appear only on the currently active monitor, matching the behavior on the lock and login screens. Its fade-in and fade-out animations are now also faster.
The wallpaper chooser in both System Settings and the desktop configuration dialog will load more smoothly, reducing visual glitches that could appear while opening it. KDE also made a small visual adjustment to the Power & Battery widget, vertically aligning the “Manually Block Sleep and Screen Locking” switch with its icon.
Several fixes are being prepared for Plasma 6.8. KDE’s remote desktop server, KRDP, now avoids a crash that could occur when closing a connection. KWin fixes an issue where resizing a window with a locked aspect ratio could sometimes cause the window to disappear entirely.
The Microphone Indicator widget will show the correct icon in the on-screen display when muting or unmuting a microphone. Applications installed through Flatpak or Nix will be pinned to Plasma’s Task Manager more robustly, reducing the chance that pinned launchers stop working if their underlying .desktop files move.
The Emoji Selector is getting a consistency cleanup, with gender variants now appearing in the same order across all supported emojis. KWin improves the appearance of the enlarged mouse pointer shown when repeatedly shaking the mouse, keeping it sharper even at unusually large sizes.
Another desktop fix addresses an unusual context-menu issue where right-clicking twice on the same desktop pixel without moving the pointer could cause the wrong context menu to appear the second time.
Finally, KDE continues expanding the capabilities of the new kscreenctl command-line tool. In Plasma 6.8, it will support setting custom CVT timings and modelines, giving advanced users more control over custom display configurations directly from the command line.
KDE Plasma 6.8 is still under development, so these changes are not yet part of the current stable Plasma release. More details about the ongoing development work are available in KDE’s latest “This Week in Plasma” report.
