Plasma 6.8 retires the X11 session after 42 years, and ships a window rule for Steam
KDE has retired support for starting an X11 session in Plasma 6.8, after what its release announcement calls "42 years of faithful service", leaving Wayland as the only way into the desktop. The same release, published on October 14 to land on KDE's 30th birthday, ships a window rule written specifically for the Steam client.
KDE's "after" image from its own before-and-after comparison of the new Steam window rule. Image: KDE Community
What goes is the session, not X11 itself. KDE says the small number of individual apps that still require X11 "will continue to work via the 'XWayland' compatibility layer", and that "KDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future".
KDE's stated reason is that "Compared to X11, Wayland offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively developed". The 42 years run from 1984, where KDE dates the first release of the X Window System.
KWin turns on triple buffering for Nvidia cards
"With KWin, NVIDIA GPUs now use triple buffering by default," KDE says, and HDR should look better for everyone when an ICC colour profile is in use. Plasma 6.8 also adds the HLG transfer function, which KDE says means "certain media and applications that did not previously work in HDR are now working as expected".
Triple buffering here is KWin's own default rather than a change in Nvidia's driver. Dropping the X11 session does mean a Plasma user with an Nvidia card has only Wayland left to start into, and Nvidia has an open KDE Wayland report of its own: on October 12 it split a full-system freeze on an external monitor in KDE Wayland out of a 2023 bug thread to track separately.
Plasma 6.8's System Monitor can pin a compute-heavy task to chosen CPU cores. Image: KDE Community
Steam gets a window rule of its own
Plasma can now apply window rules that add "desktop shadows, outlines, and rounded corners to client-side-decorated windows that can't provide these visual niceties themselves", KDE says, and Plasma 6.8 "ships with one such rule for Steam, making it feel more at home in Plasma".
Steam is the only application KDE says it ships such a rule for, and the change is cosmetic: a shadow, an outline and rounded corners on a window that draws its own frame.
System Monitor can pin tasks to chosen CPUs
In Plasma 6.8 "you can assign compute-intensive tasks to only the CPUs of your choosing from directly within the monitor", KDE says, and VRAM load now reads as a percentage. The remote desktop server gains an exclusive mode that "optionally locks the server's screen and provides the client with a virtual screen that exactly matches its window size", two-way clipboard sync, and a screen-sharing portal that can set a virtual screen's resolution rather than being held at 1920 x 1080.
Union, the theming system Plasma 6.7 shipped as an alpha, reaches beta and can now style Qt Widgets applications including Dolphin, Kate and Konsole. KDE says it is "not quite ready to be used by default", so it stays an opt-in package.
When any of this reaches a particular machine is up to the distribution, and KDE says as much: "packages of this release might not be available on all distributions at the time of this announcement". SteamOS is one of those distributions: its 3.9 beta branch moved Desktop Mode from Plasma 6.4.3 to Plasma 6.7.3, a release behind what KDE shipped on October 14.
