On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of the project published the release of the desktop environment KDE Plasma 6.8. To evaluate the performance of new releases of KDE you can use builds from the projects KDE Linux, KDE Neon and openSUSE (Argon, based on openSUSE Leap, and Krypton, based on openSUSE Tumbleweed).
Basic changesin KDE Plasma 6.8:
- X11-based session support has been discontinued. Only a session is left for working using the Wayland protocol, the ability to launch X11 applications in which is provided using the XWayland DDX server. X11 deprecation only affects the KDE Plasma desktop environment session and does not affect the ability to run KDE applications in X server-based environments (there are no plans to deprecate X11 support in KDE applications at this time). For those who require X11, support for the protocol has been retained where possible in various desktop components, and additional changes have been added to improve compatibility when running applications on top of XWayland.
Reasons cited for the end of X11 support include the general stagnation of X server development and the desire to avoid wasting limited developer resources on supporting two display systems and session types in parallel. It is stated that in the long term, getting rid of X11 will provide new opportunities to expand functionality, increase stability, optimize code and speed up the development process.
- The backup system kup has been moved to the main Plasma composition, allowing you to create versioned backups of user data and save them to external USB drives or to a server. It is possible to configure automatic saving of changes since the last backup when connecting a drive with backups to the computer.
- Added utility kscreenctl, replacing kscreen-doctor and providing a more familiar and structured command line interface for managing output. Operations such as detecting available output devices, enabling/disabling output devices, and changing settings are supported.
