KDE Plasma Development Roundup: Remote Desktop Gets Faster, Clipboard Cuts Back on RAM, and Kup 0.11.0
KDE's team published its latest weekly development roundup. Plasma 6.8, the 6.7.x maintenance branch, and Kup 0.11.0 are all getting attention this week. The theme is polish.
The whole sprint reads like a deliberate push toward finishing touches rather than feature bloat. "This week is all about closing the gap between functional and finished," writes Plasma developer Nate Graham in the roundup. The team is juggling Plasma 6.6 (LTS), 6.7, and 6.8 simultaneously, which is usually where rolling Linux projects start stretching themselves thin. Instead, they're using the overlap to ship targeted fixes across the board.
The built-in remote desktop server took center stage. A long-standing black screen bug that was hitting certain clients finally got squashed, and krdp now ships with lower latency for folks on imperfect networks. It's not the fastest remote desktop tool on the market yet, but the gap is closing fast.
Memory hogs got a quiet win, too. Plasma's clipboard history pop-up now loads on demand instead of spawning at login. Nicolas Fella's patch trims idle RAM usage, which actually matters if you're running a lightweight setup or just hate background junk you never touch.
On the visual side, Plasma 6.8 now notifies you when a printer's offline instead of silently swallowing your print job. Task Manager tooltips got tighter padding. The Window List widget stopped showing the wrong window when you switch virtual desktops. And Marco Martin's fix to the Applet::Index() property is a quiet but necessary API hardening move for third-party developers.
LTS maintenance and Kup's maturation
The 6.7.x branch got its share of love. The login screen now actually respects your preferred language and time format instead of rolling its own defaults. System Settings pages finally support the "highlight changed settings" feature, and the OS Version sensor in System Monitor stopped choking on KDE Linux.
On the 6.6 LTS branch, the xdg-desktop-portal crash recovery means your pointer and keyboard won't lock up if the portal trips over itself mid-session. Floating applets also stopped breaking file drags onto grouped Task Manager items. RTL layouts in the Task Manager widget no longer rearrange themselves into nonsense.
Kup 0.11.0 landed as a standalone release with a focus on default backup exclusions. Cache files, state files, and Btrfs snapshots are now filtered out of the default backup set. You can toggle them through a cleaner UI that actually makes sense to navigate. It's one of those improvements you won't notice until you stop manually editing exclusion lists every time you set up a fresh machine.
Head here to track the full code review on KDE's GitLab. The complete report, with merge request links and bug references, lives on the KDE blog.
