This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8.

Even with the summer holidays, Plasma 6.8 development continues to be hot with many new features and this week seeing several performance improvements too. Plasma 6.8 is working toward its soft freeze on 27 August, the Plasma 6.8 Beta 1 on 10 September, the Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 on 24 September, and then ideally Plasma 6.8.0 releasing on 14 October.

A surprisingly long overdue addition with Plasma 6.8 is allowing systems configured in a language other than English, users can now search for and find System Settings pages using keywords in English -- in addition to the primary current language.

Plasma 6.8 also enhanced its lock screen with improved alignment of buttons, selectable authentication types, and more.

KWin notifications about GPU resets happening will now also trigger for all GPUs rather than only the primary GPU.

KDE's Breeze theme has also improved styling for GTK4 apps' menus and window borders.

On the performance side, KDE Discover's background notifier process will now use "much less" memory when checking for updates. Plasma 6.8 will also startup slightly faster by avoiding unnecessary work when loading wallpapers. KWin's screenshot functionality is also going to be faster. For screen recordings is also smoother recording on high refresh rate displays.

Over on the KDE Frameworks side, Frameworks 6.30 has improved SVG caching to provide better speed and reduced vRAM usage.

More details on all of these exciting KDE desktop changes for the week via This Week in Plasma.