Following the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta from earlier this month, the second and last beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop is now available for testing.

With this second beta they are promoting their modern Union theming system being in the second-half of their public tech preview phase. Union with Plasma 6.8 now themes QtWidgets-based apps, including the likes of the Dolphin file manager and Kate text editor.

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 with the KWin compositor is also now depending upon Plasma-Wayland-Protocols 1.23 in order to address a memory leak. The memory leak from the KWIn Wayland compositor would leak one kde_output_device_mode_v2 resource per advertised mode on every client re-bind. After nearly two weeks uptime, the user reporting the bug found kwin_wayland consuming around 2.2GB of RAM compared to the typical ~0.3GB for his system.

KDE Plasma 6.8 at large delivers many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, improvements for the Union theme engine, better remote desktop support, multi-GPU handling improvements, the new kscreenctl tool, server-side drop shadow support, multi-monitor improvements, and a lot of other polishing throughout.

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 can be downloaded from KDE.org. Plasma 6.8.0 stable is expected out on 14 October that will also mark the 30th anniversary of the KDE project.