KDE Plasma 6.8 is gearing up for its official debut next week in coinciding with the 30th anniversary since the KDE project began.

This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to summarize all the interesting developments -- fixes -- in the lead-up to next week's stable debut. Among the last minute changes to Plasma 6.8 are improved keyboard navigation for arrow keys in KRunner. Discover's functionality to automatically apply updates now will always work correctly for Flatpak apps, and other minor fixes.

Plasma 6.8 also saw a last minute fix for an issue that could cause lag and stuttering when tiling windows with certain NVIDIA GPUs using the proprietary driver stack. The fix was to use a single persistent OpenGL context for Qt to avoid re-creating the context every time a Qt Quick effect is opened, which ends up briefly blocking the main thread. The NVIDIA issue was reported in June and affecting all recent Plasma versions. The fix is also tied to this early 2024 bug report too.

KDE Frameworks 6.32 meanwhile fixed an issue with Qt based apps using blur where they could crash when a tooltip disappeared while the user is typing.

For Plasma 6.9 there are some settings adjustments. Plasma 6.9 is also making virtual desktop thumbnails within KWin's Overview effect more "harmonious and visually pleasing". Also for Plasma 6.9 is allowing the brightness level of backlit keyboards to be controlled that are connected after initial log-in.

More details on the KDE Plasma changes ahead of next week's Plasma 6.9.0 stable debut can be found via This Week in Plasma.