KDE Plasma's transition to a Wayland-only desktop environment is nearing completion, with significant progress made in 2025 on features like HDR support, color management, and protocol implementations, aiming for a full switch by early 2027, while also introducing various UI enhancements.
KDE's 'This Week In Plasma' series, a popular update on Plasma desktop developments, will become less frequent or possibly go on hiatus due to a lack of volunteer contributors, as its creator Nate Graham has less time to dedicate to it because of increased work and family commitments.
KDE is removing colorful third-party app icons from its Breeze icon theme to respect developer branding and reduce maintenance. The upcoming Plasma 6.5 update introduces system notifications for device connections, performance improvements, and various UI enhancements, along with bug fixes across the desktop environment. Additionally, KDE plans to improve Wayland support and address performance issues on newer Intel CPUs.
Trinity Desktop, a fork of KDE 3.5, has released version R14.1.1, which includes the ability to drag and tile windows to the display's borders and corners, improvements to keyboard shortcuts settings, new wallpapers, and various bug fixes. This update marks the first release since R14.1.0 in April.
KDE developer Nate Graham has emphasized the need for third-party application adoption of Wayland, as KDE Plasma desktop and KDE applications are already functioning well on the platform. While acknowledging the delayed adoption of Wayland, Graham urged app developers to start porting their apps to Wayland, as it is now a viable replacement for X11. He emphasized the importance of app developers' input in refining protocols and proposed that collaboration is necessary to expedite the process of transitioning to Wayland.
KDE developer Nate Graham has announced that early progress has been made on High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support and KDE KWin compositor color management support. Other changes include improvements to Skanpage, Kate, KDE window tiling, and KDE Discover.
The Steam client beta for Linux now recognizes the global scaling factor for text sizing set by KDE, GNOME, and other desktops. The update also includes a fallback mechanism for computing the window scaling factor and a command-line switch for force-overriding the Steam client UI scaling.