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KDE Plasma 6.8 To Allow Fine-Tuning Mouse/Touchpad Speeds

KDE Plasma 6.8 will allow users to fine-tune the speed sliders for mouse and touchpads, among other improvements.

By Michael Larabel·Aug 15·phoronix.com·2 min read

Intelligence analysis by Llama

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Allow Fine-Tuning Mouse/Touchpad Speeds
Image: phoronix.com

KDE Plasma 6.8 is set to bring several enhancements to the desktop environment, including the ability to fine-tune mouse and touchpad speeds, improved UI, and better handling of apps packaged by Flatpak or Nix.

Why it matters

These improvements will enhance the user experience and provide more flexibility for users of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

KDE Plasma 6.8 is a new version of the KDE desktop environment that will let users adjust the speed of their mouse and touchpad. It also includes other improvements like a better remote desktop experience and improved handling of apps.

Analysis

KDE Plasma 6.8 Enhancements

KDE Plasma 6.8 is set to bring several enhancements to the desktop environment. One of the notable improvements is the ability to fine-tune the speed sliders for mouse and touchpads. This stems from a 2023 request to add an input spinbox for complementing the scrolling/pointer speed sliders.

This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements. With KDE Plasma 6.8, remote desktop sessions have a fully-shared clipboard. Also on the remote desktop side, Plasma 6.8 is fixing a case where the remote desktop server could crash when closing a connection.

Plasma 6.8 also landed a number of UI improvements. The emoji selector in Plasma 6.8 is now using consistent ordering for gendered emoji variants. Plasma 6.8 also better handles apps packaged by the likes of Flatpak or using Nix so they will now be pinned to the Task Manager widget in a more robust manner.

KDE Connect has also fixed a bug for Frameworks 6.30 where it could consume 100% of an entire CPU core. For the Plasma 6.7 stable series, Plasma 6.7.5 KWin now supports more than one Wayland wl_data_device to improve drag-and-drop support in Firefox.

More details on the new Plasma 6.8 features as well as various fixes to the Plasma 6.6 and Plasma 6.7 series can be found via This Week in Plasma.

Key points

  • KDE Plasma 6.8 will allow users to fine-tune the speed sliders for mouse and touchpads.
  • Plasma 6.8 includes several UI improvements, including a consistent ordering for gendered emoji variants.
  • KDE Connect has fixed a bug for Frameworks 6.30 where it could consume 100% of an entire CPU core.
  • Plasma 6.7.5 KWin now supports more than one Wayland wl_data_device to improve drag-and-drop support in Firefox.
The Upside

If KDE Plasma 6.8 is successful, it could lead to a more user-friendly and customizable desktop environment, which could attract more users to the KDE community.

The Downside

However, if the new features in KDE Plasma 6.8 are not well-received by users, it could lead to a decrease in user engagement and a loss of market share for the KDE community.

Originally reported at

phoronix.com

Discernion covers the story. Read the full piece at the source.

Tagskdeplasmadesktop-environmentlinuxopen-source

Author

Michael Larabel

Intelligence analysis by

Llama

Published

Aug 15, 2026

Source

phoronix.com

Share

Topics

kdeplasmadesktop-environmentlinuxopen-source

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