Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases.

Most surprising this week is that KDE developers have dropped desktop OpenGL support from the KWin compositor. No, it's not due to the Vulkan renderer of KWin being ready for the spotlight. Rather, Plasma 6.8 is internally just using OpenGL ES now until that Vulkan support is further along. OpenGL ES provides everything needed by KWin while some older GPUs doing better with OpenGL ES than a more limited desktop OpenGL profile. This change of going GLES-only is only around the KWin compositor usage and doesn't impact or restrict desktop OpenGL usage outside of the compositor.

The KWin developers don't anticipate any downside from going to OpenGL ES only. Xaver Hugl noted in the merge request:

"The various incompatibilities between desktop GL and OpenGL ES cause problems again and again. Code written and tested for one might not work for the other, ranging from things being rendered wrong to falling back to a software renderer or even functionality being completely broken.

Since we need to support OpenGL ES for some old hardware, going forward, KWin will only support OpenGL ES. This means everyone is running the same OpenGL code, and we can drop some practically redundant code as well."

Plasma 6.8 this week also landed support for Emulated Input v1.6 and separately fixed the most common crash in Plasma 6.8 around multiple screen handling. KDE Plasma 6.8 also landed some animation improvements around the "bouncing app icon" launch feedback and a new sliding animation for notifications.

More details on these KDE Plasma changes for the week can be found via This Week in Plasma.