October 2026 software updates: Wayland-only KDE Plasma 6.8 coming soon

KDE Plasma 6.8, the first Plasma release available only as a Wayland session, will arrive in the coming days: users of the NVIDIA 470 driver must switch drivers before upgrading, as explained below. In the meantime the base repository has received Qt 6.12, KDE Frameworks 6.31.0, KDE Plasma 6.7.5 and KDE Gear 26.08.2; the openmamba desktop has a new default look, and support for Piper speech synthesis has been added. Highlights among the updates include Audacity 4.0, Firefox and Thunderbird 158, and LibreOffice 26.8.1.

Coming soon: KDE Plasma 6.8, Wayland session only

KDE Plasma 6.8, arriving in the base repository in the coming days, is the first Plasma release without an X11 session: Wayland will be the only session available at login. X11 applications will keep working normally through XWayland.

The upgrade will automatically remove the kwin-x11, kgamma and wacomtablet packages, which KDE no longer ships because they are X11-specific. Graphics tablets are configured from the Drawing Tablet module in System Settings.

Plasma 6.8 will also bring two new components:

• Kup — backup tool integrated into Plasma, based on rsync
• Plasma Bigscreen — Plasma interface for TVs and set-top boxes, designed for use with a remote control

Warning: NVIDIA 470 driver users

The legacy NVIDIA 470 driver (package nvidia_470) is not compatible with the Plasma Wayland session and will not receive further updates from NVIDIA. Users of this driver risk ending up without a graphical session after upgrading to Plasma 6.8. Before Plasma 6.8 arrives, check your graphics card model and switch drivers:

• Maxwell, Pascal or Volta cards (GeForce GTX 750, 900 series, 10 series and later): switch to the nvidia_580 driver, which supports Wayland.
• Turing and later cards (GeForce 16 series, RTX): switch to the nvidia driver.
• Kepler cards (GeForce 600 series and most of the 700 series), supported only by the 470 driver: switch to the free nouveau driver, already included in the kernel and Mesa, which works with Plasma on Wayland. 3D performance is lower than with the proprietary driver, but adequate for desktop use.

To switch to nouveau, first upgrade the driver to the latest release, nvidia_470 470.256.02-9mamba, which correctly restores nouveau loading at boot when removed; only then remove the proprietary driver and reboot:

sudo dnf upgrade nvidia_470
sudo dnf remove nvidia_470

Users who need to keep the 470 driver can use LXQt, which still runs on X11.

New packages in the base repository

Several new tools have been added to the base repository:

• WinBoat 0.9.2 — run Windows applications on Linux, integrated into the desktop, through a containerized virtual machine
• PhotoCraft 0.9.0 — free image editor inspired by Photoshop, written in Rust
• bat 0.26.1 — cat alternative with syntax highlighting and Git integration
• age 1.3.2 — simple, modern file encryption tool
• pass 1.7.4 (password-store) — command-line password manager based on GPG and Git
• sshpass 1.10 — non-interactive SSH password authentication
• OCI CLI 3.95.0 — command-line interface for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• pipdeptree 4.2.7 and CycloneDX Python 7.5.0 — dependency tree and SBOM generation for Python projects
• GP200 VST Editor — VST3 and standalone editor for the Valeton GP-200 guitar multi-effects processor

Qt 6.12, KDE Frameworks 6.31.0, KDE Plasma 6.7.5 and KDE Gear 26.08.2

Qt 6.12.0 updates the toolkit that Plasma and KDE applications are built on; the qt6-qtbase libraries, previously split into many libQt6* subpackages, are now merged into the main package. Starting with this release, Qt WebEngine follows a release cycle separate from Qt, with version numbers tied to Chromium (6.140). KDE Frameworks moves to 6.31.0, KDE Plasma to 6.7.5, and KDE Gear applications, including Dolphin, Kate, Konsole, Okular, Kdenlive and Elisa, to 26.08.2.

New desktop look

The openmamba light and dark themes have a new default wallpaper, openmambaSinuous, also used on the SDDM login screen, and the panel is now placed at the top. Natural scrolling is enabled by default for mice and touchpads, and login and logout sounds have been enabled. Fixes also cover the language of user folders (Documents, Downloads, etc.) at first login, the placement of Welcome Center in the application menu, and some spurious low battery notifications for peripherals.

Piper speech synthesis support

speech-dispatcher now supports the Piper neural speech synthesis engine, with more natural voices than espeak-ng, which remains the default synthesizer. Voices are available in English, Italian, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese.

To enable Piper, install the speech-dispatcher-piper- package followed by the language code: it also installs the Piper module, the engine and the matching voice, and sets Piper as the synthesizer for that language. For example, for English:

sudo dnf install speech-dispatcher-piper-en

Alternatively, installing just the speech-dispatcher-piper module automatically adds the voices for the languages already installed on the system.

Notable fixes

• Discover no longer detected new packages and updates: a bug in the PackageKit dnf5 backend made repository cache refreshes ineffective
• LibreOffice printed pages rotated with some printer paper formats, such as borderless A4
• Guile and slib: fixed several issues that could stall package installation or upgrades for a long time while generating the catalog
• Audacity 4: fixed a crash related to screen handling in Qt
• TeX Live: XeTeX format generation restored
• OpenCV: fixed sudden termination of applications such as Synfig Studio when loading video plugins
• systemd: switching to text consoles (Ctrl+Alt+F2 and following) works again
• Italian man pages: manpages-l10n 4.32 replaces the old man-pages-it package, unchanged since 2020, with more complete and up-to-date translations

Main updates

• kernel 6.18.57 — stability and security updates to the Linux kernel; ELF headers are now included in core dumps, which helps debugging crashes
• systemd 262 and polkit 128 — init system and permission management
• Mesa 26.2.4, LLVM 23.1.3 and NVIDIA 615.78.08 driver — updated graphics stack and compiler
• Audacity 4.0.1 — new major release of the audio editor, with a redesigned Qt-based interface
• Firefox 158.0 and Thunderbird 158.0 — Mozilla browser and email client
• Brave 1.97.59 — Chromium-based browser
• LibreOffice 26.8.1.1 — office suite
• Telegram 7.2.10 and Signal Desktop 8.31.0 — messaging clients
• GIMP 3.2.6, Krita 6.0.4.1, Darktable 5.6.2, G’MIC 4.0.6 and ImageMagick 7.1.2.34 — graphics and photo processing
• KiCad 10.0.7 — electronic circuit design
• VLC 3.0.24 and FFmpeg 9.0.2 — media playback and encoding; compatibility packages for older FFmpeg versions have been removed
• Calibre 9.16.0 — ebook management
• Rust 1.99.1, Go 1.27.2, CMake 4.4.4, Node.js 26.12.0 and PHP 8.5.11 — development toolchains and languages
• QEMU 11.1.2 and Docker 29.9.1 — virtualization and containers
• MariaDB 13.0.2 and Nextcloud 35.0.0 — database and collaboration platform
• Samba 4.25.0, OpenSSH 10.6p1, GnuPG 2.5.24 and Nmap 7.992 — networking and security
• Tailscale 1.104.1 and rclone 1.75.2 — mesh VPN and cloud sync
• Heroic Games Launcher 2.22.4 — launcher for Epic, GOG and Amazon games
• Memtest86+ 9.00 — bootable RAM test
• PulseAudio — the daemon, unused since audio has been handled by PipeWire, is removed from existing installations; it remains available in the separate pulseaudio-daemon package
• dnfdragora 2.99.5 — graphical package manager, now based on the python-manatools library

openmamba API and internal tools

The build system’s internal tools have been updated: autodist 2.3.5 and autospec 1.56. The rpm package has been split: package building tools are now in rpm-build, package signing in rpm-sign, and plugins in separate rpm-plugin-* packages. Anyone building RPM packages needs to install rpm-build, already included in devel-base-openmamba. This split means Python is no longer installed in the minimal rootfs-base image and the matching Docker image. libarchive has also gained support for the RPM v6 package format, needed by tools such as appstream-builder to generate the metadata shown by Discover.

Installation media

Images are available from the download page.

• livecd rolling (x86_64, 2.4 GB — September 21, 2026) — KDE Plasma desktop with basic applications
• livedvd rolling (x86_64, 3.6 GB — September 20, 2026) — KDE Plasma desktop with a full software suite
• livecd-light rolling (x86_64, 2.1 GB — October 16, 2026) — LXQt desktop for systems with limited resources
• diskimg-livecd rolling (x86_64, 2.4 GB — October 8, 2026) — live system to write to a USB stick
• diskimg-raspberrypi rolling (LXQt, aarch64, 2.4 GB — October 7, 2026) — Raspberry Pi image with a lightweight desktop
• diskimg-raspberrypi-plasma rolling (KDE Plasma, aarch64, 2.1 GB — October 10, 2026) — Raspberry Pi image with KDE Plasma
• rootfs rolling (x86_64 1.9 GB, aarch64 1.8 GB — October 5, 2026) — base filesystem for advanced installations
• rootfs-light rolling (x86_64 1.7 GB, aarch64 1.6 GB, i586 1.5 GB — October 6, 2026) — lighter filesystem, a slimmer alternative to rootfs
• rootfs-base rolling (x86_64 116 MB, aarch64 108 MB, i586 116 MB — October 9, 2026) — minimal system for experts and developers