After 21 years of waiting, KDE Plasma is finally adding this long-requested feature

For many years, users requested per-screen virtual desktops, now the KDE team has decided to bless us with the feature, coming to Plasma 6.7

KDE Plasma fans are finally getting a feature they have been requesting as far back as 2005: Per-screen virtual desktops, coming to Plasma 6.7, according to the KDE team's latest "This Week in Plasma" report.

This feature is already standard in many Linux tiling window managers (like i3, xmonad, and Hyprland). When you have two monitors, for example, you will be able to switch between workspaces on your primary monitor while keeping a video, a reference document, or a presentation slide static and visible on your secondary monitor.

Before this update landed on KDE, switching virtual desktops in a standard multi-monitor setup changed the workspace across all monitors simultaneously. For a long time, implementing per-screen virtual desktops was considered hard to implement because of the X11 display server's design.

The Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH), the standard X11 uses for window states, assumes a single active desktop, so any deviation would cause your apps to misbehave. But now, with KDE ditching X11 for Wayland as its default, this limitation is gone as Wayland's new ext-workspace protocol provides a modern way to handle this exact scenario.

KDE's implementation works a bit differently from dedicated tiling window managers like i3 or Hyprland, where you might see something like Workspace 6 always opening on Monitor 2. The developers insisted that the core request for decoupled desktops was addressed and that anyone wanting strict binding was free to open a new request.

Other highlights from "This Week in Plasma" include a new "Badge" component from the Kirigami framework that is now used across many Plasma applications for a more consistent look. The team also improved the design of Discover's store pages to show more information, allowed System Monitor to tell GPUs apart by their actual names instead of just numbers, and updated the Kicker menu to highlight newly-installed applications.

As for the bug fixes, Plasma 6.6.5 (dropping next month) will fix a KWin crash that could happen on logout if you used any emulated keyboard or mouse events. The update also corrects a screen locker bug where pressing the Escape key could leave you unable to unlock your session, a color picker issue that returned random colors for some users, and a problem where the lockscreen clock would show different times on each of your monitors.

And in Plasma 6.7, apps in the Quick Launch widget can finally be rearranged again. The Audio Volume widget will also properly notice when a new audio device is connected and set as the default.

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Posted Monday 20 April 2026 at 6:52 am AEST (my time).

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