Good news for Intel users as KDE adds support for a feature AMD users have had for a while

The new "This Week in Plasma" update from the KDE team brings good news for Intel GPU users, as support for overlay planes is coming to Plasma 6.7.

The KDE team has released a new entry for its long-running "This Week in Plasma" series, covering notable work done across different components of the KDE ecosystem.

Starting with Plasma 6.7, Discover has been updated with "fancier application page headers" that feature more obvious install buttons. The Kicker Application Menu widget can now show a "Recent Locations" item, and network connections can be duplicated.

You can now also drag favorite apps out of Kicker to un-favorite them. If you're a gamer on an Intel GPU, the team finally switched on the "overlay planes" feature for you. Your battery will thank you, and you get better performance and lower latency.

KDE began aggressively rolling out support for overlay planes in Plasma 6.5, but the feature mostly benefited AMD users. Intel was left out because its GPUs use fixed plane positions, a technical limitation that meant developers had to write extra, complex logic to handle where the layers could be placed on screen.

In modern Linux display technology, the graphics driver exposes different hardware layers, known as planes, to assemble what you see on your screen. There are three main types: the Primary Plane for your main desktop, a Cursor Plane for the mouse pointer, and Overlay Planes, which are extra hardware layers on top.

Historically, your desktop compositor (KWin) would take every single window, video, and effect, process them all on your GPU, and crush them down into a single flat image to send to the Primary Plane. When you enable Overlay Planes, the compositor can offload content like a full-screen video directly to its own hardware layer.

Moving on to Plasma 6.6.5, when you drag a search result for a System Settings page to the desktop, it now creates a launcher for that page as you would expect.

Here's a list of the bug fixes slated for the upcoming version:

• A crash in the Plasma Login Manager that could occur when connecting and disconnecting multiple monitors is fixed.
• The Orca screen reader no longer has issues with key repeat, and various UI elements are now read properly.
• Spectacle's feature for automatically copying large images to the clipboard right after the app exits no longer fails.
• An issue where de-focused full-screen windows could inappropriately appear at the top of the window stack has been resolved.
• A layout glitch on the System Settings' Colors page that made UI elements overflow with certain fonts is corrected.
• Changing the screen brightness no longer terminates Spectacle's rectangular region recordings.

KDE Plasma 6.6.5 is coming on the 12th of May, while Plasma 6.7 is scheduled for a 16th June release.

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Posted Sunday 26 April 2026 at 7:57 am AEST (my time).

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