KDE is getting support for the xx-fractional-scale-v2 Wayland protocol

xx-fractional-scale-v2 is a new Wayland protocol coming to Plasma 6.7 that promises to improve fractional scaling for smoother, sharper UI rendering

The KDE team recently released a new issue of their "This Week In Plasma" update, outlining changes to the KDE ecosystem.

Starting with Plasma 6.7, developers have added support for the experimental xx-fractional-scale-v2 Wayland protocol. This protocol addresses annoying visual glitches by communicating screen coordinates using unscaled physical pixels instead of the older, less precise integer-based logical coordinate space. The change should eliminate small gaps between windows and panels on high-DPI monitors.

Here's what resizing a window looks like under the old protocol:

And here's what it looks like under the new one:

Plasma 6.7 will also ship with fixes for configuring OpenConnect VPNs. The first fix tackles a long-standing issue from 2017 where the network manager would repeatedly ask for a password even when instructed to save it, and the second fix corrects a misleading German translation for "machine private key" that caused confusion during setup.

Moving on to UI improvements, the Plasma Login Manager now correctly inherits keyboard layouts from your system settings. Previously, users who set up custom keyboard layouts found they were not available on the login screen, with no direct way to add them. In other changes, developers simplified the UI for the Clipboard widget's QR code page after they moved the copy button into the header instead of leaving it on its own row.

In Plasma 6.6.4, the team fixed a number of bugs. The developers hardened Plasma against crashes caused by broken widgets and resolved a problem where the KDED background service could die with a Wayland protocol error when the screen resolution was changed. An issue that garbled Markdown-formatted text when the on-screen keyboard was enabled has also been corrected.

Here is the rest of the bug fixes:

• The System Settings Plasma Style page could crash on distributions that ship Qt 6.11 with asserts enabled.
• Usage graphs for certain NVIDIA GPUs were broken in System Monitor.
• Editing widget popups in edit mode did not work with a touchscreen.
• KWin now better handles XWayland applications that were sized incorrectly on systems with bad configuration files.

Plasma 6.6.4 is scheduled to land next Tuesday.

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Posted Monday 6 April 2026 at 6:57 am AEST (my time).

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