Compiled by Larry Cafiero
Bobby Borisov reported in Linuxiac on Saturday that KDE Plasma plans to improve remote desktop performance, among other improvements.
The October release of the new desktop also includes a faster remote desktop performance, lower latency on poor connections, reduced memory usage, and several UI refinements.
One of the primary improvements involves printing. “Starting with Plasma 6.8, sending a print job to an unavailable printer will trigger a notification explaining the problem,” the article states. “Currently, the action may appear to do nothing, leaving users without a clear indication of what went wrong.”
KDE Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server is also receiving some improvements as well, as KDE developers have fixed an issue that could cause certain remote desktop clients to display a black screen instead of the expected desktop content.
“At the same time, work on the remote desktop implementation should make sessions feel more responsive,” the article continues. “Plasma 6.8 lowers latency and improves performance when connections are less than ideal, thus improving user experience over slower or unstable networks.”
For a full rundown of all the improvements so far for KDE Plasma 6.8, the article has a link to the “This Week in Plasma” report released on Saturday.
Linux 7.3 to better handle cluster loads
Michael Larabel of Phoronix reported on Saturday that a “set of patches from Intel are set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window to enhance the cluster-aware scheduling code so it better handles load balancing on modern Intel Core (Ultra) hybrid CPUs with a mix of P and E/LPE cores.”
Intel Linux engineer Ricardo Neri has been leading the latest effort to fix cluster scheduling for processors with asymmetric capacity.
Quoting Neri in the article, “Cluster scheduling aims to maximize performance by spreading load across clusters of CPUs that share mid-level resources. It works well on uniform systems, but it breaks down on topologies with big and small cores arranged in clusters. As a result, it fails on several generations of Intel processors already shipped and upcoming.”
Neri is also quoted as saying that he “tested these patches on Alder Lake, which has both SMT Pcores and clusters of Ecores. I tested with SMT both disabled and enabled. I also tested on Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, which have an Ecore cluster not connected to the L3 cache. I repeated the same experiment with CONFIG_SCHED_CLUSTER disabled. The load balancer behaves as expected.”
According to the article, these patches are now queued into tip/tip.git’s sched/core GIt branch. “With the patches now in a TIP branch, they should be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle,” the article concludes.
CachyOS August ISO released
Marcus Nestor of 9 to 5 Linux reported on Sunday that the latest CachyOS ISO Release for August 2026 has several improvements lined up for that distro.
Improvements includes an upgrade for the installer and desktop profiles while shipping with the latest KDE Plasma 6.7.4 desktop environment and KDE Frameworks 6.28 and KDE Gear 26.04.3.
But wait, there’s more . . .
“The CachyOS ISO snapshot for August 2026 looks like a small update that updates the CachyOS Hyprland Noctalia installer option to use the noctalia-greeter login screen instead of SDDM, updates the Cinnamon desktop option to use lightdm-slick-greeter instead of lightdm-gtk-greeter, adds gvfs-dnssd to the Gnome desktop option, and adds Cosmic Monitor to the Cosmic desktop option,” according to the article.
The latest release also updates the command line installer “with experimental support for Server Edition installation profiles, updates the CachyOS-Welcome app with improved DNS handling to correctly apply the speed-test-based server ranking, and rebase the Cachy-Update tool on Arch-Update 4.x with a Rust-based system tray applet,” the article says.
The article continues to say that the CachyOS ISO snapshot for August 2026 “adds nice-value tuning to limits.d in cachyos-settings, adds support for the CachyOS mirrorlist API to cachyos-rate-mirrors for ranking mirrors, and updates chwd with better VM handling, improved quote pacman arguments, and improved handheld detection.”
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return with news over the week on Friday.