The desktop that sits behind the Steam Deck's gaming mode just received its first round of polish. KDE has published Plasma 6.7.1, a point release that arrives about a week after the 6.7.0 feature drop and folds in a fresh batch of translations alongside small but meaningful bug fixes from contributors.
The 6.7 series is the more interesting story for anyone running games on Linux. It lets HDR content and ICC profile-based color management operate at the same time, removing a long-standing either-or choice, and adds finer control over how AMD laptop panels behave at very low brightness. Paired with Plasma's existing variable refresh rate support, that gives the desktop one of the most complete color and display stacks among Wayland compositors, which matters directly to the handheld and gaming crowd: the Steam Deck exposes a full Plasma desktop the moment you leave Gaming Mode, and SteamOS itself has moved to Plasma 6 on a Wayland-by-default session.
This cycle also expands coverage of Wayland protocols and portals, surfaces Flatpak-style background apps in the system tray, and finally delivers per-screen virtual desktops after years of requests. Optimization work cut power draw and improved performance for CPU-rendered apps, many full-screen windows, and integrated Intel GPUs, a welcome change for the low-power mini PCs and small-form-factor machines where every watt counts. Plasma 6.7 is also the last release to ship a dedicated X11 session; Plasma 6.8, expected around October 2026, will be Wayland-only.
KDE remains Free Software built by volunteers, and the full list of 6.7.1 changes is available in the changelog. Distributions that track Plasma closely should begin offering the update within the coming days.
