KDE Plasma 6.4: Smoother, friendlier and more helpful

You won't find any major changes in Plasma 6.4, but the KDE team has polished up its desktop environment for Linux in many places and made it much easier to work with.

Even in the previous version, the screen could be divided into tiles, into which Plasma then distributed the windows. From now on, you can choose a different tile layout on each virtual desktop. Furthermore, the interactive elements of the lock screen now only appear on the monitor on which the mouse pointer is currently located.

More color

Several measures have been taken to make texts and GUI elements easier to read and understand. Among other things, the dark "Breeze" theme has been made a little darker and Plasma has darkened the screen behind dialog windows. The developers have also made improvements to the controls: in a Wayland session, the mouse pointer can now also be controlled via the numeric keypad on the keyboard if desired. A corresponding three-finger gesture on the touchpad zooms in and out of the display. Thanks to revised settings, owners of a graphics tablet can adapt their drawing pen to their needs more intuitively. All of these measures not only make operation easier, but also increase accessibility.

Plasma 6.4 also improves HDR support: the desktop environment comes with an HDR calibration assistant, recognizes the P100 colour format for videos and supports the extended dynamic range mode on corresponding screens. The Krunner, which is called up on the screen by pressing Alt and the space bar, shows the corresponding color for a typed color value – useful not only for web developers. Finally, Plasma 6.4 has learned some other newer Wayland protocols, such as the FIFO and single-pixel buffer protocols.

New with the little helpers

Further changes have been made to the messages: If an application switches to full screen mode, Plasma automatically switches to "Do not disturb" mode. If an application wants to access the microphone but finds it muted, it will display a message informing you of this. When copying a file, a diagram also visualizes the transfer rate over time.

The print button starts the screenshot tool Spectacle directly in the recording mode for the rectangular area. The system monitor presents more data at a glance, shows the background processes separately and reports the raw data from (temperature) sensors. The media playback widget plays audio material slower or faster if required, while the "Disks & Devices" widget checks the mounted disks for errors and even offers to repair them if necessary.

KDE Plasma 6.4 can be tried out using prepared Docker containers or the KDE Neon distribution in the unstable version, which can also be started as a live system.

(olb)