Page 2: Informative Discover

Contents

The Discover software administration now follows the style guides of the KDE team (Human Interface Guide, HIG) more strictly. Instead of bold buttons, it displays links as underlined text, for example. Discover is faster – the search function works more efficiently and the app remains responsive, even when retrieving app ratings over a slow network connection.

Discover now distinguishes between proprietary and free software. Software management also helps when writing a comment: If you complain about bugs in an app, Discover suggests that you should submit a bug report if you find the word "bugs".

If a system update is available, Plasma previously only gave the user the option of installing the updates when restarting. Now the desktop environment can also install the updates when the system is shut down. Finally, Discover can also install and update applications under the Linux distribution PostmarketOS.

System administration and mouse pointer

The KDE devs have also tweaked the system settings. All functions should be easier to find on the tab for the keyboard settings. The page with the Thunderbolt settings has also been given a small facelift. The aids for people with color blindness can now be found under "Accessibility". The developers have increased the accessibility of all accessibility pages.

A more interesting change for developers: Themes for mouse pointers can now offer their arrows, rotating disks and hand symbols in SVG format. Thanks to the vector graphics instead of pixel graphics, they appear crisp on the screen in any size. The standard mouse pointer themes Breeze Light and Breeze Dark already use SVGs. The system themes with the same names Breeze Light and Breeze Dark now also adopt the system-wide accent color.

Colorful Wayland

The developers have also improved the so-called tone mapping when displaying images with a high contrast range (HDR): If HDR content has a higher brightness than the monitor can actually display, Plasma 6.2 adjusts the display accordingly. The result is then less over-bright and details in the images are shown to better advantage. The KWin window manager supports other Wayland protocols, such as the "alpha-modifier" protocol and the Wayland color management protocol.

Speaking of KWin: The window manager works more smoothly on systems with several graphics cards. Performance also no longer drops so much when switching to a different ICC color profile. On request, Plasma 6.2 uses the color profile stored in the monitor – if the monitor offers one.

Small stuff and test run

Plasma 6.2 contains many other minor useful changes. For example, the Minimize All Windows widget no longer minimizes all windows, but only those on the current desktop or activity. All new features can be found in detail in the lengthy official changelog. This also lists the numerous bugs that have been fixed. For example, if the ".desktop" file is missing for an application, Plasma no longer freezes briefly when it is started. Texts can now also be reliably copied from Wayland to XWayland applications again.

If you would like to try out KDE Plasma 6.2 now, you can do so with the testing version of the KDE Neon distribution or the nightly builds of Fedora Rawhide. Suitable packages should also appear shortly in rolling release distributions such as Arch Linux.

(mma)