KDE Plasma 6.3 – Pixel Perfect!

Plasma 6 aims to be the best desktop ever, and after a year of work, overcoming initial problems, fixing and perfecting, here's everything new and exciting this version brings.

KDE Plasma aims to be the best platform for creativity and digital art, and Plasma 6.3 takes the next step in that direction by providing features that help artists optimize and customize their drawing tablets to their liking. The settings page has been revamped, split into multiple tabs for better organization, and new configuration options have been added to each section:

Digital art

• You can assign a specific area of the tablet screen to the entire screen area.
• The tablet calibration feature has been refined to produce more accurate calibrations
• The pen test function displays information about tilt and pressure
• Customize the pressure curve and range of a pencil to cut high and/or low parts
• You can also reassign or swap the functions of the pen buttons.

Once you've finished setting up your tablet, you can see the changes you've made using the 'Highlight Changed Settings' feature in System Settings, which is compatible with most sections of the drawing tablet.

Graphic appearance

The biggest news regarding graphics is a major overhaul of how fractional scaling works. In Plasma 6.3, KWin is better able to fit elements to the screen's pixel grid, greatly reducing blurring and producing sharper, more defined images.

Display colors are now more accurate when using the Night Light feature with or without ICC profiles. KWin offers the option to choose the display color accuracy, although this may sometimes affect system performance.

Widgets on the desktop are slightly translucent, as are pop-up windows for widgets on the dashboard.

Monitoring

The resource monitoring system provides more accurate information on CPU usage while consuming fewer resources. FreeBSD now also supports GPU usage monitoring.

It's also much easier to monitor printers, as each printer's print queue is displayed directly in the widget. The widget also shows a small indicator on any printer currently printing, so you can see at a glance which ones are in use.

Plasma already includes a variety of background services that let you know when something has gone wrong and what to do about it. New in Plasma 6.3 is a service that detects when the kernel has terminated an application because the system ran out of memory. The service displays a notification explaining what happened and suggesting ways to avoid this problem in the future.

Tools

Regarding specific tools:

• KRunner allows you to jump between categories using the Page Up/Page Down keys and the Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down key combinations.

• Discover (Plasma App Store/Software Management). A security enhancement coming to Discover highlights sandboxed apps whose permissions have been changed after an update. This allows you to verify these changes in case you suspect any suspicious behavior. Similarly, you can now see whether apps are packaged directly by their developer or verified by a third party.

• Weather widget now supports Deutscher Wetterdienst as a source for weather data

Usability

If you use a mouse on your laptop, you can set the touchpad to automatically turn off. Additionally, if you set your computer as a network access point, Plasma generates a random password so you don't have to think of one.

Finding help is easier in Plasma 6.3. A “Help” category has been added to the launcher (the menu typically on the left side of the panel), and we’ve completely removed the Settings category. Its contents have been merged into the System category, reducing the number of categories that don’t offer meaningful grouping.

The default start menu changes categories only when you click on them, unlike the old behavior of changing them on mouse over, although the old behavior can also be enabled.

The “Show Target” option has been added to the context menu for symbolic links.

The Digital Clock widget displays all your planned events for the next 5 days (giving you a complete overview of your upcoming commitments).

The notification system has been improved. When you exit Do Not Disturb mode, Plasma 6.3 will no longer overwhelm you with a torrent of notifications. Instead, it will show you the number of unreviewed notifications.

To avoid overwhelming you with too much information, when notifications arrive while Plasma's Do Not Disturb mode is on, exiting Do Not Disturb mode displays the number of missed notifications instead of sending them all in one giant stream.

Another subtle but important change is when you drag a file out of a window that's partially underneath other windows, it no longer jumps to the top, which could obscure the location you intended to drag it to. This means the destination window always has focus.

Personalization

It's now possible to clone panels, change their transparency, and change the screen they appear on via scripts, which adds a certain level of automation to your setup.

It is now possible to change the icons for categories displayed in the menu using the menu editor, thus making the change introduced in Plasma 6.2 more flexible.

The “Edit Application…” action you run from the start menu opens the menu editor, instead of showing you the file properties.

If you've ever lost a widget while customizing your system, you'll love this new feature: in Plasma 6.3, the Widget Browser gives you the ability to delete every instance of a widget, including those that have gone missing or are only present on disconnected screens.

The Widget Explorer now gives you the ability to remove every instance of a widget, including those that have gone missing or are only present on disconnected screens, allowing for a cleaner setup.