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KDE

KDE Plasma 6.2 Released (kde.org) 48

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
"Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release, Plasma 6.2." From the report: Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma's KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the "blown out" look such images can otherwise exhibit.

You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately. Plasma's built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps' license information more accurately. In Plasma 6.2, we overhauled System Settings' Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. They've also added support for the full "sticky keys" feature on Wayland. You can read more about what's new in the complete changelog.
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KDE Plasma 6.2 Released More

KDE Plasma 6.2 Released

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  • Linux desktop lives on (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oblom ( 105 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @07:14PM (#64849997) Homepage

    It's great to see that Linux desktop movement continues to evolve. Perhaps, the goals are less ambitious than in the earlier days. But the niche is there and KDE is an important player.

    • FWIW, ever since KDE 3.5 I feel like they've not been back to that level of configurability of how certain things look, and at every version there have been regressions. I still find no reason nor any decent explanation why activities got all the attention (pet project of windows users turned Linux KDE developers is what it feels like), and caused features that were standard for regular virtual desktops to get canned.

      Recently (6.0? I installed Arch to have a look), the cube effect came back (quite limit

  • I fear running pacman -Syyu now. Everytime there's been an update to KDE my system has broken for a while due to old versions being compiled.

  • The only DE the world needs !/sarcasm

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jrepin ( 667425 )
      Well there is a huge grain of truth in this. KDE Plasma is in fact quite a flexible and customizable framework and it can be used to quite easily imitate any existing desktop environment. So yeah even if it was the only DE it would still mean very much different layouts and look and feel for different "distributions" or form-factors of KDE Plasma.

      • I stopped using KDE because of a bug that made some Wine/Proton games ONLY run when they are NOT the foreground application. I went to XFCE4+Compiz and the problem went away, so it's not inherent to using a compositor. If they fixed it, I'll use KDE again... but I'm going to go ahead and wait until I find out whether they did before I declare KDE the unchallenged winner again.

  • Wayland: the solution to the problem that nobody has!

    • Re:Oh yes, wayland! (Score:4, Informative)

      by JThundley ( 631154 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @10:12PM (#64850193)

      Different refresh rates on multiple monitors is a nice feature that I don't have because I'm stuck on Xorg. My main monitor can do 120hz but I'm stuck to the 60 that my secondary monitors max out at.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jrepin ( 667425 )
        Also proper support for scaling, including fractional scaling, and really tear-free rendering. There is a lot of solutions that Wayland brings. Unfortunately there are also some regressions. I especially miss the proper session management and restoration of applications from X11. But even here KDE Plasma did a very nice job, much better than any other desktop environment out there.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Also proper support for scaling, including fractional scaling, and really tear-free rendering. There is a lot of solutions that Wayland brings. Unfortunately there are also some regressions. I especially miss the proper session management and restoration of applications from X11. But even here KDE Plasma did a very nice job, much better than any other desktop environment out there.

          Then, buy a dedicated Wayland station if you really need that. Don't screw what has been working for ages up and try to force your way into everything, a little like systemd did.

          Having anything depending on Wayland (or systemd) to work properly should be declared a crime against humanity! /s

          Given the experience we had with systemd, I am a little afraid the same will happen with Wayland.

          I have absolutely nothing against Wayland (or systemd) fundamentally. I have much against their proponents forcing their w

          • Nobody forced shit.
            Distributions adopted them.
            We can assume you don't understand why.

            You have 2 options.
            1) Continue to believe there was a conspiracy to force these things down your throat, 2) Educate yourself until you understand.

            Software always progresses. If you can't handle the change, the onus is on you to stand still, not everyone else.
            To this end, there are distributions that only use Xorg and SysV init. Enjoy.

            • Exactly. Isn't it ironic that he's replying to a great grandparent (me) that said Wayland currently doesn't work for me so I'm stuck with X? It really wasn't hard to do at all, I just changed a dropdown menu in my display manager from Wayland to X. I want to move to Wayland but I need to be able to use antimicrox, autokey, and pyautogui.

              • Ya, the limiting of the scope of the display protocol has created many coverage gaps in functionality. Things that used to be handled by the display server, but now need to be handled by the compositor.

                Wayland will never standardize on protocols to allow for those things, since getting rid of those security gaps was one of the primary goals of the project.
                frog-protocols may come to our rescue, here (providing a level of unofficial standardization for protocols that legitimately don't belong in the Waylan

      • Different refresh rates on multiple monitors is a nice feature that I don't have because I'm stuck on Xorg.

        It would have been better to simply improve Xorg than making Wayland. Wayland is a problem to a solution.

        • It would have been better to simply improve Xorg than making Wayland. Wayland is a problem to a solution.

          You know who disagreed with you? Xorg developers who moved to the Wayland project.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            It would have been better to simply improve Xorg than making Wayland. Wayland is a problem to a solution.

            You know who disagreed with you? Xorg developers who moved to the Wayland project.

            Most developers nowadays easily get into modern and trending propaganda. This doesn't void the OP point at all, in fact. I agree with him.

            I manage several developers and most of them think that newer is always better.

            • Wayland might be just there yet and we will also use it in the future.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

              Most developers nowadays easily get into modern and trending propaganda. This doesn't void the OP point at all, in fact. I agree with him.

              I manage several developers and most of them think that newer is always better.

              Great! Xorg is open source, so you and Gravis Zero can make the clearly superior iteration of Xorg that all distros will be dying to migrate to!

              • an obvious logical fallacy.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
                  How so?

                  • You are not addressing the argument I have made. Thusly, it cannot be anything but a logical fallacy.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
                      What argument is that? That you know what would be best for Xorg, even moreso than the people who made Xorg?

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
                      OK, so, PROVE IT. Make the Xorg iteration that's superior to Wayland.
                      There's no "logical fallacy" because I'm "not addressing the argument [you] have made". I'm addressing it directly, and telling you to prove your argument.

                    • It's still a logical fallacy. It's like you are saying that it doesn't matter that someone has calculated the force of impact, you need them to jump off the skyscraper to prove it's fatal. If you oppose this comparison then feel free to explain what makes Xorg so difficult to modify that to handle "[d]ifferent refresh rates on multiple monitors" because the right now, you are contending that the better option was to spend years making an entirely new display server protocol that not only lacks basic things

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
                      I'm contending that the people who wrote Xorg in the first place might know better than you personally. They have actual, verifiable experience in specifically Xorg and other displays server protocols. You have... what? the usual slashdot armchair expertise of "well everything would be perfect if everyone did what I want, no I have no evidence, no I won't actually put my money where my mouth is and build something, just trust me guys!"

                      Your argument is you know better than they do. Please provide some evide

                    • I'm contending that the people who wrote Xorg in the first place might know better than you personally.

                      If that is true then why did you dispute my comment? Hint: because you're backtracking.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
                      Huh? What comment? Maybe a misunderstanding.

          • You know who disagreed with you? Xorg developers who moved to the Wayland project.

            Yeah, how many years ago was that? What could they have done with X in that time? They said they had to start over because cruft was holding them back, so what's holding them back now?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Different refresh rates on multiple monitors is a nice feature that I don't have because I'm stuck on Xorg. My main monitor can do 120hz but I'm stuck to the 60 that my secondary monitors max out at.

        Only an obsessive person would care about such a silly detail and paradoxically, it's the main reason to justify Wayland given often here on Slashdot. /s

        Anyway I am not even sure that excuse is even valid! I have 2 very old nvidia cards running 4 screens and 2 of them on the same card have one refresh rate while the 2 others running on the other card have a different refresh rate so YMMV I guess. Not that I would care much anyway. I have a dedicated windoze to play game, it's kind of like buying a nintendo

      • Am I missing something here? Why can't you have different refresh rates on different monitors with X?

        My monitors have different refresh rates and I'm still on X.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Maybe it's one refresh rate by video card, not sure this is even the case as a limitation either. See my other post above.

          Do you use different video cards or do you have different refresh rates with the same card?

          • Just one video interface, a bog standard integrated Intel HD, on a rather old motherboard. Two monitors plugged in to it.

            I haven't really looked into this in a long time, but I don't think it is a matter of having more than one graphics chip set on the bus. My understanding was that all GPUs these days are quite capable of driving different video modes on their various outputs (e.g. HDMI{1,2,3}).

            This entire thing only ever came to my attention when one of my monitors balked at the standard 1920x1080@60H

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ls671 ( 1122017 )

              Thanks, I have similar lines I put in my xorg.conf file with 2 cards and 4 monitors, each card driving at different refresh rates. It must be Wayland fans hallucinating then... /s

  • FINALLY! (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @04:03AM (#64850551)

    Seriously wide gamut monitors have been available for decades at this point. HDR quite a while at this point too. How is it that it has taken this long for a DE to implement colour management. This isn't even a Linux criticism, literally no OS does this well and it's been a clusterfuck of leaving things up to apps.

    Even now the two monitors in front of me show wildly different colours for the desktop but at least Slashdot looks the same on both of them because Chrome (like every application which cares) had to manually implement colour management... oh providing I don't have the window positioned so it is straddling both screens, then it looks like hyper saturated crap on one screen.

    Even cheap monitors are available with DCI-P3 colour space these days. How has this not been addressed on an OS level for 2 decades beyond an API telling an app what profile their current window should display.

    I don't even use KDE on my Linux machine, but this is going to make me try this weekend!

    • Literally 45 seconds after I read this comment, a designer came in, sat down at her desk, then repeated the subject aloud and emphatically.

      At least I didn't have to ask what she was talking about.
  • The one thing I'm really waiting for still isn't here, i.e. full session save/restore on Wayland. Every time I log in I have to reposition a dozen or so windows across multiple virtual desktops. I'm told that GNOME can already manage this, but KDE/Plasma still can't do it. To me it's a basic usability feature that users expect to see, and so should be given more priority.
    • You don't see that on Wayland because that's not Wayland's job. Wayland is a protocol.
      Kwin/Mutter handle that.

      Hop on over the Plasma lists and see if there's any work being done on this.
      Personally, I fucking *hate* desktops that default to restoring sessions, so the loss doesn't hurt my feelings any.
  • I have been using KDE since version 2.1, but recently, I have become dissatisfied. With every update, something new breaks. More and more features that users could previously customize through themes are now hardcoded. For example, the Application Launcher and Task Manager have fixed colors and rounded corners that cannot be disabled. There is no functional resource manager anymore; the screenshot tool can only capture from the first screen and causes excessive screen flickering; volume controls are als

    • I have been using KDE since version 2.1, but recently, I have become dissatisfied. With every update, something new breaks. More and more features that users could previously customize through themes are now hardcoded. For example, the Application Launcher and Task Manager have fixed colors and rounded corners that cannot be disabled. There is no functional resource manager anymore; the screenshot tool can only capture from the first screen and causes excessive screen flickering; volume controls are also broken, with a system that compresses what used to be a three-page layout into a single page, and it still does not function correctly. In the past, it was possible to choose the look and feel, and any effects like screen flashing and blinking could be turned off. However, these options are increasingly hardcoded and I don't thing it in the classical spirit of the KDE.

      Sounds like they're trying desperately to appeal to the Windows crowd.

    • I run KDE Neon (latest stable builds, on 22.04 LTS) and it's been rock solid for the most part. Began my foray back on KDE 4.0 so I've seen my share of breakage but it's been great for a long while now, on my end.

  • KDE and Gnome both went the way of following windows back to the windows 2.x days withe the flat low color desktop. No thanks. I'll just stick to the lightweight xfce desktop.

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