KDE Plasma 6.3 Released 33
Today, the KDE Project announced the release of KDE Plasma 6.3, featuring improved fractional scaling, enhanced Night Light color accuracy, better CPU usage monitoring, and various UI and security refinements.
Some of the key features of Plasma 6.3 include:
- Improved fractional scaling with KWin to lead to an all-around better desktop experience with fractional scaling as well as when making use of KWin's zoom effect.
- Screen colors are more accurate with the KDE Night Light feature.
- CPU usage monitoring within the KDE System Monitor is now more accurate and consuming fewer CPU resources.
- KDE will now present a notification when the kernel terminated an app because the system ran out of memory.
- Various improvements to the Discover app, including a security enhancement around sandboxed apps.
- The drawing tablet area of KDE System Settings has been overhauled with new features and refinements.
- Many other enhancements and fixes throughout KDE Plasma 6.3.
You can read the announcement here.
Some of the key features of Plasma 6.3 include:
- Improved fractional scaling with KWin to lead to an all-around better desktop experience with fractional scaling as well as when making use of KWin's zoom effect.
- Screen colors are more accurate with the KDE Night Light feature.
- CPU usage monitoring within the KDE System Monitor is now more accurate and consuming fewer CPU resources.
- KDE will now present a notification when the kernel terminated an app because the system ran out of memory.
- Various improvements to the Discover app, including a security enhancement around sandboxed apps.
- The drawing tablet area of KDE System Settings has been overhauled with new features and refinements.
- Many other enhancements and fixes throughout KDE Plasma 6.3.
You can read the announcement here.
Best DE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, question.
Re:Best DE (Score:4, Informative)
I'm really enjoying the minimalism of plain XFCE4 right now. It does all the things I need a desktop to do. Granted I only have one big display, so I guess there's some weird use cases– But I've used nearly everything designed to be driven with a mouse, and this is almost as good as any of them. I do miss a few things from compiz, but it is just a little too flaky.
XFCE4 (Score:5, Informative)
I switch between XFCE and KDE. They both excel at different things. Also when I upgrade KDE in Gentoo I have to drop into XFCE as I'm uninstalling the foundation libraries whilst upgrading, which running desktops apparently don't like.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Another XFCE4 fan. Simple, stays out of my way. And since 99% of my time is spent in a browser, a terminal, an editor or my email client, I don't really need a fancy desktop.
Re: XFCE4 (Score:1)
Re:Best DE (Score:4, Interesting)
If only Linux Mint had a flavor with KDE...
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Just install the package?
Re:Best DE (Score:5, Informative)
This comes from a super loyal and enthusiastic KDE user who suffered through the KDE 4 crisis/nightmare in 2008. Back then, the justification was that this was all necessary because we were going to switch to a totally new way of doing things (plasma), which would then work on different kinds of devices. I think it was called "convergence". I think it's just absolutely bonkers that 17 years later, we still can't use KDE on a tablet. Nuts.
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Remember the KDE tablet that got delayed again and again as they found out the suppliers would swap out components whenever it was cost effective?
I do chuckle whenever someone asks why KDE doesn't write its own display manager.
We can't use KDE on a tablet?? Interesting... (Score:3)
There was one problem initially (more of an inconvenience) in 6.0 in that you had to go into prefs to rotate the display. But by 6.1 a display rotate toggl
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To be fair, I tried this using kubuntu LTS, and they're still on Plasma 5.27. I know there may be more polished KDE distros out there. For a while, I had half the family on KDE neon, but with their rolling releases, stuff just constantly broke, and it became a total maintenance nightmare. So back to kubuntu (now ubuntu, I guess).
In terms of tablet usability, was KDE 6 much better than KDE 5? I could look if there's some KDE 6
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Believe me, I really wanted this to work. I am not here to rant and bash KDE.
As I said above, 6.0 had problems with tablet functionally. Every issue I was specifically having, I reported to them through the channels they provide, and all of which were addressed (and they were very nice about it). I just think that may be a better use of time/energy. You like something else better? Fine. There's no shortage of options in Linux.
But personally, I think the whole "this thing doesn't do the thing I want/need/desire it to do, it's shit" without--y'know--actually informing the people tha
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Yes, your niece can probably scribble something on Krita; my niece could, too. But that's a pretty low bar. I need a system I can rely on to get important work done
True. And also true I'm only using it for professional sound editing/design. But for anything important...
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It is so funny how subjective these things can be. I tried Fedora in its Gnome and KDE avatars and KDE felt clunky, stuttery and in some cases, very old-looking with its square aesthetic every where. On the other hand, Gnome was very smooth and much more trackpad friendly. The only extension I really needed was Dash to Dock and it was essentially more than enough.
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Zaphod head multi monitor support? (Score:2)
Zaphod head support has been a stumbling block for me for the past several years on most modern DE's. FYI, I want it so bad I'd say I need it.
FYI, multi-head modes overview:
A) Mirrored displays. Output to Monitor-A is mirrored to Monitor-B. DISPLAY=0.0 on both monitors.
B) Stretched display. Monitor-A and Monitor-B share one X (as in XFree86 or Xorg) screen, like DISPLAY=0.0 on both monitors. You can drag windows from one screen to the other. When switching virtual displays via the pager on the taskbar, both
Gnome out, KDE in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gnome out, KDE in (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never been a KDE fan, but I get what they are doing. It's a big, featureful DE, and does a reasonable job of that in reasonable ways. I prefer an oddball FVWM config, but you know KDE seems ok. If I find myself in front of a KDE machine, it's cool.
Gnome, though, I don't get the appeal. They appear to be trying to make Linux an not Linux as possible. It appears to be aimed at a hypothetical granny user who as far as I can tell largely doesn't exist. I don't think Linux is ever going to "win" on the desktop in as far as replacing Windows or Macs. GNOME to me feels neither fish nor fowl, it's not there to appeal to the users Linux has, but neither is it a vehicle to acquire new users.
I believe there is a lack of focus, it seems to alternate between trying to be a better osx than osx, a better Windows than Windows (I think those are a lost cause), but also "easy to use" (for whom?) and a tablet but also modern even if that involves making it harder to use.
What's the focus?
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Why not write some useful programs ? (Score:2)
Hey great ! They've moved stuff around and "prettified" it a bit (again) Same as last year... and the year before... and the year before... and the year before...
When do you think they'll get round to writing any "best in class" desktop software to go with the shiny new DE ?
Shouldn't really complain about people writing the software they want to write but... the Linux DEs have been good enough for decades. I can only dream of a world where there's some good desktop application software to go with them.
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Good enough doesn't mean bug free.
Which software do you desperately need?
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When do you think they'll get round to writing any "best in class" desktop software to go with the shiny new DE ?
Shouldn't really complain about people writing the software they want to write but... the Linux DEs have been good enough for decades. I can only dream of a world where there's some good desktop application software to go with them. Meanwhile I'll have to keep using that abomination from Redmond as it's the only way i can run the software I want/need to use.
I think you're a little confused. Those who write a DE aren't really responsible for writing good application software (even if they do release some small utilities/tools). Yes, Microsoft does blur the line there, but let's reword the question a bit. Is it the MS-Windows team's responsibility to write a good spreadsheet program or a good browser? Nope, not at all. MS is big enough to have all of those teams and more, but the DE team doesn't do the apps. Likewise, KDE isn't responsible for the good apps you
Re: Why not write some useful programs ? (Score:1)
I love Plasma! (Score:2)
Since I switched to Linux circa 2007, KDE has been my main user interface.
None of the others give me the customizability I want.
I really don't know what I would do without such vital applications as Okular. Kate is my favorite editor.
And Plasma is truly cross-platform.
I have some minor quibbles with them leaving options out of version 6, but I'm using Plasma 6 on all 3 of my operating systems: FreeBSD, Manjaro Linux, and OpenBSD.
KDE Neon (Score:2)
Been a KDE user since '09, and happily been running KDE Neon (stable variant) for a couple years now and it's been rock solid, despite it being "bleeding edge" KDE. I had growing pains a couple times (5.x -> 6.x, 22.04 -> 24.04), but nothing I couldn't overcome for a few days before fixed packages were released. Highly recommend for *nix newbs and vets
KDE is fantastic. They should fix grating bugs (Score:2)
I've been using KDE for nearly 20 years. I love it (except for the brief misadventure with KDE4).
I love its customizability, its powerful file manager, the ease with which I can get things done, how they have done a fantastic job of integrating the GUI experience with the unix CLI. Integrating the terminal with the console so that you can hit F4, type a command and go back to the screen is brilliant.
However, I do wish they would fix the long-standing, super-annoying and grating bugs. The two that are top of
cube and different backgrounds (Score:2)
Last update around I asked about that, and some wiseguy around here said there was, so I got Arch installed (also tried KDE distro) to find it's very limited and not usable.
I've switched to KDE when Gnome took away some options of window management that I require. Yeah, that's about 25 years ago. But there's a load of I know better Devs in KDE since a decade or so, and unfortun