KDE Plasma 6.4 Released (kde.org) 29
Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.
Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard's number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.
Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full-screen mode, you'll see a summary of any notifications you missed.
Now, when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu.
The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard. Support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has also been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards -- it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis.
Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has a much-improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password.
There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.
You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 announcement and complete changelog.
Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard's number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.
Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full-screen mode, you'll see a summary of any notifications you missed.
Now, when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu.
The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard. Support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has also been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards -- it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis.
Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has a much-improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password.
There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.
You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 announcement and complete changelog.
17 Years! (Score:3, Informative)
Plasma launched with KDE 4 in 2008. 17 years later, it still doesn't seem like a meaningful improvement over KDE 3.5.
Aaron Seigo, with Plasma, set KDE back years. Way too many years.
KDE 3.5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:17 Years! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand what you want to say here. I read "no meaningful improvement" as "consistent user experience". Users who loved KDE 3.5 are still able to work the same way with recent Plasma. KDE could choose a different paradigm in hope of providing "meaningful improvement", but for people who are looking for something else, there are already alternatives.
Look at Windows, people have been very vocal that XP or 7 provided the best user experience and more recent versions broke something that worked well. Look at GNOME, they sought of providing meaningful improvement with version 3, and fragmented their community with two very active forks. OTOH KDE managed to keep most of their community aligned (Trinity isn't very used).
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Yes, but along with that "consistent user experience" slash "no meaningful improvement" they give on the front end, they just told any LTS user to fuck off. So for those who want to enjoy that "consistent user experience" over the long term can't because KDE won't support something for longer than their attention span
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My desktop has looked pretty much the same since Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. That's 16 years!
I'm using KDE Plasma on all 3 of my operating systems: FreeBSD, Manjaro Linux, and OpenBSD.
It's beautiful, powerful, and useful--and it's easy to make it run the way you want it to, unlike some other desktops.
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I've wrote comments about KDE I wrote 20 years ago and they hold true now. It's still a kitchen sink mentality and for somebody who wants to use a desktop to "do stuff" it's just needlessly complicated experience. That doesn't mean dumbing it down to the level of GNOME, but it does mean looking at the UX and asking hard questions such as - "do we really need this mess of preferences, buttons and menus on this tool when no other desktop has remotely as many". But it never happens and KDE remains mostly an irrelevance.
Hear, hear.
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The kraziest thing is the huge number of applications & features whose name starts with a k, making finding them in menus a krapshoot, a klusterfukk and a kolossal waste of time.
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good there are no gnome apps starting with g.
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I wouldn't gnow as I don't gnuse it.
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The irony is that KDE actually has human interface guidelines and they start off reasonably - emphasizing simple by default, di
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"They might have their own names on the command line, or within their own project / community but as far as the user is concerned they have unsurprising and obvious names."
No different from KDE. The standard menu has the title on top, a description below and the program name is usually hidden.
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More nonsense than calc in Windows? What about explorer for a file manager? What about CoPilot? And who would name a browser Safari?
Seriously, the calc ones are good namings, and kcalc is just an indicator that it is a) graphical b) KDE program and c) calc itself may be taken. If everyone tried to get the generic name, only one tools per purpose could exist. So be happy that it's kcalc and not kalkulus.
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Since Plasma 4.2 or something like that there were no large changes but only polishing.
4.0 had the broken desktop, 4.1 had its issues, with 4.2-4.4 it became good. 4 to 5 was not step with a new UI. 5 to 6 also brought no new UI. They've changed the default theme a bit, still providing the older themes.
Re: 17 Years! (Score:2)
I install it every so often to check on the experience because even in open source, there is pressure to change adapt, grow, improve
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I don't understand what you want to say here. I read "no meaningful improvement" as "consistent user experience".
I mean that upon launch, Plasma as a deficient piece of crap. It threw out Konqueror and all is integrations and IO slaves and replaced it with a pathetic file manager called Dolphin. It did this sort of feature regressive scenario across the entire platform. It the took years, years, to get back to even remotely close to feature parity with what it replaced in KDE 3.5
Plasma was a massive regression. The user experience was consistently worse for far too long. It wasted years of development opportunity for
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The fact that it still basically works the same while running on 17 years of software releases including a complete overhaul to support Wayland, that sounds like a good thing.
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> it still doesn't seem like a meaningful improvement over KDE 3.5.
Have you tried LXQt?
On Debian just install it and uninstall connman and it's pretty good for most tasks, especially low-spec devices.
Actually pretty good (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.
Oh, good, that makes it easier to turn all of them frelling off.
Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy using KDE. It has been remarkably rock solid for my use cases. There are some settings that are always hard to find, but it mostly just works. Given that I can ignore some of the features that they try to push and have had better solutions for years (like Activities, which is better managed by having just a fixed number of desktops with simple keyboard shortcuts, which I've been doing for, literally, 30 years now, or KDE Wallet, or Dolphin, or ...) and still have things work just fine, that says a lot. The idea of building a useful set of tools an not forcing one particular path through them ... that idea resonates deeply for me.
The one aspect of KDE that drives me nuts, however, is that when a process opens a new window, the default should be to open that window on the desktop that the process has been assigned to rather than the current desktop (who, in their right mind, thinks that latter behavior is the right choice?). That, and there's no setting for focus that matches what I want, and the descriptions, despite multiple revisions, remain opaque.
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>The one aspect of KDE that drives me nuts, however, is that when a process opens a new window, the default should be to open that window on the desktop that the process has been assigned to rather than the current desktop (who, in their right mind, thinks that latter behavior is the right choice?).
I haven't used KDE in forever, as Cinnamon has been sitting in the sweet spot of configurable AND simply straightforward for me, but unless you can assign applications to ONLY open on specific desktops ( which
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We disagree.
If I'm running an application on one desktop and explicitly select a different desktop to do something else, I want any new child windows from the first application that open when I've shifted to a different desktop to be created on the original desktop. After all, I explicitly directed a change in my attention to do something else while the first computation was churning on something. When I return to the first desktop, I want to have all of the windows from that application right there, rath
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Window Rules lets you assign apps to virtual desktops. Or positions on monitors. Does that not do what you want? The feature you describe is there.
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No, it doesn't do what I want, as far as I have been able to determine. I want the new child window to always appear on the desktop that its parent is on, no matter what desktop that might be. What I can find is that I can tell it to appear on a specific virtual desktop. That's not what I want.
The default now, to open new windows on the current desktop is almost never the right action, at least for me --- it should instead be what I described: open on the desktop of the parent window.
Moreover, child wind
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I think you can make KWin window rules for that.