In this week's note in KDENate Graham began by reminding us that Plasma 6.4 beta has been released. At the same time, or before I would say, a hard freeze took place, meaning that version 6.4 of the KDE graphical environment will no longer receive new features, and whatever new features arrive will be released in version 6.5, or in a maintenance release if deemed necessary. This isn't typical, though, as point updates typically fix bugs and nothing else.
Users interested in trying out the Plasma 6.4 beta are best off downloading the KDE Neon Testing release and installing it in a virtual machine or launching a live session. The stable release will be available next month, and later for most Linux distributions. The following is the list with news that they presented this week.
New Features Coming to KDE
plasma 6.4
- Added HDR calibration wizard.
- KWin now allows you to enable Extended Dynamic Range on supported displays, simulating HDR by strategically changing the backlight brightness.
- KWin now allows you to limit the maximum color depth on displays that support this feature.
- Applications using XWayland can now be allowed to control the keyboard and mouse, which of course reduces security, but some of those applications depend on this behavior to function.
- Plasma's built-in free space notifier now alerts you about low free space on any partition, not just / and /home. It's smart enough to ignore read-only partitions or those mounted in a nearly full state, to avoid inconveniencing you. You can now also configure the percentage at which it begins alerting you.
KDE interface improvements
plasma 6.3.6
- Improved keyboard navigation through system tray widget pop-ups to be more convenient.
plasma 6.4
- The System Monitor overview page now includes more relevant monitors in the foreground, including GPU usage and individual disk capacities.
- On Wayland, sticky keys now unlock on click, just like they do on X11.
- Enabling Plasma's built-in RDP server now asks for permission once, and after granting it, you are not bothered by it again.
- That same integrated RDP server now accepts horizontal scroll events from connected client applications.
- Significant improvements to the Comics widget regarding its configuration dialog and messaging, and in an unconfigured or error state.
- In the Audio Volume widget, the audio input and output device sections now have small textual headers, like many other Plasma and KDE applications.
- A small context-sensitive help button has been added to the Mouse page of System Preferences that explains what the middle mouse button scrolling function does, as it's not very obvious otherwise.
- Improved the way screen readers announce scrollable views in System Settings.
- Trash widgets now display a small busy spinner while emptying, because sometimes emptying the trash can take a while.
- The clipboard item navigation buttons now display the “Edit” button first, as that’s likely the one you’ll want to use most often.
- Spectacle recording notifications no longer remain in your history, as they become irrelevant immediately after you view them.
- The Kickoff app launcher's footer button to show more power and/or session actions now always reflects what's in it, rather than only occasionally.
- All tooltips that appear when hovering over labels in the Mouse & Touchpad pages of System Preferences have been removed because they merely duplicated the visible text with minimal or no differences. Instead, only the most important things are explained using the more familiar context-sensitive Help button user interface.
- The "Disable this popup" menu item that appears on clipboard popup actions has been removed, as it is now disabled by default.
Framework 6.15
- The dialog box that asks if we want to open or run an executable file, which can be invoked from Dolphin or Plasma, now makes the "don't ask again" option much clearer so we really know what we're agreeing to.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, this week KDE has 4 high priority bugs and 22 of them are left with 15 minutes, which is more than last week in both cases.
KDE Plasma 6.3.6 is expected to arrive on July 8, Plasma 6.4 on June 17, and Frameworks 6.15 on July 13.
Images and content: KDE blog.