A few days ago, the developers of KDE announced the release of the new version of its popular KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, which arrives after 3 months of the previous release (Plasma 6.0, which by the way had a long delay).
KDE Plasma 6.1 presents a large number of improvements and various new features, among which we can find that it has been implemented support for Explicit Sync technology, which allows applications to report to composite manager based on Wayland protocol that a frame is ready to be displayed on the screen. Esto reduces delays and eliminates artifacts when displaying graphics, resolving issues with output violations and stuttering on systems with NVIDIA GPUs and Wayland support enabled.
Also, in Plasma 6.1 When using Wayland, added the ability to simulate session recovery, allowing you to restart applications that were open in a previous session (although saving window positions is not yet supported).
In addition to this, we can also find the new interface for editing the desktop. This allows you to customize the location of the panels and manage the widgets. This mode is activated through the “Enter editing mode” item, available in the context menu that appears when you right-click on the desktop.
Along with this, have been added symbolic versions of encryption related icons directory and music hosting to the Breeze topic, in addition to improving the display of icons for audio and video files distributed in formats for which there are no specific icons.
Moreover, KWin now supports triple bufferingr, what allows for smoother rendering and animation. This system uses three screen buffers: one for drawing, another for displaying the screen, and a third for continuing the continuous rendering process if the first buffer fills before completing the vertical scan. Using the third additional buffer eliminates the lag that occurs with double buffering by allowing you to switch between the render and output buffers before the vertical scan (vblank) completes.
Other changes that KDE Plasma 6.1 presents are the integration of a component to organize remote access to the desktop using the RDP protocol. Additionally, it has been added a separate page in the configurator to adjust remote access settings.
Added support for Battery Conservation Mode, available on many Lenovo IdeaPad and Legion laptops, which prevents charging the battery above a certain capacity (e.g. 80%) when constantly connected to a charger, to prevent degradation of its characteristics.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- A customizable barrier between screens has been added, making it easier to click on interface elements that are on the edge between screens and resolving issues with panels automatically hiding along the edge.
- The keyboard RGB backlight color is guaranteed to be in sync with the accent color selected in KDE settings.
- Added support for using on-screen color profiles.
- Added support for passwordless screen lock, which can be used as a screen saver.
- The network information widget now shows the wireless channel number in addition to the frequency.
- The effect that highlights the position of the cursor when you move it with the mouse is enabled by default.
- Added an effect to hide the mouse cursor after a certain amount of time of inactivity (disabled by default).
- In the configurator, the page with the list of background services is hidden by default to avoid interruptions to normal operation. However, experts can access this page by searching on KRunner.
- On the graphics tablet settings page, it is now possible to change the parameters of the tablet and stylus buttons to use them as modifiers instead of direct action triggers.
- In the printing system configuration, identification and improved installation of printers have been made easier, allowing the installation of the system-config-printer package if it is not included in the base system distribution
Finally, it is worth mentioning that if you are interested in trying the What's new in KDE Plasma 6.1, I recommend using the builds of the KDE Neon and openSUSE projects (Argon, based on openSUSE Leap, and Krypton, based on openSUSE Tumbleweed).
Although on the Ubuntu side, there is its official flavor Kubuntu, At the moment there is no possibility of having 6.1 directly, since the only via is compiled.