KDE continues advancing the Linux desktop with the release of version 6.3 of its Plasma desktop environment (DE), widely considered to be one of the best DEs on any platform.
Plasma 6.3 brings a myriad of changes and improvements, with the vast majority focused on fixing bugs and improving the overall experience. As a result, while there’s not many major new features, this release is a significant quality-of-life release that most users should install as soon as possible.
One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma’s developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 — turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone!
Fractional Scaling
One of the biggest improvements in this release is how fractional scaling works, something that has long been a week point for Linux, compared to macOS and Windows.
The most important news regarding graphics is a huge overhaul of how fractional scaling works. In Plasma 6.3, KWin makes a stronger effort to snap things to the screen’s pixel grid, greatly reducing blurriness and visual gaps everywhere and producing sharper and crisper images.
This works at very high zoom levels as well, as KWin’s Zoom effect switches to a sharp pixel-perfect representation and overlays a grid on top of the screen. You can actually see how individual pixels look relative to other ones. Very useful for artists and designers.
Plasma 6.3 also uses more accurate colors when the Night Light feature is enabled. Night Light is designed to reduce blue light in the evenings.
Drawing Tablet Support
Plasma 6.3 includes a number of improvements to Drawing Tablet integration, further solidifying Plasma as the leading DE for creatives.
The System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page has been overhauled and split into multiple tabs to improve how things are organized, and new configuration options have been added to each section:
- You can map an area of a drawing tablet’s surface to the entire screen area
- We have refined the tablet calibration feature so that it produces more accurate calibrations
- The stylus testing feature shows information about tilt and pressure
- You can customize the pressure curve and range of a stylus to chop off the high and/or low parts
- You can also re-map or swap the functions of the stylus’s buttons
Hardware Monitoring
Plasma 6.3 includes improvements to hardware monitoring, with System Monitor more accurately reporting CPU usage. In addition, the application itself uses less resources, leading to a better, more accurate understanding how resources are being used.
Improvements were also made to GPU and printer monitoring as well.
Info Center also provides more information, exposing data about all of your GPUs as well as your batteries’ cycle counts.
Monitoring printers is equally easy, as each printer’s print queue is shown directly in the widget. The widget also shows a little spinner on any printers that are currently printing, so you can see at a glance which ones are in use.
Tools
KDE made improvements to KRunner, used for quickly searching through files.
KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now let you jump between categories using the Page Up/Page Down keys and Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down key combinations.
It’s good to see KRunner receiving some love, as the tool is one of the best features of Plasma, but sometimes feels like it doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves.
Similarly Discover, Plasma’s app center, will now highlight sandboxed apps with permission that are likely to change after being installed. This should help users identify potential issues with applications and identify “shady behavior.”
Usability
Plasma 6.3 includes a number of usability improvements.
Plasma 6.3 makes things easy without ditching flexibility. If you prefer using a mouse with your laptop, you can now configure its built-in touchpad to switch off automatically, so it doesn’t interfere with your typing. Also, if you set up your machine as a network hotspot, Plasma generates a random password for the network so you don’t have to think one up.
Finding help is easier in Plasma 6.3. A “Help” category has been added to the launcher (the menu that tends to live on the left hand side of your panel), and we have removed the Settings category entirely. Its contents have been merged into the System category, reducing the number of categories that don’t offer meaningful grouping.
Speaking of menus, the default Kickoff launcher menu now switches categories only when you click on them, matching the behavior of all other sidebar lists. However, if you preferred the old switch-on-hover behavior, it’s still available too.
We have made things clearer by adding a Show Target item to the desktop context menu for symbolic links, the digital Clock widget displays all events on days with more than five of them (giving you a complete view of upcoming commitments), and when you want to reboot into the bootloader menu the next time your machine reboots, the logout screen now indicates this.
To avoid overwhelming you with too much information, when notifications arrive while Plasma’s “Do Not Disturb” mode is engaged, exiting that mode shows the number of missed notifications, rather than sending them all in one giant torrent.
Additionally, a subtle but important change: when you drag a file out of a window that’s partially below other windows, it no longer jumps to the top, potentially obscuring what you wanted to drag it into!
Customization
One of Plasma’s defining features is the ability to customize it to be exactly what users want. Version 6.3 is no different, adding a number of improvements.
In Plasma 6.2, we introduced symbolic icons in Kickoff’s category sidebar. Some people didn’t like that, so in 6.3 you can undo the change yourself: we modified the implementation to pull icons from the standard data source, allowing you to set them to whatever you want using the Menu Editor app.
Speaking of the Menu Editor app, editing desktop files for apps from the “Edit Application…” menu item in Kickoff (and other launcher menus) opens the app in the editor, rather than showing you file properties. This lets you easily edit the entire applications list!
If you have ever lost a widget in the process of customizing your system, you’ll love this new feature: in Plasma 6.3, the Widget Explorer gives you the opportunity to remove every instance of a widget, including those that got lost or are only present on unplugged screens.
Conclusion
In our Linux Distro Review series, we looked at the major Linux DEs, including KDE Plasma. In that review, we praised Plasma’s gorgeous looks, powerful features, incredible applications, and the myriad of customization options, concluding it offered “a level of features and power that is unrivaled across any other DE or even any other platform.”
Unfortunately, the paper cuts that came Plasma (then version 5.x) resulted in our conclusion that it was “the one that could be king” if more work was put into improving stability and reducing paper cuts.
With the 6.x series, the KDE developers have done just that, making Plasma more stable, reliable, and solid than it has ever been, and Plasma 6.3 is a testament to that work.
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