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KDE Plasma 6.1 has been released with a plethora of productivity and performance-minded improvements.
Building on the KDE Plasma 6.0 release from earlier in this year, the 6.1 update sees KDE developers deliver “improvements and powerful new features to every part of your desktop”, with promises that future updates will see things ‘get more interesting’.
Plasma 6.1 allows users to initiate a remote desktop access straight from the System Settings app, to which Remote Desktop clients, like KRDC, can connect. RDP features aren’t new to KDE per se, but this new integration makes setting up connections easier.
KDE is king —or queen, before I get cancelled— of customisation, and the Plasma desktop has long had an interactive ‘edit mode’ which is easily accessible. But, more so for newer users, it’s easy to enter edit mode accidentally and not notice!
So in KDE Plasma 6.1 Edit Mode is visually explicit (and arguably all the better for it). Entering Edit Mode now triggers an animation which seems the desktop smoothly zooms out into a framed overview area. Here, changes can be made as before and saved/applied.
With the KDE Plasma 6.x series being Wayland-first some effort has gone into enabling those who want their open apps/windows to be stored between sessions (i.e. logging out and back in). This capability is supported in X11 but under Wayland, until now, MIA.
So Plasma 6.1 includes an initial (but not yet perfect; devs describe it as a WIP) implementation. When you log out or shutdown your computer when app windows are open, Plasma re-opens them when you next login so you can resume working right away.
On the topic of Wayland, KDE Plasma 6.1 features Explicit Sync support to help eliminate visual glitches often experienced by NVIDIA users, and enables Triple Buffering to improve the smoothness of on-screen animations and rendering.
The “Shake cursor to find it” effect popularised by macOS has an equivalent in KDE Plasma 6.1. Users can waggle their mouse repeatedly (or wiggle a finger on the touchpad) to temporarily enlarge the cursor on screen to make it easier to spot.
Other changes in KDE Plasma 6.1:
- Sync keyboard LED colour to desktop accent colour1
- Simplified exit dialog with smarter surfacing of options
- Option to disable screen locking password (i.e. become a screensaver)
- Support for using a monitor’s bundled color profile2
- Discover offers help for end-of-support Flatpak apps
- Lenovo IdeaPad, Legion laptop ‘battery conservation mode features’
- Middle-click Power & Battery widget to toggle sleep/screen locking
- Scroll over Power & Battery widget to change power profile
- Support for Input Capture portal
- Visual tweaks, including rounder corners, radii consistency
- Overview improves its window layout algorithm
- Option to hide mouse pointer after a period of inactivity
- Configurable edge barrier between screens
In all, a welcome set of changes.
KDE Plasma 6.1 will rolling out to users of KDE neon stable edition from today. Rolling-release Linux distributions will package it up and push it out in due course, but the update may not come to users of fixed-release distros, but repos/coprs/PPAs can fill in.
Source code is, as always, available from the KDE website.