Entirely coincidentally, the KDE team released Plasma 6.2 yesterday, the latest release in the well-received 6.x series. As the version number implies, it’s not a groundbreaking release, but it does contain a number of improvements that are very welcome to a few specific, often underserved groups. For instance, 6.2 overhauls the Accessibility settings panel, and ads, among other things, colourblindness filters for a variety of types of colourblindness. This condition affects roughly 8-9% of the population, so it’s an important new feature.
Another group of people served by Plasma 6.2 are artists.
Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. Open System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see various tools for configuring drawing tablets.
New in Plasma 6.2: a tablet calibration wizard and test mode; a feature to define the area of the screen that your tablet covers (the whole screen or a section); and the option to re-bind pen buttons to different kinds of mouse clicks.
↫ KDE Plasma 6.2 release announcement
Artists and regular users alike can now also enjoy better colour management, more complete HDR support, a tone-mapping feature in Kwin, and much more. Power management has been improved as well, so you can now manage brightness per individual monitor, control which application block going to sleep, and so on. There’s also the usual array of bug fixes, UI tweaks, and so on.
Plasma 6.2 is already available in at least Fedora and openSUSE, and it will find its way to your distribution soon enough, too.
I’m so excited, 6.2 has already been started to be pulled into Debian Experimental! So they’re keeping experimental up to date. Hopefully that means it’ll trickle down to Testing in the next few months 🙂
That’s pretty much the process, you’ll see it in Stable in 3-5 years.
Yup, that’s why I’m running Testing for now. Although given Bookworm was June 2023, and before that Bullseye was Aug 2021, I’m hoping it’ll hit stable in 1-1.5 years from nowish. Until then…I’ll be running Testing.
That’s nice, however they still haven’t fixed the issue with mapping of the side buttons on Huion tablets (not the pen buttons, the ones on the tablet itself) with digimend drivers which just replicate mouse buttons and cannot be remapped in the system settings. I have configured my Huion H950 (HID 256c:006D) manually, but when I go to express keys tab and try to make button 1 to e.g. CTRL+S, it still acts as if it’s left click, which is just wasteful (pen tip is left click).
KDE has always been impressive to me but there’s something wrong with it and it’s not the interface or the usability or anything like that. I don’t know if anybody else has this experience but I don’t react well to the aesthetics. I’m also a user of Linux Mint and the Cinnamon interface. I don’t find the same visceral negative reaction to Cinnamon, and though I don’t like gnome for some of the same reasons it doesn’t cause this negative visceral reaction. But KDE does cause this negative visceral reaction. I’ve never figured it out. I just get to the point when I try it out again after several development cycles from time to time that I get to a point when I’m using it and I say with my stomach in a twist, “I can’t use this.” I wonder if anybody else has this kind of reaction. because as far as I can tell it’s great I just have a negative physical reaction to it. for information I also have the similar reaction to a car color from the ’90s that Hondas used to use it’s kind of a fingernail polish purple. and I just couldn’t handle it. so there is that but it would be interesting to know if anybody else has it similarly weird reaction to KDE?
Simply apply a custom desktop and maybe icon theme that satisfies your taste and that is that, problem solved.
I do agree that the modern versions of KDE are much better for me in this weird reaction I have. The older versions of KDE perhaps from I don’t know a decade ago or more definitely affected me worse than the ones that exist now. but it may be deeper than a theme or icons or anything like that. I wish I could be more specific.
It’s that weird thing where nothing is aligned properly. It’s been a problem with KDE ever since they introduced plasmoids and split the interface between plasma widgets and Qt apps. The plasma widgets have weird alignment problems with text and icons that manifest as inconsistent spacing. It’s unsettling and makes the interface look amateur out of the box. Themes don’t always fix it, but changing the font (I am an IBM Plex person) and working with the font size can go a long way. It’s still a problem 15 years later and there have been no serious attempts to clean up the interface. But hey we got the ability to rotate an analog clock on the desktop (even though there’s already a clock in the panel) so I guess that was the tradeoff.
At least we got rid of the cashew.
We should be very careful with that, people emerging and claiming they will “clean” KDE. Just look at what happened to GNOME, no need to make the same mistake with KDE. So best to “clean” it up to your liking for yourself and for the customize options to stay there enabling you to do it. Compared to “cleaned” KDE!
Same here.
I think it’s the blocky aspect and fisher-pricey default colors and icons. I had the same vibes, to a lesser extents, with BeOS.
I’ve always referred to KDE as “terminally ugly” – I don’t know why it’s like that, but it just is. With KDE 6 they managed to make it at least as ugly as Windows maybe Vista – but it’s still old looking, and ugly. Gnome is more modern looking, but makes funky UX decisions.
It is possible at least to play with the theme, but the core paradigms I think are the problem.
One feature that’s much appreciated is: I can set my monitor (desktop) screen brightness from their software (Brightness and Color)! Tried it using ViewSonic and Lenovo 24″ monitor. As far as I know –and using– kde, gnome, xfce, windows 10, etc, I recall that I cannot set monitor brightness.
So, kudos for KDE Dev teams!
Still strugling with KDE PLasma + Wayland + 3 screens (27 virtual desktops) + Nvidia …
still works really crappy …
Same old, same boring old… Which is good as far as I’m concerned. Most of why I use KDE is that it’s boring, reliable, and stays out of my way. If I wanted an exciting and unique desktop that didn’t help me get things done, I would use Gnome.