Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet’s surface to a part of the screen, change the functions of stylus buttons, customise the pressure curve and range of a stylus, and much more. The entire settings panel for drawing tablets has also been redesigned to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
Plasma 6.3 also completely overhauls KWin’s fraction scaling. Fractional scaling in KWin will not try to snap everything to your display’s pixel grid, to reduce blurriness and make everything look sharper. KWin’s zoom effect also makes use of these improvements, making for a pixel-perfect zoom feature with a pixel grid overlay, which is great for artists and designers. This will be a very welcome improvement for people using e.g. 125% or 150% scaling on their displays.
Hardware monitoring is much improved too, with System Monitor showing more information while using fewer resources, and KDE users on FreeBSD can now see GPU statistics too. There’s also a ton of small additions that are still quite welcome, like opening the menu editor instead of a properties dialog when clicking on Edit Application in a launcher menu’s context menu, the ability to clone panels, an option to turn of symbolic icons in Kickoff, a “Show Target” option in the context menu of symbolic links, and a lot more.
KDE Plasma 6.3 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.
But have they found a way to minimize and maximize videos in wayland yet that is not very slow on AMD systems?
I loved KDE years and years ago, but it’s performance become so poor on moderate hardware I dropped it about a decade ago and never went back. I find it ironic when KDE users complain about the poor performance of Windows.
KDE runs just fine, you propably abandoned it during one of the version switches, in my experience from 3 to 4 or 4 to 5 its usually a bit buggy slower etc. so i keep using the oder one, until i read from the majority of people its stable now, to make the switch. I use KDE on three machines (All using Archlinux) and speccs from good to average to a Thinkpad T490s (Intel I5 with 16GB RAM). KDE is awesome because it is fast and consistent, sure its original memory consumption is higher then something that is only a WM but its a complete and consistent Desktop Environment, with everythng from one hand. Always funny, when i see these tiled WM people installing their so super leight weight systems just to add afterwards about 20 seperate tools to make it a complete desktop (not even interested to think about all the tinkering and inclined issues bcs. of incompatibilities and inconsistencies between all such projects) KDE makes aggressive use of RAM if its there which makes sense and is good. Average hardware has at least 8GB RAM nowadays or 16 and that makes it run smooth If you are not having a system from 20 years ago (where also macOS and windows11 would stutter). Otherwise whats the point in these leightweight windows like behavior in terms of RAM and SWAP that in my opinion comes from a time, when we had 1GB RAM in the systems. Use it to prefetch etc. i dont care better then 7GB free and never used, then i can remove 7GB and just live with 1… except when someone plays a game every now and then of course.
Seconded.
I stopped using KDE back when because the 3.x to 4.x switch was so rough — 3.x was abandoned before 4.x was ready for prime time, which is probably why we saw TDE fork but didn’t see similar forks for KDE 1, 2, or 4. (You can say the same thing about Gnome and MATE; Gnome handled the 1->2 transition much better than the 2->3 transition; I sometimes miss Gnome 2 but do not miss Gnome 1).
But Kde 5 and now 6 are really performant. On my low-spec machines (e.g. a 2012 Tochiba Chromebook with 4GB RAM) they are more responsive and use less RAM than even XFCE, despite running more services and including more bling.
Brainworm,
Since so many users find transitions rough/unappealing, maybe our desktops should just not have them
Gnome 3 was not the same desktop at all. It didn’t really feel related to gnome2 and while I had been a happy gnome 2 user, I liked it better than KDE. But then gnome 3 came and I felt it was enough of a downgrade that I started actively looking for alternatives. I got back on the KDE train and I feel it does what I need. Although XFCE works too and I appreciate their restraint in using as as guinea pigs for changes nobody’s asking for.
Some people seem to seek out “bling” and the latest and greatest, whatever this ends up meaning. Others like myself just want a desktop to work and really stay out of the way. Don’t go making drastic changes without involving the community.
Nostalgia glasses? 3 to 4 was a complete mess. Once 4.3 was around it was better than any other integrated DE available, and gnome was in complete dissaray. GTK3 was a mess, so is GTK4, they have still not made proper visual controls possible and at most CSS to somewhat theme the engine. I do so hope all those creative talents go instead to work where they are aprechiated. CSD is the dumbest thing ever made on the UI and microsoft realized this a bit soon after it was to late. They knew that had “shit the bed” with windows media player theming that did not had to follow the standard, but they did not learn. Now very bad applications like discord (install in user directory and not in proper programs folders) and is much harder for admins to keep out threatens the infrastructure built on windows, and the “webapps” look like shit to quote Adam Curry (the inventor of podcasts).
NaGERST,
Nostalgia glasses? I’m not sure I follow. Those were my opinions at the time.
I feel like developers of the past (around the win2k era) were more focused on consistency in app development as a goal. The OS color palettes/controls/shortcuts/etc were used and or closely mimicked. At some point the industry decided it would be fashionable to throw it away and have everyone just do whatever. It almost seems like all the platforms got together and decided to buck their own style guidelines at the same time. “Hey look windows metro is throwing out the GUI guidelines, let’s all follow suit!”
I agree with you. Not to yell at clouds, but the main reason I use a Mac (for work) and KDE (at home) is that they have retained conventional menubars. Macs do this more consistently — KDE has a lot of programs running menu-less by default.
My least favorite application thing is trying to figure out which hotkeys activate which hamburger menu so that I can further guess which hotkeys to use for the options enumerated in each of them.
Nautilus, despite being a pretty good File Manager, may be the worst offender on this one, with like three different icon (hamburger) menus plus a global menu with options scattered randomly across them. Like, why are there two search menus? Why do the other two menus — both of which have three horizontal “hamburger” lines, do two completely unrelated things? Why can’t these menus be labeled with words instead of cryptic symbols? If I couldn’t read in the first place why would I be using a computer?
KDE Plasma 6.3 running perfectly smooth with Fedora Atomic 41.
The sharpness in my HiDPI monitor with fractional scaling improved so much! A true pleasure to work everyday with plasma as my DE.