After four months of development, the release of the KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop environment has been published. To evaluate the performance of the new KDE releases, you can use builds from the KDE Neon and openSUSE projects (Argon, based on openSUSE Leap, and Krypton, based on openSUSE Tumbleweed).
Key Changes:
- The composite manager KWin has revamped support for fractional scaling. To reduce blurriness and enhance clarity when zooming, it provides a binding to the pixel grid of the screen.
- The zoom effect has been upgraded, which now shows a grid for visually separating individual pixels during significant scaling changes.
- In night mode, the accuracy of color display has improved, regardless of the use of ICC profiles. A parameter has been added in KWin to adjust color display accuracy.
- Light transparency has been enabled for widgets placed on the desktop and for pop-up windows of panel elements.
- In the widget displaying the list of open windows in the panel (Task Manager), the ability to show standard text tooltips has been implemented, in case the display of window content thumbnails is disabled in the settings.
- The interface for configuring the graphics tablet has been redesigned — the content of the page in the configurator has been divided into three separate tabs (Display, Pen, and Pad). A more familiar graphics tablet calibration matrix has been implemented. During stylus testing, information about tilt and pressure is shown. The option to map the surface of the graphics tablet to the entire screen has been added. Settings for stylus pressure range have been included, for example, to ignore very light or very heavy touches. An option has been added to highlight changes in settings with color.
- A setting has been added to automatically disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected.
- In the access point settings, random password generation for connecting to the created wireless network has been implemented.
- A new category 'Help' has been added to the main menu, and the 'Settings' section has been removed and merged with the 'System' section.
- In the Kickoff Application Launcher menu, switching categories now occurs only with an explicit mouse click (like in the side panels). An option has been added to the settings to revert to the old behavior, where hovering the mouse cursor was sufficient for category switching.
- The 'Clock' widget now displays all upcoming events for the day, not just the first five.
- After exiting Do Not Disturb mode, the number of missed notifications is now shown instead of displaying all accumulated notifications at once.
- When moving a file with the mouse from a window partially obscured by other windows, that window is no longer brought to the foreground, as it might cover the content where the user intended to move the file.
- A button has been added to the context menu shown when right-clicking a shortcut with a symbolic link, allowing users to show the target file of the link.
- In the panel configurator accessed through the context menu by right-clicking on the panel, a 'Clone Panel' button has been added, which allows users to clone the selected panel, for example, to duplicate the bottom panel to the top of the screen.
- The option to disable symbolic icons in the Kickoff menu is now available using the menu editor (the KMenuEdit application).
- When trying to edit files with the '.desktop' extension through the 'Edit Application…' menu, the KMenuEdit application now launches instead of the file properties dialog.
- In the Widget Explorer, it is now possible to remove all instances of a widget, including those lost or attached to disabled screens.
- When launching applications granted permissions to capture input devices and the screen, a notification now appears with a tip on how to disable the capture and regain control.
- Memory consumption for storing a large clipboard history has been reduced.
- In the configurator on the KWin settings page, the ability to temporarily disable rules that override application window attributes (KWin Window Rules) has been provided. Previously, these rules could only be removed to cease their effect.
- The "Power and Battery" widget now displays a notification for low battery of wireless headphones, providing accurate information about battery status.
- In the System Monitor application, the accuracy of CPU load tracking has been improved, and resource consumption while running this application has been reduced. Support for collecting statistics about GPU usage in FreeBSD has been added. Additional information about all GPUs is provided in the Info Center, along with battery cycle counters.
- Tracking printer status has been simplified — the widget for each printer now displays the print queue and an indicator showing which printer is currently outputting the print.
- A service has been added to determine when the kernel forcefully terminates an application due to memory shortages in the system, and it displays a corresponding notification.
- In the Discover application manager, the layout on large screens is limited to two columns. Color highlighting for permission changes in new versions of programs is ensured. Packages prepared by the main project developers or verified by authorized personnel are specially marked.
- KRunner has added the ability to switch between categories using the Page Up/Page Down and Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down keyboard shortcuts. The search fields based on KRunner now feature the capability to convert units of length.
Source: opennet.ru
