After a year and a half of development, KDE Partition Manager 4.0 has been released — a utility for managing storage devices and file systems, similar to GParted for Qt environments. The utility is built on the KPMcore library, which is also used by the universal installer Calamares, for example.
What is noteworthy about this version?
- The program no longer requires root permissions when launched, instead requesting elevated rights for specific operations through the KAuth framework. Among other things, this solved issues with operation on Wayland. In the future, the program will access the Polkit API directly instead of using KAuth.
- The KPMcore backend now uses sfdisk (part of util-linux) instead of libparted. Many bugs have been identified and fixed in sfdisk.
- Additionally, during the development of KPMcore, the code for working with S.M.A.R.T. has been migrated from the abandoned libatasmart to smartmontools.
- A sufficient level of application portability has been achieved, with plans to release a version for FreeBSD in the future.
- Support for LUKS2 has significantly improved — it is now possible to resize such containers, but only if they do not use advanced options like dm-integrity. However, the creation of LUKS2 containers is not yet available in the graphical interface.
- The program has learned to identify APFS and Microsoft BitLocker.
- The KPMcore code has been improved to maintain ABI compatibility for future versions. Modern C++ features are also widely utilized.
- A number of bugs related to LVM and more have been fixed.
Source: linux.org.ru
