After a year and a half of development, KDE Partition Manager 4.0 was released - a utility for working with drives and file systems, an analogue of GParted for Qt environments. The utility is built on the KPMcore library, which is also used, for example, by the Calamares universal installer.
What is special about this version?
- The program no longer requires root privileges at startup, but requests elevation for specific operations through the KAuth framework. Among other things, this solved problems with working on Wayland. In the future, the program will instead of KAuth access the Polkit API directly.
- The KPMcore backend now uses sfdisk (part of util-linux) instead of libparted. At the same time, many errors were identified and fixed in sfdisk.
- Also, in the process of working on KPMcore, the code for working with SMART was transferred from the abandoned libatasmart to smartmontools.
- A sufficient level of portability of the application has been achieved, in the future it is planned to release a version for FreeBSD.
- Support for LUKS2 has been significantly improved - now you can change the size of such containers, but so far only if they do not use advanced options like dm-integrity. But the creation of LUKS2 containers is not yet presented in the GUI.
- The program has learned to detect APFS and Microsoft BitLocker.
- The KPMcore code has been improved to maintain ABI compatibility for future releases. Modern features of C++ are also widely used.
- Fixed a number of bugs in working with LVM and not only.
Source: linux.org.ru