A new version of Plasma is here, and it feels even more like
/home
, as it becomes smoother, friendlier and more helpful.Plasma 6.4 improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.
↫ KDE Plasma 6.4 release announcement
KDE Plasma 6.4 comes with a big improvement in window and virtual desktop management, allowing you to create entirely custom tiled configurations per virtual desktop. Accessibility was another focus of this release, as we talked about a few weeks ago, bringing number pad mouse pointer navigation, improved desktop zoom, screen readers improvements, better contrast i the dark theme, tons of little legibility improvements across the desktop environment and its applications, and more.
Furthermore, there’s now finally a dedicated page in Settings for animations, so you no longer have to dig your way through the oddly placed and obtuse Desktop Effects page. Notifications have been improved as well, with new additions like a speed graph in file transfer notifications or Plasma notifying you when you’re trying to use a muted microphone input. KRunner can now visualise colours when searching for a hex code, Spectacle has received some love, various widgets have been touched up, and much more.
There’s a brand new HDR wizard, support for Extended Dynamic Range, and the addition of the P010 video color format. System Monitor will now show usage information for Intel and AMD GPUs, and Info Center will show raw sensor data from the sensors in your device. There’s a ton more, as this is a fairly major release.
You can download and compile KDE Plasma 6.4 now, or just wait a few days until it lands in your distribution’s repository.
Delightful
Thom Holwerda,
I’m looking forward to it.. But “a few days until it lands in your distribution’s repository” got a laugh from me. On stable distros, sometimes it feels like we wait forever.
Yes, it looks like you will be waiting until 2027 for Plasma 6.4 in Debian 14. That said, you will get an even newer version at that time.
Thankfully, Plasma 6.3.5 is already really good and you should get that in Trixie “soon”.
Xfce 4.20 is good too.
Yeah, I’m planning on going with Trixie stable (currently on Testing) for a few months, then probably switching back to Testing to get newer kernels/Plasma/etc. ZFS makes rollbacks in the event of a bad update a lot simpler and smoother.
Or just upgrade to TDE and forget Plasma 😀