Must-Know Bits 👇 — Makes the lives of digital artists a lot easier. — Features a beautiful new wallpaper called Nuvole. — Introduces major changes for hardware monitoring.
People like KDE Plasma for its impressive customization potential that encourages them to play around with the interface, letting them add gorgeous themes, wallpapers, and widgets to liven up their Linux desktop.
Every few months or so, we get a new Plasma release that usually comes loaded with many upgrades and fixes, and this time it's no different with the recently announced 6.3 release.
🆕 KDE Plasma 6.3: What's New?
Touted as “an unmatchable desktop experience” by KDE developers, the Plasma 6.3 release brings about many fixes that the devs have been working on to extend the Plasma 6 family of releases.
You will notice that there are some major changes across the board targeted at digital artists, alongside the usual quality-of-life upgrades, so let's get into it.
Digital Artist-Focused Changes
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Source: KDE
In a bid to make Plasma the go-to platform for creative professionals and hobbyists, Plasma 6.3 ships with a revamped “Drawing Tablet” page in the System Settings app.
It now allows artists to easily map the entire screen area of a drawing tablet's surface, shows information related to tilt and pressure (during stylus testing), allows tweaking the pressure curve and range of a stylus, and remapping/swapping of stylus buttons.
Another important change is the overhauled fractional scaling that makes the experience of using a high-resolution display much better than before. KWin now snaps elements to the screen's pixel grid, eliminating blurriness and gaps while producing a sharper, more crisp image.
Source: KDE
The screenshot above shows how very high zoom levels look with KWin's Zoom effect, showing a pixel-perfect output that can be helpful for artists.
Additionally, when using the Night Light feature, the displayed colors are now more accurate with and without ICC profiles, with KWin showing an option to set the color accuracy.
Many User Experience Upgrades
Moving on, users of KRunner and any searches powered by it can now take advantage of the Page Up/Page Down and Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between categories.
In the widgets department, the Weather Report widget can now show forecasts from Deutscher Wetterdienst, a Germany-based source. The Discover app store also sees a major upgrade, with it now automatically highlighting sandboxed applications whose permissions are set to change after an update.
Furthermore, if you look closely at the screenshot above, you will see that the Spectacle screenshot utility has finally made an official debut on KDE Plasma.
If you are someone who likes to keep an eye on their hardware, then the System Monitor on Plasma 6.3 won't disappoint, as it has been improved to monitor CPU usage more accurately while consuming less CPU resources than before.
The Info Center app also sees some changes, with it now providing more information related to any installed GPUs and the battery. It is also easier to monitor printers using the Printers widget, as the print queue is now directly shown in it.
🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements
We wrap up the article with a few other interesting changes:
A new “Help” category has been introduced in the app launcher.
The “Settings” category has been removed from the app launcher.
The Widget Explorer now allows deleting every instance of a widget.
Cloning panels is now possible, with scripts allowing panel opacity adjustments.
Now, after turning off Do Not Disturb, users won't be flooded with missed notifications.
The official announcement blog and changelog have more details if you are interested in diving deeper into this release.
⚙️ How to get KDE Plasma 6.3?
Users of KDE Neon will be among the first ones to receive the KDE Plasma 6.3 upgrade.
Similarly, users of rolling release distros like EndeavourOS can expect to get the release too. By the way, it also received a major release recently. You can check out our coverage of it when you are done here.
You could also build KDE Plasma 6.3 from source if you are up for a challenge. Although, I recommend against it.
As for existing users, you should ensure that any important data is backed up before following the listed upgrade steps. We start with the upgrade process for Arch Linux users, who simply have to run the following command and follow the on-screen prompts:
sudo pacman -Syu
Next up is the upgrade process for KDE Neon users. Launch the 'Discover' app, go into the “Updates” page, click on “Refresh”, then wait for the packages to load, then click “Update All”.
The Discover app on KDE Plasma makes system upgrades effortless!
After the downloads are complete, the updater will ask you to do a system reboot. If everything goes well, you'll be updated to KDE Plasma 6.3.
And, finally, we have the upgrade process for Ubuntu and Kubuntu users. While LTS users are not likely to get this release anytime soon, they can still get it via the backports method, where users will have to add the Kubuntu Backports PPA to their system.
Do note that you might have to wait a bit before the Plasma 6.3 release arrives on those, and things might break if you install using this method. Anyhow, execute these commands one-by-one to get the upgrade:
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Sreenath
