The KDE project has just announced version 6.2 of its KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment. It's the first big update the popular desktop environment has received since June this year and brings several notable changes, especially for digital artists.
For users of drawing tablets, Plasma 6.2 includes lots of new features, you can now go to System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see different tools for configuring your drawing tablet. Some new options include a tablet calibration wizard and test mode; a feature to define the area of the screen that your tablet covers; and the option to re-bind pen buttons to different kinds of mouse clicks.
The KDE project said that you shouldn't need to install new drivers to use your drawing devices but if you see that they do not work, then you can inform the "We care about your Input" project so that work can be done to support your device.
Another feature that will be interesting to artists but also a wider user base is the new color management options. Plasma 6.2 gets more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol enabled by default to help ensure consistent colors are used across monitors.
Improvements have also been made for improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles as well as HDR performance. These updates will improve the experience when designing graphics, playing games, and watching videos.
The final color management update is new tone mapping built into Plasma's KWin compositor. This will improve the look of images that have a brightness or set of colors greater than the screen can display, reducing the "blown out" look images can exhibit.
Another big update with Plasma 6.2 is the power management settings. One improvement is that you can now override misbehaving applications that stop the system from going to sleep or locking the screen. You can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor separately. These updates should help you lower your energy bills which are still extraordinarily high in some countries.
The Power and Battery widget has also been updated so that you can adjust power profiles for different scenarios. You can hold down the Windows key + B to cycle through different power profiles one at a time, you will see a lead badge on the battery when in power saver mode and a rocket when you're in performance mode.
Other updates in Plasma 6.2 include:
Discover and System Updating
- Support for PostmarketOS packages for mobile devices in Discover
- Better app review writing and more accurate app license information
- Option to shut down the system after an offline update, in addition to restarting
Accessibility
- An improved Accessibility page in the System Settings
- New colorblindness filters
- Full sticky key support on Wayland
UI/Visual Design
- Updated accent colors and System Tray
- Improved Widget Explorer and unified dialog/pop-up appearance
- improved Welcome Center, sound effects, and actions
Other
- The Weather Report widget now shows “feels like” temperatures, adds more information for BBC weather forecasts, and more.
- You can turn off window borders in the Pager widget.
- The Minimize All widget now minimizes only windows on the current virtual desktop and activity.
- You can now give custom names to your custom shortcuts.
- There's now an integrated cropping tool when setting a new user avatar.
- We’ve added a once-a-year donation request notification — please consider using it to show your love for Plasma by donating!
You can find a complete changelog here.
It's unclear when you will receive Plasma 6.2 on your system, it all depends on when various operating systems decide to push it. As quite a big update, it will most likely be include with the next major release of the operating system you're using in the case of Linux distributions unless you're on something Arch-based then you could get it much quicker.
Source: KDE
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