The KDE team continuing building up the next version of the popular KDE Plasma desktop environment, with Plasma 6.3.0 getting some great additions.
In a recent blog post from developer Nate Graham some of what's coming includes KWin's zoom effect switching to a "pixel-perfect representation and overlays a grid on top of the screen" which should be useful for artists and designers. On top of that you will be able to switch to a setting that has Plasma "prefer screen color accuracy at the expense of some system performance, should that be your preference", another one good for artists.
Perhaps more exciting for general desktop use is the big improvements to fractional scaling. As noted by Graham " it makes an effort to always snap things to the screen's pixel grid, greatly reducing blurriness and visual gaps everywhere", and they noted how they've been using 175% scale factor for a week and it all looks "fantastic".
A visual change coming in 6.3 is that Plasma panels now appear on screen only after their contents have been fully loaded, which should prevent some weird looking pop-in.
KDE Plasma 6.3 is due for release in February, 2025. At some point between the 6th and the 11th depending on how many issues they find.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments
legluondunet 5 hours ago
How is KDE plasma behavior today? Is it enough stable for a daily use and gaming ? How is it resources consuming ? I prefer light DE and keep resources for gaming.
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Quoting: legluondunetHow is KDE plasma behavior today? Is it enough stable for a daily use and gaming ? How is it resources consuming ? I prefer light DE and keep resources for gaming.
At least on X11, as long as you disable akonadi, Plasma should be lighter than XFCE and much more so than Gnome. I use it daily for work and gaming, plenty stable. Even if you use NVIDIA and it crashes stuff as is usually does, the workspace should handle it gracefully
Last edited by skaplon on 16 December 2024 at 12:27 pm UTC
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Quoting: legluondunetHow is KDE plasma behavior today? Is it enough stable for a daily use and gaming ? How is it resources consuming ? I prefer light DE and keep resources for gaming.
No problems at all in the past year, I would say. I even avoided some problems on a latest major release by postponing system updates. Performance was always good, can't complain. It should be noted, however, that I live in a world where nothing else exists, or I prefer to think so. GNOME 3 and 4 is a HERESY. Other DE's don't support Wayland. Tilable desktops are too raw and experimental for me. It's very hard to compare linux experiences, because it's all very different and customized. I have a >10 years old PC if that helps, if you want to gauge performance that way.
Edit: there's a page dedicated to the problems of wayland adoption (just in case) here.
Last edited by vox on 16 December 2024 at 12:36 pm UTC
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hardpenguin 4 hours ago
> Favorites
> Dota 2
There is truly no escaping it
> Dota 2
There is truly no escaping it
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Quoting: skaplonQuoting: legluondunetHow is KDE plasma behavior today? Is it enough stable for a daily use and gaming ? How is it resources consuming ? I prefer light DE and keep resources for gaming.
At least on X11, as long as you disable akonadi, Plasma should be lighter than XFCE and much more so than Gnome. I use it daily for work and gaming, plenty stable. Even if you use NVIDIA and it crashes stuff as is usually does, the workspace should handle it gracefully
Haven't heard about any problems with akonadi, but heard and suffered enough through baloo`s BS. Many people suggest turning it off, deleting it and like physically scraping it from the hard drive with a rusty knife - just to be sure. So be advised about it. It "works" on my system, but sometimes it doesn't when you need it. Some people say, that it never actually works, despite being very busy all the time.
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Can't wait to all these changes to land on SteamOS. There's a lot of new things since the 6.0 release, especially for touch input.
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Quoting: voxHaven't heard about any problems with akonadi, but heard and suffered enough through baloo`s BS. Many people suggest turning it off, deleting it and like physically scraping it from the hard drive with a rusty knife - just to be sure. So be advised about it. It "works" on my system, but sometimes it doesn't when you need it. Some people say, that it never actually works, despite being very busy all the time.
I have had personal experience with Baloo as well, disabling it is definitely recommended until they fix it (if they haven't already), although I don't even notice any downside to disabling it.
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Now if I could just get Nvidia to fix the horrific external monitor performance in Nvidia hybrid laptops, so I can go back to using KDE with Wayland.
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Quoting: Slayer5934Quoting: voxHaven't heard about any problems with akonadi, but heard and suffered enough through baloo`s BS. Many people suggest turning it off, deleting it and like physically scraping it from the hard drive with a rusty knife - just to be sure. So be advised about it. It "works" on my system, but sometimes it doesn't when you need it. Some people say, that it never actually works, despite being very busy all the time.
I have had personal experience with Baloo as well, disabling it is definitely recommended until they fix it (if they haven't already), although I don't even notice any downside to disabling it.
It certainly helps if you need to search files or some text occasionally, especially given it's integration in the system. Blocking it everywhere except couple of folders should fix most of the issues I assume. But then again, this project is a meme already and there will be always doubt about it's ability to do it's job. As I've said before: it works for me [for now, sorta. It appears working... I think].
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Mountain Man 6 minutes ago
Quoting: legluondunetHow is KDE plasma behavior today? Is it enough stable for a daily use and gaming ? How is it resources consuming ? I prefer light DE and keep resources for gaming.I've been using KDE to play games for years, even before Steam was brought to Linux, and have never had a problem. KDE has an underserved reputation for being bloated simply because it has a lot of features and is easy to customize, but in reality, its resource usage is negligible. A web browser will easily put more strain on your system than KDE.
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