KDE Plasma 6.3 is out now with big fractional scaling improvements, drawing tablet upgrades and more

KDE Plasma 6.3 has been released and it's another beautiful sounding release! Filled with new features and fixes for my favourite Linux desktop environment. Plasma is also used on the Steam Deck for the Desktop Mode.

For those of you scaling up your desktop there's some good news with this release. The developers overhauled how fractional scaling works, making a "stronger effort to snap things to the screen’s pixel grid, greatly reducing blurriness and visual gaps everywhere and producing sharper and crisper images". Sounds awesome and they said it works at high zoom levels too.

Pictured - Plasma 6.3

For people who own a drawing tablet there's plenty of improvements there too. There's an overhauled system settings page for tablets, along with a bunch of new configuration options to really set it up how you want it. Laptop users should rejoice too, since you can now configure the built-in touchpad to be turned off to not interfere with typing.

Panels, like the bar at the bottom in the above screenshot, can also now be cloned. Plus the Kickoff launcher to go through applications had a tweak to only change category (Games, Graphics, Office etc) when you click on them, instead of flicking through constantly whenever you hover the mouse.

Lots of other changes like:

• Auto random password being created when setting up a network hotspot.
• Discover store will show sandbox apps that have permissions changing with updates.
• Discover will also show if a package is directly from a developer, verified or from a trusted third party.
• System Monitor got improvements to be more accurate and use less CPU resources.
• More accurate colours when using the Night Light feature.
• + lots of smaller additions and bug fixes.

See more in the release announcement.

The release schedule has also been changed. In future, Beta releases will be spread across 6 weeks instead of 4, with a new Beta every 2 weeks.