The KDE Project announced today the release of the beta version of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment series for public testing. Here’s a first look at the major new features and changes.
The biggest new feature in KDE Plasma 6.1 is the highly-anticipated explicit GPU synchronization feature that would benefit users of NVIDIA GPUs who had issues with the Plasma Wayland session. Now that explicit sync has arrived in the Mesa 24.1 graphics stack, it’s time for Plasma users to enjoy a much better Wayland experience.
“In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing latency and graphical glitches. The effect should be particularly noticeable with NVIDIA GPUs, which only support this rendering style, and not having support for it on Wayland was the most common source of random graphical glitches and slowdowns,” said renowned KDE developer Nate Graham.
KDE Plasma 6.1 also promises triple buffering support for smoother animations, better support for Flatpak apps, a new Remote Desktop page in System Settings where you can turn on and configure RDP remote logins, a new “Hide Cursor” effect that will automatically hide the pointer after a period of inactivity, improved notifications, manual session saving on Plasma Wayland, the ability to do calculation and unit conversion from Kicker, and improved support for WireGuard VPNs.
Furthermore, it activates the new “Shake cursor to find it” effect by default, introduces the option to synchronize the backlight color with the currently active accent color on laptops boasting RGB-backlit keyboards, includes capability for manual updates of Snap apps in Plasma Discover, includes numerous improvements to the Power and Battery widget, direct scan-out for rotated screens, and adds enhanced support for XWayland apps.
In addition to these, KDE Plasma 6.1 integrates an experimental session restore feature for Plasma Wayland that reopens the applications that were running at the time of the last logout, brings more contemporary System Settings pages, and many user interface enhancements. For more information, refer to the complete changelog.
The KDE Plasma 6.1 final version release will be accessible from June 18th, 2024. However, the stable tarballs will be provided to system integrators a week prior, from June 13th, allowing for quicker adoption in your GNU/Linux distribution of choice.
Until then, you can try the KDE Plasma 6.1 beta version on the testing editions of the openSUSE Tumbleweed or KDE neon distributions. However, please remember that this is a pre-release version you should not use for any production work.
Last updated 6 hours ago