More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate.
KDE Plasma development highlights for the week have now been published by KDE developer Nate Graham. The most interesting Plasma changes this week included:
– A major performance improvement with Plasma 6.6 to enhance the smoothness of animations throughout Plasma and KWin for those using screens with a refresh rate higher than 60Hz. This fixes a year and a half old bug report over Plasma 6 animations being capped to 60Hz. After 67 comments on that bug report since early 2024, this merge landed in KWin to sync the Qt Quick animation driver to the render loop. David Edmundson provided the fix and explained how this 60Hz bottleneck came to be:
“We render each offscreen QtQuick effect (if damaged) on every compositor paint. However currently the driving of animations is independently by a timer in QtBase code, because we force the basic render loop this is effectively a fallback case limited to 60fps and completely out of sync with when we render.”
– KWin for Plasma 6.6 will also be able to do one less atomic test per compositing cycle. This reduces the amount of unnecessary work done by KWin in the compositing pipeline.
– KDE Frameworks 6.21 with systemd integration will no longer fail to launch when there are any environment variables beginning with a digit.
– Plasma 6.6 will allow selectively excluding windows from screen recording. This behavior can be invoked from the titlebar context menu, Task Manager context menu, or window rules.
– UI polishing to the portal remote control dialog.
– Plasma 6.3.5 fixes a case where KWin could crash when the system wakes from sleep.
– Plasma 6.5.4 is fixing some memory leaks.
– Plasma 6.6.0 will fix a bug in some XWayland-based games that prevented text input into certain popups.
More details on these changes via This Week In Plasma.
