In addition to GNOME OS seeing recent improvements, KDE Linux continues seeing more enhancements too for this leading reference platform for showcasing the KDE Plasma desktop.
KDE developer Nate Graham published the latest issue of This Month In KDE Linux to outline some of the recent improvements to this general purpose OS for showcasing the KDE desktop stack.
KDE Linux is now installing Kup as KDE’s backup software. This should help users in backing up their systems off-device in a GUI-driven manner. KDE Linux also has enabled Apple APFS file-system support. Read/write support for the Apple APFS file-system is available on Linux by a DKMS out-of-tree kernel module with KDE Linux now installing the linux-apfs-rw-dkms package.
The linux-apfs-rw out-of-tree module is still considered experimental for supporting the Apple File System under Linux, especially for write support. But now it’s pre-installed for a nicer KDE Linux experience for those needing to deal with data off modern Apple/macOS systems.
KDE Linux has also added an AMDGPU driver workaround for an issue with total system freezes affecting AMD GPU users for the past several months due to a very annoying page-flip time-out issue leading to display freezes:
“Many AMD systems are affected by a total system freeze that requires a hard reboot. This is reported upstream at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4831 (and others; they haven’t been properly triaged and merged into one).
It’s been going on for months with no fix in sight. Given the severity of the issue, work around it by setting amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10 in the kernel command line, which disables panel self-refresh. The consequence will be slightly higher power usage, but this seems worth it to avoid system freezes and hard reboots.”
Plus KDE Linux is now pre-installing more languages for Flatpak apps and other improvements. More details on these recent KDE Linux improvements via this blog post. KDE Linux can be downloaded from KDE.org.
