Ahead of Akademy kicking off in Berlin, the annual KDE developer conference, there is another weekly Plasma development update. KDE developer Nate Graham shared the latest exciting progress on Plasma 6.5 while more good news will be coming out later today.
This Week in Plasma has more good news in terms of exciting Plasma 6.5 changes. Some of the latest Plasma 6.5 activity includes:
– Plasma 6.5 added support for underlays for better GPU efficiency with capable hardware. The KWin change is merged and allows for more versatile use but not currently working with Intel graphics:
“There are many, many situations, in which we can’t put surfaces on an overlay, for example
– the window has server side decorations with rounded corners
– there’s subtitles on top of it
– there’s an entire window on top of itThese situations can still work however, often even more efficiently, by putting the overlay plane below the primary plane and painting a transparent hole on the primary plane where the surface would normally be. Other elements, like window outlines, other windows and subsurfaces are then painted on top of the transparent hole, and are thus still visible.
Note that in its current state, this doesn’t work on Intel, as it has fixed plane positions. Fixing that will require putting some more changes on top of this, to put the scene on an overlay plane and the underlay on the primary one.”
– KDE System Settings’ “Flatpak Permissions” page has evolved into an “Application Permissiosn” area. The Application Permissions area now allows configuring XDG Portal system settings and more.
– Plasma 6.5 implements support for the XDG Wallpaper portal so portal-based apps can request desktop/lock-screen wallpaper changes.
– Improved behavior of focus-stealing-prevention settings under Wayland with Plasma 6.5.
– The Discover app is now more verbose when it’s fetching updates.
– Plasma 6.5 will bring improved keyboard navigation in the Kicker Application Menu widget.
– KDE Frameworks 6.18 will improve the visuals of how toolbars load in Kirigami-using apps.
– Plasma’s Night Light feature will no longer distort the colors in screenshots and screen recordings.
– Some more KWin fixes for Plasma 6.5.
More details on these changes via Nate’s blog.
