There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas.
This last full week before the holidays ramp up brought a large number of improvements to the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop. Standing out the most is finally having ambient light sensor support for modern laptops and also fixing HDR issues with Windows games under Wine/Proton.
– Support for ambient light sensors with devices having said sensor. This includes recent AMD Ryzen laptops like the Framework 13 that expose the ambient light sensor via the AMDGPU sysfs interface. This bug report from March raised the issue that KDE Plasma currently doesn’t support ambient light sensors. For Plasma 6.6 it should all be in place.
– Plasma 6.6 also has a workaround for Windows games with HDR support to make sure the colors are still looking appropriate when run under Wine or Valve’s Proton (Steam Play). The bug report was raised in September around HDR peak brightness clipping under KDE.
– The KDE System Settings WiFi/Networking page now shows information on connected WiFi networks.
– Plasma 6.6 will now respect opacity window rules for picture-in-picture windows.
– KDE Frameworks 6.22 is fixing a number of clipboard-related issues under Wayland.
– Plasma 6.5.5 fixes a KWin problem from using direct scanout when the Battle.net launcher is open.
– Plasma 6.6 will reduce the frame drop on monitors with extremely high refresh rates.
– Portal-based applications can now inhibit logout such as when having unsaved documents open.
More details on these improvements via this blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham.
