Jack Wallen/ZDNET
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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- KDE Plasma 6.7 has been released.
- There are big features, even though this is a point release.
- You can wait until it reaches your distro’s repositories or try KDE Neon.
KDE Plasma 6.7 has finally arrived, and the development team decided to add a few extra features and polish into the mix, some of which you might find rather interesting.
The thing about KDE Plasma is that it’s already one of the finest desktop environments on the market. It’s gorgeous, stable, highly user-friendly, but also flexible, and it performs more like a lightweight desktop akin to Xfce. So, when the developers offer a release that’s even better, you can be sure it’s worth installing.
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But what features can you expect to find in KDE Plasma 6.7? Let’s chat.
The new features
Given that this is a new point release (.7 as it were), you shouldn’t expect earth-shattering-kaboom-like new features, as you might with a major release (such as 7.0). Even so, for a point release, there are some pretty cool new options.
For instance, there’s the new global mic mute hotkey. Think about it: You’re using an app that shouldn’t have access to your mic, but you find that it’s being used anyway. Instead of having to go through the Settings app or the system tray to mute the mic, you can use the new global mic mute hotkey.
By clicking the preconfigured hotkey on your keyboard, the mic is automatically muted. This can also work when you’re in a video or audio meeting, and you need to quickly mute your mic for some reason. For anyone who regularly uses a mic, this will be a handy feature to have.
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The Plasma Bigscreen mode (which allows you to mirror your desktop on a TV) has finally arrived in full force, so you can view your desktop on a large-screen TV without it looking stretched, blurry, or otherwise wonky.
Version 6.7 also delivers on the promised per-screen virtual desktops, allowing you to customize them on a per-monitor basis. Maybe you have two or three monitors, and you want to set up specific virtual desktops for each. With KDE Plasma 6.7, you can do that.
For example, you could have one monitor for coding, with virtual desktops for your IDE, terminal, and debugging apps. You could have your second monitor set up with two virtual desktops: one for web browsing and one for productivity.
The sky’s the limit on that one.
Other new features include:
- A new print queue viewer
- Wayland session restore
- Support for typing non-standard characters
- The ability to exclude windows from screencasts and screenshots
- Multi-GPU swapchain for Vulkan
- A new setup UI for setting up printers from a shared network
- Custom sound themes
- The return of the Air theme and an improved Oxygen theme
- Easy light/dark theme swap
- Remote-control notifications
- Smarter KRunner results
- Global hotkey for clearing the notification history
- Support for 3D LUTS that help reduce GPU load on resource-heavy graphics processes
- Dawn-timed theme switching
There are also improvements to all of the default apps, such as those found in System Settings and KDE Discover.
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Of course, what is a new release without bug fixes, and 6.7 includes plenty of them. You can view the complete list of bug fixes (as well as the full feature/improvement list) on the official release notes.
When can you expect KDE Plasma 6.7?
This is the tricky part, as each distribution will have to get the latest release into its standard repositories. Because of this, there’s no hard-coded deadline for when this will happen. Hopefully, your distribution of choice will add KDE Plasma 6.7 soon.
Until then, if you’re anxious to try out the latest version, you can always run a virtual machine of KDE Neon or KDE Linux (or install one of them on a spare PC). Either way you go, you should be excited about the upcoming release of KDE 6.7.
I know I am.
