Plasma 6.4

A new version of Plasma is here, and it feels even more like /home, as it becomes smoother, friendlier and more helpful.

Plasma 6.4 improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.

As this is going to be a long read, let’s get right into it…

Zarządzanie oknami

Plasma already offers Virtual Desktops to help organize your windows and activities; and customizable Tiles you can stick windows to so they don’t overlap, allowing you to see everything important at a glance.

Plasma 6.4 combines these features by letting you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop.

The video below shows the power of this feature: you can tile two windows on your main virtual desktop, each taking up half of the screen. Then in another virtual desktop, you can place tile apps: two on either side, and the other two floating in the middle.

This new feature lets you create any other kind of layout combination that best works for you.

UI & Visual Design

Straddling the boundary between accessibility and visual design, another way of making Plasma easier to use is by increasing the contrast between the foreground and background elements.

In that respect, we’ve made our Breeze Dark theme a bit darker. This subtle change helps the text and user interface elements pop, making them easier to read and see.

Plasma 6.4 also darkens the background of the desktop or window when an authentication dialog shows up. This will help you locate and focus on the window asking for your password.

The energy page in the Info Center and the entirety of KMenuEdit (the app you can use to edit apps’ presentation and grouping in the launcher menu) have all had their looks overhauled to make them cleaner, clearer, and easier to use.

Speaking of settings, there’s a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making it easier to find and configure them.

Plasma 6.4’s lock screen plays nicer with multiple-screen setups, too. The lock screen’s interactive elements will now only appear on the screen that has focus or the pointer on it. And when it’s time to input your password, the text entered into one password field is synced across all others, avoiding any errors that may cause passwords to be half-entered in a field on one screen, and then the rest in a different one on another screen.

Widgets

Widgets are the building blocks of Plasma: small programs that carry out specific tasks on your Plasma desktop. They can launch programs, track the weather, set alarms, or tell you when you have updates.

Among many other improvements, a new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu. The tag disappears after 3 days, or after you run the app for the first time.

The Media Player widget now allows you slow down or speed up whatever audio or video is currently playing (for players that support this feature).

And the Disks & Devices widget used to access internal and removable disks now checks and even offers to repair your disks if it finds errors in them.

Plasma 6.4 features many other smaller changes to the included widgets as well; explore them to see everything that’s new!

Color Management

For those looking to adjust the colors for gaming or watching movies, the Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard in Plasma 6.4.

Plasma 6.4 can also do Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) on screens that support it, and gives you a tool to limit color depth — again for screens that support that feature.

Finally, Plasma now supports the P010 video color format, improving power efficiency with HDR video content.

In a nutshell, Plasma helps you make the best use of your fancy screen hardware!

Screenshots & Screen Recording

Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, looks very different in Plasma 6.4 — for the better!

Press the PrtSc key and Spectacle opens directly in screenshot mode: drag a box to select a region of the screen, or press Enter immediately and Spectacle will take a shot of the whole screen.

You can also start annotating right away, by drawing arrows, blurring sections, adding explanatory text, and more.

Finally, quality has been massively improved for screen recordings using the WebM format or taken on screens using fractional scaling.

Miscellaneous

When dragging files to another location on the same disk using Dolphin or the Plasma desktop, you can now have the system always move the files, rather than being asked what to do every time.

The Plasma browser integration feature that allows you to control the playback of media in your browser from the desktop (among many other things) now supports the Flatpak versions of Firefox and Chromium variants like LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.

And finally, for the more technically-minded, Plasma 6.4 adds support for a large number of Wayland protocols, including the “Relative tablet dials”, “idle notify“, “color representation”, “FIFO”, “toplevel tag”, and “single pixel buffer” protocols. This will help apps integrate better into Plasma’s Wayland session.