The KDE development team has shared a New report on the progress of KDE Plasma 6.7, whose launch is scheduled for June.
This week has been a transition week, preparing for a large gathering of collaborators in Graz, so efforts have focused on polishing interface details, consolidating graphical performance under Wayland, and ensuring the stability of the next version.
Greater accuracy with Wayland and Vulkan
One of the biggest challenges in modern high-resolution desktops has been the fractional scaling. In Plasma 6.7, the KWin compositing manager debuts support for the protocol experimental xx-fractional-scale-v2 from Wayland. This protocol solve the problem Historical resolution of the logical coordinate system. By introducing a scaling factor that accurately links logical coordinates to the actual pixels on the screen, it eliminates the annoying gaps or dead lines that sometimes appeared between maximized windows and system panels on high-density displays.
In parallel, the KWin's internal engine continues to strengthen its support for the Vulkan graphics API within the DRM backend (Direct Rendering Manager). The goal of this migration is to maximize performance, especially on systems with multiple graphics cards (Multi-GPU). This week, Vulkan's ability to transfer textures directly from the GPU to the CPU was enabled, and drivers were added to convert image formats. These improvements have undergone extensive testing on cutting-edge hardware, including NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti cards with proprietary drivers, demonstrating the project's maturity.
Visual improvements and desktop control
La User experience receives several improvements which, although subtle, contribute greatly to the cohesion of the work environment. The popular The Breeze theme has been adjusted so that the menu items change their background color Clicking on the tooltip will provide clearer visual feedback across the entire KDE application ecosystem. Similarly, tooltips will now strictly adhere to the visual style of your currently active theme.
The management of The workspace is now also smarter. When you drag a widget across the desktop to an area where it physically won't fit, the system will immediately display a transparent thumbnail indicating the nearest free space where the widget can be placed. Additionally, the clipboard widget has simplified its interface by displaying QR codes and moving the copy button directly to the header bar to save space.
Other practical new features include lSynchronization of keyboard layouts with the Login Manager Plasma, and a notable improvement to the "Mouse Marks" accessibility effect, which now supports tracing multiple lines simultaneously on touchscreens.
Stability and bug fixes in Plasma 6.6.4
While preparing for the future, the present is also being consolidated as the team has documented the resolution of critical errors that affected the daily experience:
- The System Monitor has been patched to correctly record the usage of certain NVIDIA GPUs again.
- Plasma's code has been hardened to prevent the entire desktop from crashing if you try to load a faulty widget.
- A more comprehensive solution has been implemented for the problem of system tray icon context menus sometimes featuring unsightly square black corners.
- A problem was fixed where the KDED background daemon could crash with a Wayland protocol error when changing the screen resolution.
- A strange issue was fixed that distorted certain Markdown-style formatted text when Plasma's on-screen keyboard was enabled but not visible.
- A problem was fixed that could cause the Plasma Style page in System Settings to fail on certain distributions that included Qt 6.11 with assertions enabled.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about this, you can check the details in the following link.