loading . . . 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…
## Highlights
### More Flexible Tiling
Choose a different tile layout for each of your virtual desktops
### New Spectacle
Spectacle gets an overhaul to make it even more awesome
### KRunner Gets Color
Enter a color code in any notation and let KRunner show you what it looks like
## Window Management
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.
## Accessibility
Accessibility is a top priority for KDE. This work is endless, but we make improvements in every new Plasma release!
The Wayland session in Plasma 6.4 brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard’s number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.
In addition, a great deal of subtle but important work has been done throughout Plasma to improve keyboard navigation, screen reader usability, and text readability.
## 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.
## Notifications
Notifications are how Plasma communicates what’s going on within your system.
The file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going, and how long it will take to complete.
When you get notified that updates are available, you can now install them directly from the notification.
When any applications are in full screen mode — like when you’re playing a game, working on a critical project, or watching a video — Plasma will enter _Do Not Disturb_ mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full screen mode, you’ll see a summary of any notifications you missed, and they’ll be right there in the _System Tray_ for your perusal.
Have you ever found yourself talking during an online meeting, and no one can hear you because you forgot to unmute your microphone? No more! Now when an app tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up.
Finally, notifications with interactive buttons will still show them in the history view.
## 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!
## For Digital Artists
Plasma continues the push to improve support for devices used by digital artists and graphic designers.
In Plasma 6.4, we’ve made configuring the buttons on your stylus much more intuitive:
If you make a mistake while calibrating your tablet, Plasma offers an easy way to reset everything and start over.
And when you aren’t making art, you can still continue using your tablet, since Plasma now supports _relative mode_ which makes the stylus behave more like a regular mouse.
## 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!
## KRunner
KRunner is Plasma’s powerful built-in assistant. If you need to find something, define something, calculate something, or convert something, press `Alt` + `Space` and ask KRunner.
In Plasma 6.4, KRunner can help you visualize colors. Just enter the color in hex notation, as a hexadecimal number, or its CSS/SVG name (like “MintCream”, “PeachPuff”, or “PapayaWhip” — yes, those are all names of colors and not fancy desserts). Then KRunner will show you how that color looks and its equivalent name/code in many other notations.
## 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.
## System Monitoring
Plasma 6.4’s _System Monitor_ helps you stay on top of how your system is working in even more ways.
First, the _Overview_ and _History_ pages have been overhauled to show more information and be more generally useful:
And on those pages, you can find usage monitoring for Intel GPUs. In addition, it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis for Intel and AMD GPUs.
There’s also a new “Background Services” group on the _Applications_ page, giving you the complete picture of the system resources being used by things that aren’t apps.
In addition, the built-in free space monitor now checks for free space on all non-cache partitions of all disks, not just a disk’s _Root_ and _Home_ partitions.
And finally, a new _Sensors_ page in _Info Center_ shows raw sensor data for things like the temperature of your CPUs and GPUs.
## 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.
…and there’s much more. To see the full list of changes, check out the complete changelog for Plasma 6.4. https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/
