cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48812123
KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In addition to other hardware, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.7.
This new major release brings back the Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4 era, including the Horos wallpaper. The ability to switch virtual desktops independently for each output/display was added. It is now easier to toggle between light and dark mode directly from the Brightness & Color widget. You can now test microphones from the audio settings, and assign a custom global keyboard shortcut for "push-to-talk" microphone un-mute. If you have Plasma keyboard enabled and a physical keyboard key is long-pressed a selection of related special characters is presented to choose from. When it comes to printing it is now much easier to connect to shared printers on Windows networks, and a new print queue management tool offers more power than ever before. Vietnamese lunar calendar was added, and you can now select the default system calendar application. It is now possible to set mouse and tablet stylus pointers to be synced. ICC color profile can now be applied when HDR mode is active. Graphical performance has been improved and power usage lowered for CPU-rendered applications, some full-screen applications and on Intel graphics hardware. This release also features an experimental preview of the Union theming engine, which is based on web-like CSS definitions and will make creating and using new themes easier in the future.
For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.7 release announcement and the complete changelog.
Naive question: does this just come in with like apt update, or do I have to go out of my way?
Depends on your distribution! Debian is still on an older version. Even if you switch to Debian Sid (unstable), it's still on 6.6 https://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/plasma-desktop
Ah. I'm on Pop!_Os, which I think is downstream from Ubuntu. So it'll make its way to me eventually, I guess. Not sure how to track that, heh.
I think, that might possibly take quite a while still. Pop!_OS currently is still in the process of rebasing on Ubuntu 26.04, from what I understand. That won't have this update. If they stick to the Ubuntu LTS bases, then that might mean you only get it after 28.04 is release, which is in 2028.
I read somewhere that they wanted to speed releases up again after their COSMIC Desktop is out of Alpha, so maybe you can get it earlier.
Maybe it's also possible for you to activate the Kubuntu-Backports repository and get the release earlier that way. I really do not know, how good of an idea it is, though, to activate that on Pop!_OS.
Would not recommend doing that unless you find documentation or one of their devs saying that it can be done...