Plasma 6.3 Ready for Public Beta Testing
Plasma 6.3 will ship with KDE Gear 24.12.1 and KDE Frameworks 6.10, along with some new and exciting features.
Plasma 6.3 is ready for beta testing, and it has plenty to offer by way of new features and improvements over current offerings. According to the official blog post from the KDE team, there are updates to Bluedevil, Breeze, Breeze-gtk, Discover, DrKonqi, Flatpak permissions, and much more.
After picking through the list, some of the more exciting changes include a new UI for cloning panels, which could make it considerably easier to create the exact desktop UI you need; improved Do Not Disturb functionality; a newdesktop context menu entry, Show Target; more consistency with close buttons throughout Plasma; an improved look for desktop widgets (with them now being slightly translucent to give them a more modern look); and plenty of bug fixes.
Another interesting change is found within Plasma Discover (the front end for the package manager). Discover will now display for users when apps are packaged directly by the developers or have been verified by a third party. Discover will also highlight any sandboxed apps that have had permissions altered during an update.
You can expect the final release of Plasma 6.3 to drop around February 11, 2025. If you can't wait for that date, you can always kick the tires with openSUSE Tumbleweed (the testing release) or KDE Neon. Remember that beta software (especially a desktop environment) should not be used for production systems.
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