KDE Plasma 6 Looks to Bring Basic HDR Support

When KDE Plasma 6.0 finally lands, users will find that High Dynamic Range (HDR) support has finally arrived. Because 4K screens are becoming the norm, HDR support has become a necessity.

With HDR, video content can be pushed well beyond the limits of the now outdated standards media outlets have held onto for decades. Support for HDR in KDE Plasma 6.0 came by way of an HDR hackfest that was organized by Red Hat in May 2023 as well as the Plasma Sprint.

KDE Plasma 6.0 will only offer HDR support for Wayland sessions, which, according to KDE developer Nate Graham (https://pointieststick.com/2023/05/20/this-week-in-kde-preliminary-hdr-support/), "lays the groundwork for color management on Wayland."

You can read a very in-depth post, written by KDE developer Xaver Hugl (https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2023/05/18/hdr-and-color-management-in-kwin.html), about HDR and color management in KWin. In his post, Hugl says, "We didn't do a lot of hacking at the hackfest, but I did manage to drive an HDR screen with a wide color gamut and with HDR mode enabled while having KWin do the required color conversions to make SDR content look correct."

One thing to keep in mind is that, with KDE Plasma 6, Wayland will be the default display manager.

Also, according to Hugl, HDR support will be "quite basic at first." Because of that, users won't be able to jump in and immediately watch videos or play games in HDR. The development team has a long road ahead of them before HDR support in Linux matures.

Bodhi Linux 7.0 Beta Ready for Testing

Bodhi Linux has been around for some time now, and the latest release promises new versions of software, better hardware support, heightened security, improved performance, and much more to entice new users and please those who have been on board.

Front and center of the new version is Moksha 0.4.0-8 desktop, which includes a number of improvements, including completely refactored modules, a new keybindings viewer, better window snapping, Do Not Disturb feature for menu items, an Internal Notification API which was backported from e25, and much more. As well, there are new themes for both Plymouth and the Greeter application.

For the base, you'll find Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS, a choice of three different kernels (Standard 5.15.0-71-generic, HWE 5.19.0-41, and 6.2.6), EFL 1.26.99-2, the mozillateam PPA, kelebek333's PPA, nvidia-legacy PPA, and Ubuntu Backports is enabled.

A lot of work has also gone into improving and fixing the many modules included with Bodhi Linux, and there've been plenty of software updates, including Chromium (non-Snap version) 113.0.5672.63, Terminology 1.13.1-3, the Web Browser Manager (which allows you to select any number of browsers to install), and Thunar 4.16.

You can read all about version 7.0 here (https://www.bodhilinux.com/release/7-0-0/) and download the beta version here (https://sourceforge.net/projects/bodhilinux/files/7.0.0-beta/).

Changes Coming to Ubuntu PPA Usage

With the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur), there will be a considerable change to how PPAs are handled. As you may know, in the current iteration of the software-properties software, when you add a PPA from the command line, a .list file is created in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, and the associated GPG key is added to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/.

When 23.10 is released, those PPAs will use the Deb822 format for .source files and their corresponding GPG keys will be added directly to the file in a Signed-By field. This means users won't have to manage a collection of .list files.

According to the developers, this change offers one very important benefit: When a PPA is removed from a system, the GPG key will be automatically removed as well. Keys will now be unique to a PPA and cannot be used for other repositories, and other keys cannot be used to sign a PPA. These benefits will go a long way to enhance the security of PPAs. Another benefit of the new system is that users won't have to worry about deleting .list files that can accumulate on a system.

Of course, there's always a downside, the biggest of which is that PPAs will have root access to a system. Because of this, a program maintainer could add malicious code to a repository, and the next time you upgrade, that malicious code would be installed and have unfettered access to your machine.

Read the announcement from the ubuntu-devel mailing list (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2023-May/042573.html).