The developers of the KDE Plasma desktop environment continue to paint an image of Linux as a home for artists with the release of Plasma 6.3.0. The update also has a lot more settings that anyone can try out.

The latest update for Plasma, the desktop environment for Linux and and FreeBSD operating systems, has several improvements to workflows for artists. Plasma reworked its settings menu for drawing tablets, building on Plasma 6.2 by letting you map your tablet’s surface to the entire display. There’s also now a test area for your stylus, and improving customization capabilities for your stylus and its buttons. I sold my drawing tablet when I accepted that graphic design was in fact not my passion, but otherwise I’d be testing out those mapping features.

Plasma also gets granular with this update, refining its fractional scaling support. Now if you zoom in close enough, you’ll see the outline of individual pixels. This is another score if you’re a creative-minded Plasma user, as you’ll be able to learn how and why visual elements look the way they do on the pixel level. I’m writing this on Plasma 5.27, and I can confirm objects just become big blurry blobs when you zoom in very close.

It isn’t all about the art for Plasma 6.3 though. There are also improvements to the hardware monitoring tools, like a claimed improvement in the ability to monitor the CPU while reducing the CPU drain that monitoring causes. While support for GPU monitoring has been available for Linux devices for a while, it’s now arrived for FreeBSD systems.

Beyond the art and statistics, there are also several quality-of-life improvements. For example, Plasma 6.3 will let you set the touchpad to turn off automatically when an external mouse is connected, so you make fewer unintentional mouse brushes. The notification system is also a little bit more sane now, showing you the overall number of notifications you missed while in do-not-disturb mode when you exit instead of flooding your screen with each of those notifications.

I’m using Garuda Linux with Plasma on my desktop PC right now, and it gets updates pretty fast, so I expect to test it out there soon. The digital artist assistance isn’t all that helpful to me, but the part I’m most looking forward to is the do-not-disturb notification enhancement. As I wrote in my exploration of the Garuda experience today, though, what I’ll really appreciate is stability.

Source: KDE