Plasma 6 has come into its own over the last two releases. The wrinkles that always come with a major migration have been ironed out, and it's time to start delivering on the promises of the new Qt 6 and Wayland technology platforms that Plasma is built on top of. One of the outstanding issues has been to make Plasma a more artist-friendly environment by providing full support for the hardware that creative people need to get their work done.

For Digital Artists
Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. Open System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see various tools for configuring drawing tablets.

Plasma 6 hits its stride with version 6.1. While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level.

In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer.

Slimbook Spain has presented its "KDE Slimbook V" model to the public—the company has collaborated with KDE, an international free software community. The latter's Plasma 6 open-source desktop environment is due to launch next week (according to Phoronix), so it is encouraging to see partner hardware appear beforehand. The Spanish tech company specializes in Linux-loaded laptops and notebooks—their "KDE V" collaborative variant seems to be an offshoot of an already released Slimbook Excalibur model, bearing a full "refined" aluminium chassis. The KDE Slimbook V is hyped as offering: "outstanding Performance—slender laptop that packs a punch. At the heart of the svelte KDE Slimbook beats the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor, one of the most powerful CPUs for portable computers in the range. With its 8 cores and 16 threads, it can run your whole office from home and on the go, render 3D animations, compile your code and serve up the entertainment for your downtime." The KDE Slimbook V's full specification page can be found here.

A Slimbook Manjaro gaming-oriented laptop was revealed last week—again, this seems to be another rejigged model. An earlier "Hero" version shares the same spec sheet; notable parts include an Intel Core i7-13620H CPU and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile GPU. The Slimbook and Manjaro partnership provides an almost Valve Steam Deck-esque user experience, albeit in non-handheld form—with support for Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, ProtonUp-QT, OBS, and Lutris platforms. Returning to the Slimbook V—its upcoming deployment of KDE's Plasma 6 desktop simply replaces the Excalibur model's standard installation of Linux or Windows OS options (dual boot is also available). Slimbook has set a starting price of €999 for a basic configuration—customers can select various upgrade options (RAM, storage, USB-C adaptors, power bricks etc.).

Six months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced KDE 4.1, the second most important release in the KDE 4 era. KDE 4.1 brings support for a lot of new applications and newly developed features. It is also the first KDE4 release to contain the Personal Information Management suite KDE-PIM with its E-Mail client KMail, the planner KOrganizer, Akregator, the RSS feed reader, KNode, the newsgroup reader and many more components integrated into the Kontact shell. Furthermore, the new desktop shell Plasma, introduced in KDE 4.0, has matured to a point where it can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users. If you're using KDE Linux distribution, and you find KDE 4.1 to be interesting for you, make sure to take some time and read through the full changelog here. To download the complete source code for KDE 4.1.0 please click here.

Anyone paying the slightest attention to the Linux-on-the-desktop scene will have noticed that desktop environments are featuring more and more eye-candy with every release. While this has had the predictable effect of increasing processor usage and memory requirements (although the pretty things can always be turned off), it seems that the newest version of the K Desktop Environment graphical user interface will use nearly 40% less memory than current version 3.5 despite having a lovely composited windows manager (think Aero but free). The figure comes from a test run by German magazine Pro-Linux who ran tests comparing the performance and memory footprint of the second release candidate of KDE 4 compared to the latest version of KDE 3.5.

On May 11, the KDE Community released the first alpha of KDE 4.0 aka "Knut" - which will boast a completely renovated desktop appearance. This release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in KDE 4.0. This early alpha version reveals new visual appearance based on the Oxygen theme, improved hardware and multimedia integration (through Solid and Phonon), and new applications such as the file manager - Dolphin and the document viewer Okular. More information such as screenshots and installation instructions can be found in the KDE 4.0-alpha1 Visual Guide. The KDE team will release KDE 4.0 RC1 (release candidate 1) on Sep. 25, followed quickly by RC2 on Oct. 9. The final test releases of KDE 4.0 will appear on Oct. 23, 2007.

KDE, or "K" for short, is a windows manager for the X window system in *nix. Without window managers like KDE or Gnome, the *nix GUI would be rather bleak. KDE is currently developing the next version of it's software, KDE 4. In this version, there will be a multi-lingual spell checker built into the window manager. There will also be much better support for hardware, and a gigantic tweak of the software that allows for interoperability between a Windows/Mac system and a *nix system. There is also "Dolphin", the new file manager. You can get more details of KDE4 off of dot.kde.org.