By Larry Cafiero
It’s been coming for awhile now, but now that it’s here, it still has to sting for the X11 fans out there. But KDE has released the latest version of the Plasma desktop environment – 6.7 for those of you keeping score at home – and of the many “improvements” to it is the imminent abandonment of X11 for Wayland.
In other words, it’s the last KDE Plasma version with X11 support, with the next version, 6.8, being Wayland-only.
Nevertheless, the highlights of the new desktop environment are plenty, according to the announcement on KDE’s announcement page. First and foremost, Oxygen and Air themes have been updated from older KDE versions and make a return to the latest version.
Other KDE Plasma 6.7 highlights include a revamped Plasma Big Screen mode for mirroring the desktop on a big screen television, support for per-screen virtual desktops, a full-featured print queue viewer app, a global push-to-talk feature, Wayland session restore, and a “multi-GPU swapchain” feature for Vulkan support.
Also, according to 9 to 5 Linux, “KDE Plasma 6.7 also brings support for typing characters that aren’t on your physical keyboard, a dedicated setup UI for configuring shared printers on Windows networks, the ability to exclude windows from screen recording using permanent window rules, and a Plasma Panel switch to instantly go from light mode to dark mode.”
However, if you really must insist on keeping X11 around – and I know there are some of you out there – fear not: Bobby Barisov ran a story on the Linuxiac site on Thursday proclaiming that “[i]f you are a KDE user who still depends heavily on X11 and is concerned about what happens after Plasma 6.8 drops the X11 session, there is some good news. SonicDE is an emerging X11-focused desktop project based on forked KDE Plasma components with a simple goal: to preserve and enhance KDE’s X11-specific components.”
For those interested in SonicDE, there’s a page with more information here.
Arch AUR registrations blocked
According to Christine Hall at FOSS Force on Tuesday, “Arch has evidently stopped new AUR registrations for the time being while maintainers scrub malware and users debate how to harden the popular community repository.”
“Although things seem to be quieting down a bit — we’ve heard no new reports of newly discovered poisoned packages since early Sunday — there is news to report,” the article states. “It appears that AUR maintainers who’ve been working overtime to remove malware-laden packages and delete their committers’ accounts, have now blocked new AUR registrations.”
But fear not, Arch and Arch-based distro users: According to an article on It’s FOSS by Souray Rudra on Thursday, “ yay, the most popular AUR helper for Arch Linux, just put out a release aimed at tackling that mess on the user level, introducing two new features that make it easier to spot a risky package before you install it and to automate the review work yourself.”
Instructions on how to get yay up and running on your Arch or Arch-based distro are included in the article.
Meanwhile, like FOSS Force, we’re keeping an eye on this situation as well, and we’ll let you know something when we know something ourselves.
And that’s all for today. Some might argue that it’s too much. Either way, don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return on Monday.