The team at KDE are producing upgrades for Plasma very quickly, with another weekly update out from developer Nate Graham with some major new bits being hooked up.
In preparation for the next Plasma release, a fingerprint manager has been added so that Plasma will support fingerprint authentication in the next version. This expanded support allows you to use your fingers for passworded operations like using sudo, unlocking the screen and more.
Perhaps the bigger one though is initial support for NVIDIA’s new GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) backend, which arrived in the recent NVIDIA Beta 495.29.05 driver. This means that eventually when it’s stable in NVIDIA drivers, along with a new Plasma release, that KDE should default to it for NVIDIA giving a much improved Wayland session experience. They still have some quirks to work out but it’s getting there now.
Discover, the software store on Plasma, also saw lots of tweaks like knowing you have a package installed when trying to open a downloaded package and giving you the correct option to remove it. Discover will also now let you enable, disabled and remove Flatpak repositories and also enable and disable distribution repositories too.
Lots more tweaks done like the lock screen showing the Sleep and Hibernate actions, their newer Overlay effect gained a blurred background and allows you to remove / rename or add more Virtual Desktops.
There are also lots of bug fixes coming in. Good, since Valve will use Plasma on the Steam Deck for the main desktop session so hopefully it will be in great shape for Valve to eventually update the version used.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
