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The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 6.6.1 as the first maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop environment series with an initial batch of improvements and bug fixes.

KDE Plasma 6.6.1 improves the Custom Tiling feature to correctly respect key repeat, improves the Networks widget to show a more appropriate icon in the panel or system tray when Wi-Fi is disabled, and improves animation performance by leaning more heavily on the Wayland Presentation Time protocol.

This release also re-enables searching for Activities using KRunner and KRunner-powered searches, updates overall app ratings in Plasma Discover to match a simple average of the individual ratings, and improves the critically low power level notification on battery-powered devices.

The Networks Widget was the first thing I noticed.
The separation of ipv4 and ipv6 info and the added status page in the kcm was a nice addition.

I used this back in the day after i left university with free MATLAB.

Very functional, but struggled (8 years ago was the last I tried) with large datasets, especially variable exploring. It also was missing signal processing and filtering libraries back then.

I had since switched to python with numpy, Pandas, scipy, and matplotlib and it is phenomenal.

I would try it out because it has probably improved a ton, but Python is now available in excel (and it already was in libreoffice) for sharing scripts with people without python at work, so I don’t know if it is worth it lol.

Do it for the nostalgia, bro. I enjoyed using octave at uni as well. Gotta be some fun in there somewhere now. 😁

Desktop Linux is in a better place than it used to be. App stores have made software discovery much simpler, and it’s become normal to install an app without even needing to know what a repository is.

We can grab almost any app in seconds (or minutes, depending on your connection), but that convenience comes with a trade-off. We’ve lost some of the fine-grained control that used to be standard on the Linux desktop.

Clonezilla Live, free and open-source disk cloning and imaging software for system backup, recovery, and deployment, has released its latest stable snapshot, v3.3.1, based on Debian Sid, with the Linux kernel updated to v6.18, and Partclone to v0.3.45.

A major highlight is expanded support for 4Kn (4K native) and 512n/e disks. The release adds mechanisms for cloning between mismatched sector formats, allowing 4Kn-to-512n/e and 512n/e-to-4Kn migrations. NTFS handling is improved by correctly updating the Total Sectors field.

Moreover, a new utility, ocs-pt-512-4k-convert, enables conversion of partition tables from 512B to 4Kn layouts. The GPT expansion tool ocs-expand-gpt-pt has also been rewritten to detect sector mismatches and perform conversions when needed.

Following yesterday’s Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel’s WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam.

The WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM option has for many years been part of the Linux kernel and enabling it will provide a warning whenever there is a use of unseeded randomness within the kernel. To help spot situations of random number generation use prior to being able to securely use RNG on the system, this option was added long ago to help spot such uses of unseeded randomness by kernel code. But due to caveats on some CPUs around a fully-seeded CRNG, the WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM can become like an endless stream of spam. After encountering a bug report where much of the kernel log were just messages about unseeded randomness and in turn losing some of the initial boot log, Torvalds had enough and gutted out this option.

The proper way to find these things for the hypothetical developer that cares - if such a person exists - is almost certainly with boot time tracing. That gives you the option to get call graphs etc too, which is likely a requirement for fixing any problems anyway. See Documentation/trace/boottime-trace.rst for that option.

The solution for developers that care, if they exist.

Linus Torvalds just capped off the Linux 7.0 merge window with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1. While the big version bump is coincidental with Linus Torvalds liking to bump it after x.19, Linux 7.0 is quite heavy on new features.

Linux 7.0 is packing a lot of changes and new features. Making this kernel all the more interesting beyond the changes and big version number is that it’s also expected to be the default kernel for the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 for making this an extra special release. Linux 7.0 brings more enablement work for Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids processors, more AMD Zen 6 enablement too, and a lot of new hardware driver support throughout – including for non-AMD/Intel platforms like more Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 upstreaming work. On the graphics side is also new AMD graphics hardware support for upcoming products.

I, for one, welcome our vigesimal BDFL.

I honestly think it would be much cooler if linux used semantic versioning instead of random versioning, but Linus bumping majors just because he feels like it is also funny and cool.

I like the idea of X forwarding, but it doesn’t work in real world anymore. As far as I know, it has to do many round-trips for everything. Launching something like LibreOffice Writer is funny, it will be loading bit by bit, icon by icon for several minutes. It was only usable for me on < 1ms network.

Unlike say VNC, it opens windows locally.

And now there’s Waypipe which does the same thing, but for Wayland. And it actually works! Even better than VNC.

BUT, it doesn’t work for X programs. It can somewhat work with rootful Xwayland… but that’s basically a desktop for X-only programs.
https://lemy.lol/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fapi%2Fv3%2Fimage_proxy%3Furl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Ffiles.catbox.moe%252Fqybbb5.png

Welp, I just wanted to check something on the remote desktop, so I launched VNC, and WOAH, I didn’t expect to get XFCE invasion.
I didn’t know XFCE can do Wayland now.

Anyway, this cursed thing does actually work pretty fine. xfce4-session works with Waypipe, good to know.

OC by @user224@lemmy.sdf.org

this is actually still very useful for vms, containers, etc. even over LAN it’s quite usable for ~gtk2 programs.

@cm0002@lemy.lol Could you at least cross-post like a normal person or link to OP? Hard to reply like this.

This past week, there has been some controversy about the new Plasma Login Manager, which launched with KDE Plasma 6.6 and requires systemd. Soon after, KaOS surprisingly announced it would stop using Plasma as its desktop environment.

Which, whichever way you look at it, is a significant shift, considering KaOS has used KDE for 12 years for its primary and only desktop environment and has always promoted itself as a Qt-focused and GTK-free Linux distribution.

As a response (though not directly addressing KaOS), KDE later shared its position on the matter, which I covered here. And then, a few days ago, KaOS posted an explanation of its decision on its official website.

Common Niri W tho

Why not just keep using SDDM with KDE Plasma?

Demon? Damon? Or something more exotic?

You people use meat flapping to communicate?

I always thought the 2 pronunciation of route were different but similar things. Raut as in a set road between two large places, not specific place in a city but the city itself. Root as a path between 2 specific points, house to house.

Power levels are measured in seconds for rebuild times ofc.

i use nix btw (and arch btw, dual booting)