"Enhance!" KDE Plasma is getting higher-quality zoom

The KDE team announced over the weekend some features being added to the upcoming Plasma 6.7 release. They include enhanced desktop zooming and better background app support.

Happening now

Plasma 6.7 will have "lossless" zoom: The KDE desktop environment's Zoom feature (activated with Meta+Plus and Meta+Minus) will now render elements you're zooming in on with sharper resolution thanks to Wayland's fractional scaling abilities.

• Upscaling can have unintended negative effects, so you can turn the feature off if it isn't working well for you.

Background apps will function better: Some apps were lacking built-in ability to live in Plasma's system tray, so you closed their window and they kept a service running in the background, it was impossible to bring them back without relaunching the app. This is changing with Plasma 6.7, as support for org.freedesktop.BackgroundMonitor is being added.

Several minor improvements: The printer applet will show the number of print jobs queued, certain app dialog boxes will look better, and the Discover software browser will now gracefully handle a lack of internet connection on launch.

Zooming out

Why this announcement matters: KDE Plasma has been growing in popularity, and improvements to its user experience will mean improvements for a wide swath of Linux folks.

My take: I appreciate that the enhanced zoom details means both better accessibility and higher quality zoomed screenshots.

Diving in

Go further: See the This Week in Plasma blog post for minor changes and links to git commits for details.

When can I get it? The blog post notes that Plasma 6.7 has hit the "soft feature freeze" phase, which means the first public beta will be out soon. The full release is scheduled for June 16.