cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48914616

Like a cult classic movie, Godot 4 has only gotten better with age. The first few releases focused on stability, granting the engine a rock-solid foundation that could be safely and easily iterated upon. Gradually, this has shifted more towards polish and quality-of-life, peaking in Godot 4.6 giving developers the tools to put them and their workflow first.

This brings us to Godot 4.7. With 3 years under its belt, the 4.7 Director’s Cut offers colors of never-before-reached intensity. HDR output radiates bold and brilliant new hues, allowing your projects to shine like never before. Inject some juice to your UI without breaking a sweat using the new Control offset transforms. Find the plugin that will help push your game even further with the new Asset Store, bask in the ease of creation with standalone Android exporting and publishing, and helm a bevy of new features to eliminate any remaining friction between you and your vision.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48812123

KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In addition to other hardware, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.7.

This new major release brings back the Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4 era, including the Horos wallpaper. The ability to switch virtual desktops independently for each output/display was added. It is now easier to toggle between light and dark mode directly from the Brightness & Color widget. You can now test microphones from the audio settings, and assign a custom global keyboard shortcut for “push-to-talk” microphone un-mute. If you have Plasma keyboard enabled and a physical keyboard key is long-pressed a selection of related special characters is presented to choose from. When it comes to printing it is now much easier to connect to shared printers on Windows networks, and a new print queue management tool offers more power than ever before. Vietnamese lunar calendar was added, and you can now select the default system calendar application. It is now possible to set mouse and tablet stylus pointers to be synced. ICC color profile can now be applied when HDR mode is active. Graphical performance has been improved and power usage lowered for CPU-rendered applications, some full-screen applications and on Intel graphics hardware. This release also features an experimental preview of the Union theming engine, which is based on web-like CSS definitions and will make creating and using new themes easier in the future.

For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.7 release announcement and the complete changelog.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48865817

After many months of design, development, gathering feedback, and testing, today we’re releasing a big update with Mastodon 4.6. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon’s work ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we’ve put a lot of thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of the pitfalls and abuse people have experienced with similar features on other platforms, while focusing on its primary goal: Helping new users discover more of the Fediverse.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48812123

KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In addition to other hardware, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.7.

This new major release brings back the Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4 era, including the Horos wallpaper. The ability to switch virtual desktops independently for each output/display was added. It is now easier to toggle between light and dark mode directly from the Brightness & Color widget. You can now test microphones from the audio settings, and assign a custom global keyboard shortcut for “push-to-talk” microphone un-mute. If you have Plasma keyboard enabled and a physical keyboard key is long-pressed a selection of related special characters is presented to choose from. When it comes to printing it is now much easier to connect to shared printers on Windows networks, and a new print queue management tool offers more power than ever before. Vietnamese lunar calendar was added, and you can now select the default system calendar application. It is now possible to set mouse and tablet stylus pointers to be synced. ICC color profile can now be applied when HDR mode is active. Graphical performance has been improved and power usage lowered for CPU-rendered applications, some full-screen applications and on Intel graphics hardware. This release also features an experimental preview of the Union theming engine, which is based on web-like CSS definitions and will make creating and using new themes easier in the future.

For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.7 release announcement and the complete changelog.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46379162

The Kubuntu team is thrilled to announce the release of Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”! As a community-driven flavour of Ubuntu, Kubuntu continues its mission to deliver the cutting-edge KDE software ecosystem on top of Ubuntu’s rock-solid foundation. This Long-Term Support release, aligned with Ubuntu’s two-year LTS cycle, brings together the freshest stable KDE software with the reliability and security users depend on for years to come.

Building on the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base released today by Canonical, Kubuntu 26.04 introduces Plasma 6.6 as the flagship desktop environment, alongside Qt 6.10.2, KDE Frameworks 6.24.0, and the latest KDE Gear 25.12.3 application suite. We’ve also upgraded to Linux kernel 7.0 for enhanced hardware support and performance. Whether you’re a developer, creator, or everyday user, this release emphasises Wayland maturity, modern security, and seamless integration with the open source world.

Kubuntu 26.04 LTS will receive security updates and critical fixes through April 2029, making it an excellent choice for home users, schools, businesses, and anyone who values a dependable, beautiful desktop.

Kubuntu remains completely free to download, use, and share—empowering our global community to innovate without barriers.

Four Exciting New Features for Kubuntu Users

Here are four standout enhancements that Kubuntu 26.04 LTS brings to your desktop:

• Text Recognition in Spectacle: Capture Text, Not Just Images Spectacle, KDE’s built-in screenshot tool, gains one of its most practical new capabilities in Plasma 6.6: built-in OCR text recognition. Capture any screenshot containing text—a document, a web page, an error dialog, a presentation slide—and Spectacle can analyse the image and convert the visible text into selectable, copyable content, right from within the app. No third-party tools required. Multi-language support means it works for users around the world, and the extracted text copies directly to your clipboard for immediate use. It’s the kind of small feature that quickly becomes indispensable.

• A New On-Screen Keyboard for Touch, Accessibility, and Beyond: Plasma 6.6 introduces a fully integrated on-screen keyboard, making Kubuntu a much stronger choice for touchscreen devices, tablets, and users with accessibility needs. The keyboard supports multiple languages and layouts, adjusts its position intelligently to avoid covering input fields, and is easily accessible via the system tray or accessibility settings. It includes standard keys, function keys, and emoji support, and appears automatically when you tap a text input field on touch-enabled hardware. This addition reflects KDE’s ongoing commitment to making the desktop inclusive and usable for everyone.

• Plasma Wayland - The Default, Fully Supported Session: The Plasma Wayland session is the default and fully supported session in Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, delivering improved security, smoother rendering, and better HiDPI display support. For users who need it for legacy hardware or specific workflows, the plasma-session-x11 package remains available in the Ubuntu archive— but it is not installed by default and is not supported by the Kubuntu team.

• Extensive Theming and Configuration Improvements: Plasma 6.6 brings significant advances to theming and desktop configuration, giving users more expressive control over the look and feel of their environment than ever before. Custom global themes have been expanded, colour scheme handling has been refined throughout the shell and applications, and widget customisation options have been deepened across panels and the desktop. Whether you prefer a polished out-of-the-box experience or enjoy crafting every detail of your workspace, Resolute Raccoon gives you the tools to make Kubuntu truly your own.

What’s New Under the Hood

Beyond these highlights, Kubuntu 26.04 LTS inherits Ubuntu’s robust platform upgrades:

• Linux Kernel 7.0: Updated from 6.8, the kernel now enables crash dumps by default on desktop installations, brings the new sched_ext scheduling system for hot-swappable eBPF-based schedulers, and retires the linux-lowlatency package in favour of a leaner lowlatency-kernel tuning approach on top of linux-generic.

• KDE Applications 25.12.3: All KDE Gear applications have been updated to 25.12.3, a stable release, including Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, Kdenlive, and more.

• Qt 6 Ecosystem: Qt 6.10.2 and KDE Frameworks 6.24.0 power the desktop. Qt5 (5.15.1cool1.gif and KDE Frameworks 5 (5.116.0) legacy packages remain in the archive for applications that have not yet completed their Qt6 port.

• Firefox 150 and LibreOffice 26.2: Both core applications are updated, with Firefox delivered as a Snap from the Snap Store and LibreOffice included in the full installation.

• sudo-rs by default: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships sudo-rs, a memory-safe Rust reimplementation of sudo, as the default sudo provider — improving security without changing everyday usage.

• Rust-powered core utilities: The core OS utilities are now provided by rust-coreutils, bringing performance improvements and memory safety to fundamental command-line tools.

• VA-API hardware video acceleration: AMD and Intel users now get hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding by default via the Video Acceleration API — great for media playback and video work.

• Updated developer toolchain: GCC 15.2, Python 3.14, Rust 1.93, Golang 1.26, LLVM 21, OpenJDK 25, and .NET 10 are all included and ready to use.

• APT 3.2: The package manager gains a new dependency solver, OpenSSL-backed TLS, an automatic pager for commands like apt show and apt list and history and rollback commands like apt history-list or apt history-rollback, which were previously found only in separate apt-rollback tool.

This release marks another milestone in Kubuntu’s long journey as one of Ubuntu’s most beloved flavours. A huge thank you to our volunteer contributors, testers, bug reporters, and the upstream KDE and Ubuntu teams for making Resolute Raccoon a reality.