KDE Plasma 6.9 Lands Some New Performance Optimizations

I love a good performance optimization and there are several this week in the KDE space with Plasma 6.9 development heating up. This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight the newest KDE changes as we close out the month of October. For those using KWin's zoom effect, with Plasma 6.9 the zoom effect will have a much lower performance impact. The zoom plugin will now skip processing low-contrast pixels like for flat and solid areas, which is leading to significant speed-ups: Plasma 6.9 is also now clearing stale entries for desktop file and folder positions in its configuration file, to avoid it growing massively over time and slowing down Plasma overall. This stems from a 2023 bug report over the screen mapping entry in the config file growing infinitely enough that it slows down the Plasma shell and could crash it. With Plasma 6.9, the Discover software center will now allow copying and sharing of appstream://URLs for locally-installed Flatpak packages. Meanwhile this week's Plasma 6.8.2 release brought some crash fixes and also addressed other regressions. With Plasma 6.8.2 it also included a regression that could degrade gaming performance due in KWin, which is fixed by disabling post-blend offloading if not supported by the DRM color pipelines. Plasma 6.8.3 will bring some additional crash/regression fixes in November. Also exciting this week on the fixes front is KDE Frameworks now fixing a 15 year old bug over file completion to USB storage devices. More details on these changes via This Week in Plasma.