KDE Plasma Readies Its NVIDIA GBM Support, Fingerprint Authentication Added

It's been an exciting week for KDE developers with preparing their formal support for handling NVIDIA's driver with GBM support as well as getting fingerprint authentication finally in place, among other improvements.

The autumn excitement for KDE developers this week included:

- Initial support for the NVIDIA driver with KDE Plasma 5.23.2's GBM back-end. In conjunction with the NVIDIA 495 Linux driver beta exposing Generic Buffer Manager support, Plasma 5.23.2+ will play nicely with that new driver support on Wayland.

- Many bug fixes to Plasma 5.23, winding down the list of known vulnerabilities remaining.

- Fingerprint reader support is landing for Plasma 5.24. This support allows for unlocking the screen for systems having fingerprint readers as well as features needing authentication such as for sudo.

- Discover support for enabling/disabling/removing Flatpak repositories.

- Support with Plasma 5.24 to fix the regression of being able to change the desktop resolution when running in a virtual machine.

- Plasma Wayland's idle time detection now works more properly with Plasma 5.24.

- Plasma's free space notifier will stop uselessly monitoring read-only volumes.

- Various other minor bug fixes and UI refinements.

More details on all of these KDE improvements and fixes for the week can be found via this blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham with his wonderful weekly development summaries.