KDE Starts April With Big Performance Jump For Local I/O + 50~95% Faster Samba Transfers

KDE developers managed to squeeze some long-problematic I/O optimizations into the KDE code-base this week along with other enhancements to make for a nice first week of April.

The performance work for kicking off April includes:

- 50~95% faster transferring of large files to/from Samba shares. This big speed-up is a Dolphin improvement for a 2012 bug report. This fast-copy support for the Samba code should now allow "mount-level copy performance" thanks to various architectural changes in the code.

- Move and copy speeds for local file transfers should also be much faster. KIO is now using sendfile when the file is larger than 2GB and also using 512 kB copies rather than 32 kB for each sendfile or read/write copy iteration.

Other non-performance work includes:

- The Dolphin file manager can now display thumbnails for 3MF files, the 3D Manufacturing Format for 3D models.

- More granular configuration of volume-related on-screen displays.

- Fixing a possible security issue with executable .desktop files that could potentially be executed without confirmation from the launchers.

- GTK programs running on Plasma now default to using the Breeze icon theme.

- Better keyboard navigation within save dialogs.

- KInfoCenter now shows the correct OpenGL information for NVIDIA Optimus setups.

More details on all of the KDE fixes and improvements this week via KDE developer Nate Graham's blog.