KDE Will Now Set Scale Factor For GTK Apps, Plasma Gets Other Scaling & UI Polishing Too

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of interesting development activities impacting Plasma, Frameworks, and the Applications stack.

When the display scaling factor for KDE is set to an integer, KDE will now export that as well to the GNOME/GTK environment variables of GDK_SCALE/GDK_DPI_SCALE, for helping out GTK applications running on the KDE desktop so they should still scale appropriately. The Wayland behavior was already correct while this should help out GTK X11 applications. The GNOME/GTK scaling though only supports scaling by integer numbers.

KDE Frameworks 5.52 meanwhile is bringing improvements to fix cut-off/off-centered icons in Dolphin and other programs when using a non-integer system wide scaling factor. Separately, KMail notifications no longer use "ugly low-resolution icons."

Some of the other KDE happenings this week is showing distribution release upgrade options within Discover's update notification widget, the NetworkManager widget shows actual upload/download speeds in its speed graph, various fixes to Spectacle, and other user interface polishing.

More details over on Nate's weekly summary.