KDE Plasma 6.7 has arrived, and the development team has sprinkled in a few extra features and polish - some of which you might find rather interesting, assuming you're the type of person who enjoys having a desktop that doesn't feel like it was designed by a committee of angry spiders.

The thing about KDE Plasma is that it's already one of the finest desktop environments on the market. It's gorgeous, stable, highly user-friendly, but also flexible, and it performs more like a lightweight desktop akin to Xfce. So when the developers offer a release that's even better, you can be sure it's worth installing - or at least worth reading about while you wait for your distribution to get around to packaging it.

Given that this is a point release (.7 as it were), you shouldn't expect earth-shattering-kaboom-like new features, as you might with a major release (such as 7.0). Even so, there are some pretty cool new options. For instance, there's the new global mic mute hotkey. Think about it: You're using an app that shouldn't have access to your mic, but you find that it's being used anyway. Instead of having to go through the Settings app or the system tray to mute the mic, you can use the preconfigured hotkey. This also works when you're in a video or audio meeting and need to quickly mute your mic for some reason - like when your cat decides to start loudly explaining the plot of a movie you've never seen.

The Plasma Bigscreen mode (which allows you to mirror your desktop on a TV) has finally arrived in full force, so you can view your desktop on a large-screen TV without it looking stretched, blurry, or otherwise wonky. Version 6.7 also delivers on the promised per-screen virtual desktops, allowing you to customize them on a per-monitor basis. Maybe you have two or three monitors, and you want to set up specific virtual desktops for each. For example, you could have one monitor for coding, with virtual desktops for your IDE, terminal, and debugging apps, while your second monitor has two virtual desktops: one for web browsing and one for productivity. Because nothing says 'I'm a power user' like having so many desktops you forget which one has your email.

There are also improvements to all of the default apps, such as those found in System Settings and KDE Discover. And of course, what is a new release without bug fixes? 6.7 includes plenty of them. You can view the complete list of bug fixes (as well as the full feature/improvement list) on the official release notes.

This is the tricky part: each distribution will have to get the latest release into its standard repositories. Because of this, there's no hard-coded deadline for when this will happen. Hopefully, your distribution of choice will add KDE Plasma 6.7 soon. Until then, if you're anxious to try out the latest version, you can always run a virtual machine of KDE Neon or KDE Linux (or install one of them on a spare PC). Either way, you should be excited about the upcoming release - or at least mildly curious, which is basically the same thing in the Linux world.