Regata OS has just gained another new version, update 21.0.17, which arrives with the new KDE Plasma 5.23.3, the latest stable version of the graphical environment, which arrives full of fixes and improvements, allowing a better experience with the Regata OS desktop.
In addition, KDE Plasma 5.23.3 brings the new “focus ring” feature, which increases the focus effect, for example, of buttons in general, check boxes, combo boxes and text fields. This change was brought over from the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 release to the current version of the graphical desktop to resolve several focus related issues that have been reported by users and make it much easier to visually distinguish these UI elements at a glance.
Other interesting changes include improvements to the network icon available in the system tray to allow you to connect to an OpenVPN server with a password-protected .p12 certificate, there is a fix for a crash that may occur when starting the System Monitor application ( KSysGuard) and improvements to right-click GTK application icons in the systray area.
Updated Drivers for Players
As the focus of Regata OS is also to better serve gamers, the 21.0.17 update also brings updated drivers for AMD graphics hardware, ensuring support for numerous new Vulkan extensions, allowing better support for Windows games running with Proton/Steam Play or through Regata OS Game Access and other solutions such as Lutris.
For AMD graphics cards with RDNA2 architecture, support for the "Next-Gen Geometry Culling" (NGGC) feature is now enabled by default to help performance in some scenarios. In addition, RDNA2 GPUs should also benefit from support for AV1 decoding via VA-API.
For those more enthusiastic, there is now support for ray-tracing, including support for older graphics cards. However, it is worth remembering that the ray-tracing implementation for AMD GPUs has not yet been optimized well and performance will likely be slow. However, although still experimental, at least the feature is maturing.
These driver improvements are only possible thanks to the arrival of Mesa 21.3, which provides several drivers and libraries that are essential for AMD and Intel hardware. But it's also important to remember that NVIDIA video card owners also have access to the latest stable version of the NVIDIA video driver on Regata OS.
For those who need help: Regata OS Support
The Regata OS Support application also received a little more attention in this new Regata OS update, where the option to manually update the repositories was fixed and now the forum is opened in the system's default browser, which helps to solve problems support forum login compatibility.
