New KDE Partition Manager 4.0 Released With New Features And Code Re-write

Lots of new features and some code re-base highlight KDE Partition Manager 4.0

 

After 1 and 1/2 years of work from the developers, KDE Partition Manager 4.0 has been made available to users. by far, the main aspect of this release is that the entire application, including the GUI, does not need to run as the root user.

"The main highlight of this release is that GUI does not need to run as root user. Instead we use KAuth framework (note that in the future we plan to use lower level Polkit API directly but this work is not started yet). GUI runing as unprivileged user also makes our Wayland port work perfectly fine"

The announcement states that the changes above will make KPM more portable, and therefore possible to be used by other projects such as FreeBSD.

Additionally, many of the underlying tool sets have been updated including moving to the latest version of smartmontools from libatasmart, and moving the KPMcor e component to sfdisk (a part of util-linux).

KDE Partition Manager 4.0

Other notable changes / improvements include new detection support for Apple's APFS file system and Microsoft's Bitlocker, use of modern C++ features, LVM bug fixes, and better LUKS2 support.

The LUKS2 support, while not exposed in the Partition Manager GUI, is present and will allow other related projects such as the Calamares Installer, to to support LUKS2 containers / partitions in the future. 

The full release announcement is available over at Andrius Štikonas' blog.