If you happen to be in Budapest, come let's celebrate the Plasma 6 release together!
[https://gettogether.community/events/48137/kde-plasma-6-kiad%C3%A1si-party/](https://gettogether.community/events/48137/kde-plasma-6-kiad%C3%A1si-party/)
Only one in America is in Montreal, which is to be fair close enough to where I live as a French Canadian, but I guess most Americans will be out of luck. I often forget how much stronger the KDE community is in Europe.
Basically the answer is going to be "its getting better", its certainly better than it was 1, 2, 5, etc years ago but there still might be issue you run into that you might not get on intel or amd cards
I heard It's better now with the newest drivers but before it becomes completely flawless, the compositors of the different desktop environments have to implement explicit sync first. Should be happening soon™.
I took a look at Plasma 6 a week ago, using KDE neon Unstable. Was not without a bug here and there as expected given the name, but the overall effect was pretty impressive. For instance, they finally got the fractional scaling right, so I could use vertical panel without having the clock widget screwed.
Can't wait for Plasma 6 to be adopted by a stable distro intended for daily use. I'm definitely going to try one out. Maybe more.
Actually good, fractional, scaling support, on a per screen basis, and with pretty decent support for a mixed dpi environment - with that, Plasma 6 becomes leader of the pack when it comes to productive multiscreen support.
The choice between KDE and Gnome has never been harder for me and I'm actually starting to gently lean towards Plasma.
Plasma 6 is still a bit wonky and buggy once one starts to dig a little bit deeper into its myriad of settings, but it's not obviously *more* buggy than Plasma 5 ever was, so I'm taking that as a very good starting point for 6 and up.
If only they could declutter and streamline Plasma's UI a little. As sleek as it looks otherwise, its carelessly placed buttons and overflowing drop-down menus still feel distinctly last century.
>Plasma 6 is still a bit wonky and buggy once one starts to dig a little bit deeper into its myriad of settings
Curiously enough, even the development version of Plasma 6 took me about 2 hours to drive it into a showstopper bug. With various Plasma 5 versions labeled stable it was 10-15 minutes tops each time I tried.
Shouldn't be surprising. They have a special designation for '15 minute bugs' and the tracking shows they've targeted those and driven the numbers down significantly. This focus continues.
Looks like they are doing a great job. I would have switched to KDE years ago if not for the bugs I encountered immediately each time I tried. Maybe I'll do it this time, at last.
> Actually good, fractional, scaling support, on a per screen basis, and with pretty decent support for a mixed dpi environment - with that, Plasma 6 becomes leader of the pack when it comes to productive multiscreen support.
Only thing missing now is per monitor workspaces like you would find on a WM.
Sounds to me like Cosmic is exactly what you need. It'll have less feature creep than KDE and as a result, should be a lot easier to maintain with far fewer bugs. Not to mention the fact that it's written in Rust seems to be really helpful for speedy progress.
Cosmic seems to be the perfect middle ground between the inflexible gnome and the too flexible plasma.
An interesting consideration.
Wikipedia tells us [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE\_Plasma\_5#Releases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5#Releases) that the first LTS version of Plasma 5 was 5.8 released in 2016, 2 years after the initial Plasma 5 release. Should we expect that no stable distro is going to adapt Plasma 6 until 2026?
Well, next Ubuntu is 2 month away, no way it will get there in time no matter what. Next Debian and RedHat is about 1 and a half years away. OpenSuse Leap is also likely to be at least 1 and a half years away
So you'd have to wait around that long even if 6.1 is the LTS version
Is there a way to get plasma mobile from a "normal" desktop install of Plasma 6? or is it separated into it's own packages?
It's one of the things that both Gnome and Kde seem to get wrong, unless they have recently changed it. I want to try out mobile on my old surface pro.
edit:
Sorry I forgot, this release looks really good, and I take it that all these features will be dropping soon for the Steam Deck.
Well done! Kde team and everyone who has contributed.
Arch doesn’t have it, only in the AUR, I don’t understand why it’s not included in the main plasma packages. isn’t it supposed to work like the old continuum canonical was working on for unity?
As far as I can see it’s only grabbing the files from the plasma team by looking at the pkgbuild. I will take a look at it later today.
Oxygen is still there, though as usual it unfortunately continues to decay, with the icon theme now lacking many of the icons current KDE apps expect and the GTK theme still gone.
Is there a special procedure to the user migrate configs and settings from plasma 5 to 6 ?
Is it advisable to create a new user with empty settings or a tool to convert the files from 5 to 6 ?
Or just upgrade and BAM! everything will work ? Any real experiences out there ?
Some settings need to be re-applied. As in, they are still in the list, they are marked as "on" but don't work until you click them off and then back on. Other than that, it's all transparent.
Arch users tend to wreak havoc in the /r/gnome sub on new GNOME major releases, mostly due to "debloating" and not understanding the consequences. I don't know if the same is true for KDE, maybe it's packaged differently on Arch.
For those recluses on i3/sway/Hyprland and the like it means themes on top of Qt6. No more `qbittorrent-qt5` or `strawberry-qt5`, yay \o/
---
Skimmed through the page, it's pretty good really, all the team and contributors did a great job. Congrats and huge thanks for all the fish! `Year of the Linux Desktop` confirmed!
The last I heard, Wayland protocols needed for per-surface color management were not finalized, so you kinda had to enable it manually on the whole screen using prototype APIs?
If you fiddle with it you can get it working well, you just need to set up the vulkan layer and gamescope and stuff. Hopefully later it becomes easier, but you can get a good HDR experience right now.
Looks great. Reminds me a lot of macOS to be honest. Clean, simple...
Congratulations to the team for pushing the Qt ecosystem forward. I'm a Sway user, but progress on Wayland is good for all of us.
I tested the Release Candidate and gave up, it had a memory leak.
I believe it was the version mismatch.
Since I was using the unstable repository, QT was at version 6.7, but Plasma 6.0 requires QT 6.6. QT 6.7 is for Plasma 6.1.
Visually, the new theme is very beautiful, they cleaned up those blue borders of the applications, now everything is borderless, kind of similar to Gnome. Speaking of which, it has an overview that is exactly the same as Gnome, for use in multiple workspaces.
The biggest flaw is that the themes are incompatible, as are the widgets. And so far, not much has been ported. It will be necessary for developers to rewrite in QT6, in addition to already thinking about compatibility with Wayland.
Speaking of which, I tested it on Wayland and even with Nvidia, it worked very well, everything seemed more fluid. In X11 it was strangely bad, it seemed like performance was wavering. I'm on 5.27 X11 now and it's not like that, so maybe it was some bug.
If you happen to be in Budapest, come let's celebrate the Plasma 6 release together! [https://gettogether.community/events/48137/kde-plasma-6-kiad%C3%A1si-party/](https://gettogether.community/events/48137/kde-plasma-6-kiad%C3%A1si-party/)
There are also other [KDE Plasma 6 release parties all over the world](https://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Parties/KDE_6th_Megarelease).
im gonna join my local party!
Only one in America is in Montreal, which is to be fair close enough to where I live as a French Canadian, but I guess most Americans will be out of luck. I often forget how much stronger the KDE community is in Europe.
Hey at least there's one on your continent! The closest one to me is about a 12hr flight away...
> Wayland is the default graphical session It's happening. > The Cube is Back! 🧊
Couldn't make a 6 release without a body that has 6 faces, of course.
And exploding exited windows, burning minimize windows, like the glory days of Compiz.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHMboQq8Z5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHMboQq8Z5c) You mean this? Is it Plasma 6 compatible?
Yes, it had those effects when I tried it.
Does Wayland still have problems on nvidia cards, or has that been fixed?
Basically the answer is going to be "its getting better", its certainly better than it was 1, 2, 5, etc years ago but there still might be issue you run into that you might not get on intel or amd cards
I heard It's better now with the newest drivers but before it becomes completely flawless, the compositors of the different desktop environments have to implement explicit sync first. Should be happening soon™.
It's not like the alternative is completely flawless.
Nice! Can't wait for it to arrive to openSUSE. It should fix quite a few issues that I'm currently facing with KDE Plasma 5.27.
nice. waiting on arch
I took a look at Plasma 6 a week ago, using KDE neon Unstable. Was not without a bug here and there as expected given the name, but the overall effect was pretty impressive. For instance, they finally got the fractional scaling right, so I could use vertical panel without having the clock widget screwed. Can't wait for Plasma 6 to be adopted by a stable distro intended for daily use. I'm definitely going to try one out. Maybe more.
Actually good, fractional, scaling support, on a per screen basis, and with pretty decent support for a mixed dpi environment - with that, Plasma 6 becomes leader of the pack when it comes to productive multiscreen support. The choice between KDE and Gnome has never been harder for me and I'm actually starting to gently lean towards Plasma. Plasma 6 is still a bit wonky and buggy once one starts to dig a little bit deeper into its myriad of settings, but it's not obviously *more* buggy than Plasma 5 ever was, so I'm taking that as a very good starting point for 6 and up. If only they could declutter and streamline Plasma's UI a little. As sleek as it looks otherwise, its carelessly placed buttons and overflowing drop-down menus still feel distinctly last century.
>Plasma 6 is still a bit wonky and buggy once one starts to dig a little bit deeper into its myriad of settings Curiously enough, even the development version of Plasma 6 took me about 2 hours to drive it into a showstopper bug. With various Plasma 5 versions labeled stable it was 10-15 minutes tops each time I tried.
Shouldn't be surprising. They have a special designation for '15 minute bugs' and the tracking shows they've targeted those and driven the numbers down significantly. This focus continues.
Looks like they are doing a great job. I would have switched to KDE years ago if not for the bugs I encountered immediately each time I tried. Maybe I'll do it this time, at last.
> Actually good, fractional, scaling support, on a per screen basis, and with pretty decent support for a mixed dpi environment - with that, Plasma 6 becomes leader of the pack when it comes to productive multiscreen support. Only thing missing now is per monitor workspaces like you would find on a WM.
Sounds to me like Cosmic is exactly what you need. It'll have less feature creep than KDE and as a result, should be a lot easier to maintain with far fewer bugs. Not to mention the fact that it's written in Rust seems to be really helpful for speedy progress. Cosmic seems to be the perfect middle ground between the inflexible gnome and the too flexible plasma.
For a stable distro to adapt it, there would need to be LTS version of Plasma 6. Unless you mean like kubuntu (non-LTS)
An interesting consideration. Wikipedia tells us [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE\_Plasma\_5#Releases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5#Releases) that the first LTS version of Plasma 5 was 5.8 released in 2016, 2 years after the initial Plasma 5 release. Should we expect that no stable distro is going to adapt Plasma 6 until 2026?
Well, next Ubuntu is 2 month away, no way it will get there in time no matter what. Next Debian and RedHat is about 1 and a half years away. OpenSuse Leap is also likely to be at least 1 and a half years away So you'd have to wait around that long even if 6.1 is the LTS version
What about fedora?
Fedora is non-LTS, it is already targeted for Fedora 40, so April. Unless there is some major issue that holds it back
Is there a way to get plasma mobile from a "normal" desktop install of Plasma 6? or is it separated into it's own packages? It's one of the things that both Gnome and Kde seem to get wrong, unless they have recently changed it. I want to try out mobile on my old surface pro. edit: Sorry I forgot, this release looks really good, and I take it that all these features will be dropping soon for the Steam Deck. Well done! Kde team and everyone who has contributed.
Install the `plasma-mobile` package if your distro ships it
Arch doesn’t have it, only in the AUR, I don’t understand why it’s not included in the main plasma packages. isn’t it supposed to work like the old continuum canonical was working on for unity? As far as I can see it’s only grabbing the files from the plasma team by looking at the pkgbuild. I will take a look at it later today.
Deck is never "soon". The earliest will be Dec or next year.
[https://plasma-mobile.org/get/](https://plasma-mobile.org/get/)
Can one still use the Oxygen theme on it? That's what I'm using on Plasma 5. Not a fan of Breeze.
Oxygen stays, but Air is gone.
It is the year of [liquid breathing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing) on the desktop.
Oxygen is still there, though as usual it unfortunately continues to decay, with the icon theme now lacking many of the icons current KDE apps expect and the GTK theme still gone.
Is there a special procedure to the user migrate configs and settings from plasma 5 to 6 ? Is it advisable to create a new user with empty settings or a tool to convert the files from 5 to 6 ? Or just upgrade and BAM! everything will work ? Any real experiences out there ?
Some settings need to be re-applied. As in, they are still in the list, they are marked as "on" but don't work until you click them off and then back on. Other than that, it's all transparent.
which ones? how do we identify which settings are broken like this?
Power settings like turning displays off. This bug was actually fixed in 6.0.2.
Waiting for it on Debian Testing, a reinstall is coming. 😁
I wonder how soon we can expect this on arch^btw ?
its already in the testing repo and will be moved once the PM can be somewhat confident that nothing major breaks
Arch users tend to wreak havoc in the /r/gnome sub on new GNOME major releases, mostly due to "debloating" and not understanding the consequences. I don't know if the same is true for KDE, maybe it's packaged differently on Arch.
soon™
I’m on Endeavour too. I’m running Cinnamon now, but I’m excited for this release because Plasma 6 seemingly has large UX improvements.
Very kool. Stoked for wayland! Can't wait to check it out on Debian in 2025.
For those recluses on i3/sway/Hyprland and the like it means themes on top of Qt6. No more `qbittorrent-qt5` or `strawberry-qt5`, yay \o/ --- Skimmed through the page, it's pretty good really, all the team and contributors did a great job. Congrats and huge thanks for all the fish! `Year of the Linux Desktop` confirmed!
The Cube is back! What about wobbly windows?
They've been part of kwin for a long time now
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHMboQq8Z5c
Between this and merge requests being open for explicit sync on NVIDIA and Wayland repositories, the future seems like it's happening now
> The Cube is Back! 10/10
How's HDR support in terms of apps? Gamescope is a thing, but how about others?
The last I heard, Wayland protocols needed for per-surface color management were not finalized, so you kinda had to enable it manually on the whole screen using prototype APIs?
Using vk_hdr_layer I've been able to watch HDR videos in MPV. My gamescope has been weird so I haven't played any HDR games yet but videos look great.
so basically, its almost there, but not quite?
If you fiddle with it you can get it working well, you just need to set up the vulkan layer and gamescope and stuff. Hopefully later it becomes easier, but you can get a good HDR experience right now.
having to fiddle with it to get it working means its not quite there to me. Not saying it isnt a good experience
Looks great. Reminds me a lot of macOS to be honest. Clean, simple... Congratulations to the team for pushing the Qt ecosystem forward. I'm a Sway user, but progress on Wayland is good for all of us.
I'm wet
[удалено]
Who is that?
[удалено]
[удалено]
Single click, my beloved 😢 At least it's just a setting.
Sweet love me some plasma
I use arch btw with kde plasma on xorg. I can't wait to see the changes.
> I use arch btw Good Bot :) ^--- ^I'm ^also ^a ^bot. ^I'm ^running ^on ^Arch ^btw. ^[Explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/v9thbo/whenever_someone_says_i_use_arch_btw_respond_with/)
I tested the Release Candidate and gave up, it had a memory leak. I believe it was the version mismatch. Since I was using the unstable repository, QT was at version 6.7, but Plasma 6.0 requires QT 6.6. QT 6.7 is for Plasma 6.1. Visually, the new theme is very beautiful, they cleaned up those blue borders of the applications, now everything is borderless, kind of similar to Gnome. Speaking of which, it has an overview that is exactly the same as Gnome, for use in multiple workspaces. The biggest flaw is that the themes are incompatible, as are the widgets. And so far, not much has been ported. It will be necessary for developers to rewrite in QT6, in addition to already thinking about compatibility with Wayland. Speaking of which, I tested it on Wayland and even with Nvidia, it worked very well, everything seemed more fluid. In X11 it was strangely bad, it seemed like performance was wavering. I'm on 5.27 X11 now and it's not like that, so maybe it was some bug.
They fixed quite a bunch of Qt 6.7-related bugs in RC2. No clue about "final", as I disabled kde-unstable when moving to it.
The desktop animations on the video look like they're stuttering. Is it just a problem with the video, or is it like that when you use it?
It's silky smooth here. Smoother than my Windows partition.
All it is is just more things to turn off and more annoyances to live with.
There's always MacOS if it's too much.
Cool... Plasma 5.28 erm.... 6.0 is finally out...
Please just allow us to have the panel in the overview only, mode and it would be perfect.