this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Today the KDE Community is announcing a new najor release of Plasma 6.0, and Gear 24.02. KDE Plasma is a modern, feature-rich desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Known for its sleek design, customizable interface, and extensive set of applications, it is also open source, devoid of ads, and makes protecting your privacy and personal data a priority.

With Plasma 6, the technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of the application framework, Qt 6, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland. They will continue providing support for the legacy X11 session for users who prefer to stick with it for now. The new version brings the new windows and desktop overview, improved colour management, a cleaner theme, more effects, better overall performance, and much more.

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 8 months ago (7 children)

All that matters is… THE CUBE IS BACK BABY!

[–] [email protected] 52 points 8 months ago

THE CUBE IS PROOF KDE IS RUN BY THE PEOPLE

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

All hail the CUBE.

... now we wait for ... the jiggly cube!! :D

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

PRAISE THE CUBE

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Had to look up what exactly the cube is and it looks awesome!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

A new cube user in 2024. Checkmate, atheists.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Resistance is futile!

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (5 children)

How long until this trickles down into the major distros?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago

It will reach Slackware about 6 months before the heat death of the universe.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago

Fedora 40 (April) should have it I think

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's currently in Arch Testing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not hard to install from testing actually, may give it a shot..

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (3 children)

However, one should first read through https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/official_repositories#Testing_repositories and consider whether it is really worth the risk.

For my part, I will simply wait until Plasma 6 arrives in the official package sources.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I hope it's quick. Really fun upgrade.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

It's just been merged to master for NixOS. Next stable would be 24.05

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/286522
https://nixpk.gs/pr-tracker.html?pr=286522

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (8 children)

I love KDE. Been using it for 10 years

One question i've always had though... Does anyone actually use the default KDE software like konqueror, kmail, kontacts, etc? Why not just focus on the desktop environment?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago

That software played a much bigger role back in the day (i.e Konqueror's. KHTML was forked by both Apple and later Google for Safari and Chrome), so it's kind of a proud legacy. Konqueror is deprecated though. The other apps are useful for KDE mobile.

But the real reason people work on them is "cause they wanna"

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago

Konsole is fantastic.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

KDE's weakness to GNOME is definitely the range and quality of its homegrown apps, but the 'core' apps like Kate, Kalculator, Konsole are really solid.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A bunch of them: Kate, Konsole, Dolphin, KCalc, Kdenlive, Okular, Gwenview, Ark, Spectacle, KDEconnect, Elisa and probably a couple more I missed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I used okular and loved Kate

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Yeah I use a lot of KDE software, main reason because it fits so nicely with the desktop and it also integrates functions with Plasma so usage is even smoother. One of the main applications I do not use from KDE are browser, I use LibreWolf (the desktop integration package+plugin does quite a nice job for integration here), and LibreOffice,

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Nice. I've kept coming back to try Plasma for years and years, but there's always been some jank, bug, complete lack of polish, or random annoyance that forced me off it again.

Much of these have been improved with Plasma 6, and I'm glad that they took extra time to release rather than quickly shoving it out, a la Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5. To be blunt, those two were an absolute mess. It was only around 5.15 where it started getting stable enough to really use.

The only big showstopper in Plasma 5.27 for me was the lack of proper session restore - if Kwin crashes, it takes all my work down with it. Plasma 6 will be fixing that.

I think I'm going to try this on my laptop once Fedora 40 releases

Compliments to the devs, it's a thankless job sometimes

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well yeah, about session restore. In X11 mode it is better. But on Wayland, well it is missing completely, since Wayland does not support it just yet. KDE developers are pushing hard to make it happen in Wayland and in the meantime they are also working on workarounds.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

and I’m glad that they took extra time to release rather than quickly shoving it out, a la Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5.

As far as I can remember, this was also the fault of some distributions that wanted to release Plasma 5 quickly, even though the developers of Plasma pointed out existing bugs.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Already switched to AMD to enjoy it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

i never had much issue with Nvidia on wayland, but KDE Plasma sadly has quite poor support for graphics switching out of the box. Then again, only Sys76 and Pop! ever got that down to what I'd call "seamless"

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I like Plasma but the bug where the OS goes to sleep when using a joypad is pretty frustrating. It's an old bug now too.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I experienced that too and ended up just disabling the timed sleep mode. Not sure if it's actually related to KDE software or just a Linux bug in general though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Last time I mentioned it someone posted the bug report for it (KDE). It was like 5 years old or something

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Use gamemode

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

I look forward to the havoc this will cause with all my themes and widgets in the coming weeks lol.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

i've been using rc2 for a couple of weeks and it's really good improvement over 5.27, which was also a quite solid release.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Congratulation to the KDE team! Well done!!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

FYI: an interesting video on How KDE Plasma 6 Was Made

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