KDE MegaRelease 6
kde.org
KDE is an open community of friendly people who want to create a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy.

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.

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    261·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
      23·
      1 year 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”

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
      141·
      1 year 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.

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      5·
      1 year 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,

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
        32·
        1 year ago

        I’d argue GNOME has a better native app ecosystem. they have the resources to maintain a massive selection of “official” apps

        • scharf_2x40@lemmy.world
          5·
          1 year ago

          I don’t know, I used gnome for a while and I just felt like I was using toy apps. But I think that comes down to personal preference. KDE definitly has the bigger apps like Kdenlive and Krita.

  • Swarfega@lemm.ee
    English
    15·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      Oh not just me? amazing lmao

      For what it’s worth, there’re some upcoming wayland protocols that will allow apps to announce their content type (ie. documents, games, media etc.) to the compositor which might finally mean Wayland will consider not going to sleep when a game is running

    • ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah this is really annoying for me as well. I found that if you go into the system tray and click on ‘power management’ and then tick the box for ‘manually block sleep and screen locking’ it’ll solve the issue. Unfortunately it means that your display won’t go dark when the system is idle, so I have to remember to untick that box after I’m done gaming in order to keep that behaviour.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      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”

  • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

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