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.

  • mellowheat@suppo.fi
    0·
    1 year ago

    Wow. They just lifted the horrific Desktop management paradigm from MacOS.

    But I don’t know, I guess people like it, and fortunately I’m not forced to use KDE.

        • mellowheat@suppo.fi
          0·
          1 year ago

          No, I’m referring to KDE. Check the link in the post and watch the videos. The desktop switching is now working almost exactly like in MacOS.

          Of course KDE wins by allowing to configure it.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          I’m not sure what he means either, but if he meant gnome he’d have said Gnome.

          And Gnome really doesn’t feel like MacOS. Beyond a black bar at the top with a few bits in it, they’re very different.

          E: I think they’re referring to the new overview menu that Plasma has clearly heavily taken from the Gnome Activities view. But that’s not really how it is on MacOS at all.

    • zkrzsz [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Can always change whatever you don’t like, that’s the strong part of KDE, unlike Gnome where you have to rely on 3rd party extensions and hope they don’t break next update.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      They just lifted the horrific Desktop management paradigm from MacOS.

      I’m amazed that people like this style of desktop switching. Linear? Why? It’s easier to picture my place “in a small grid” than in a “long line of desktops”. Since “forever” I’ve used a 3x3 grid of desktops that I navigate with ++. Turn off all of the stupid animations, effects, etc. and make it an instant desktop change. I assume KDE being KDE this will still be configurable as it is in Plasma 5 though.

      • TeryVeneno@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        I think this just comes down to differences between people, 3x3 grid is far more confusing for me than finding my place in line. Instant desktop change is also super jarring, but if it works for you then keep on doing your thing.

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    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.

    Honestly 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

    • Fryboyter@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      1 year 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.

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      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.

    • lengau@midwest.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      I think the Kubuntu folks are mostly working on polishing Plasma 5.27 for Kubuntu 24.04 right now, but I would bet that shortly after its release we’ll see 6.0 in the backports PPA.

      I doubt that’ll be available for 23.10 though, as it’ll mess up the upgrade to 24.04.

  • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

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

  • Swarfega@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    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.

    • Hubi@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Swarfega@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

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

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
      0·
      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
      0·
      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
      0·
      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”

      • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        Prime works well anywhere tho. I guess you are asking for a GUI to switch between them and/or disable it on a per software basis? For me games via Steam “just work”, they use the Nvidia GPU by default and Lutris has a little switch to enable it. It’s only getting more complicated if you want your Nvidia GPU to fully turn off when not in use.

        • ProtonBadger@lemmy.ca
          0·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, I was amazed when I started gaming on Linux. The desktop and VA-API uses Intel iGPU and Steam games use the Nvidia GPU through offload, I never have to do anything. It works even better than it did on Windows.