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.
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
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.
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.