Just to get it out of the way: I’m a bit older than most you. I’m an old school FOSS contributor: Slackware, couple kernel merges, and some weak device driver contributions.
I’m just not WOW’d by this Plasma release. I’m seeing the news everywhere, and it seems everyone is clamoring to get it, but it mostly seems like 90% cosmetic changes, no? I must be missing something.
Here are the things I’ve gathered are non-cosmetic:
- Update to QT6
- Better Wayland interactions (HDR notable)
- Compositor improvements for gaming
Everything else seems like eye candy. I feel like Gnome and forks, or Xfce have been faster to the fight on these things, and this KDE release took many years. So what do I have wrong here?
You think Xfce has been “faster to the fight” on what exactly? It’s famously slow to do anything. It still doesn’t even have Wayland support at all, let alone support as good as Plasma.
Plasma vs Gnome is a lot more subjective depending on your priorities, and Gnome was certainly faster to get to Wayland as it’s primary display protocol. I’m not quite sure about what else you might think Gnome is faster at though. It’s actually way behind in things like gaming support and HDR.
Plasma 6 was specifically planned to focus on a polished release and reduction in technical debt, not introducing flashy new features. I haven’t tried it yet, but I LIKE those priorities for a major porting effort. I’m looking forward to trying it when it comes to my distro.