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?
Faster to the fight for what? Wayland? Xfce doesn’t even have a working Wayland session yet, so surely not. The new Plasma update is indeed being hyped for stability and Wayland. Wayland is finally ready to be used by default and that’s a big deal. Many of the biggest issues with 5.27 have been fixed, which has improved usability a lot. HDR is also a big deal, people have been waiting for years for it to work on desktop Linux. Yes, there is also a lot of “eyecandy”. People constantly complain Plasma looks ancient compared to GNOME, so they’re doing something about it.