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?

  • Fryboyter@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    4 months ago

    Here are the things I’ve gathered are non-cosmetic:

    Based on https://kde.org/de/announcements/megarelease/6/, I think that many more things are not just purely cosmetic changes.

    I must be missing something.

    I would say you simply have the wrong expectation that with a so-called mega release a lot of big changes have to happen that the user has to notice immediately. However, many of the changes in Plasma 6 are probably not huge. But many smaller changes are also many changes.

    And as others have already written, the changeover to QT 6 was probably not an easy task.

    I also see Plasma 6.0 as a basis for things that are planned in Plasma 6.1 or later versions, for example, and are therefore not yet visible to the user. Articles on the development of Plasma are regularly published at https://pointieststick.com, which provide a more detailed insight into the development process.