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.
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All that matters is… THE CUBE IS BACK BABY!
THE CUBE IS PROOF KDE IS RUN BY THE PEOPLE
PRAISE THE CUBE
Resistance is futile!
What’s the cube?
How long until this trickles down into the major distros?
It will reach Slackware about 6 months before the heat death of the universe.
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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. To be blunt, those two were an absolute mess. It was only around 5.15 where it started getting stable enough to really use.
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.
Excellent, thanks for this info.
Already switched to AMD to enjoy it
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”
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.
It does, but the problem with laptops is that their external outputs (HDMI etc.) are often only connected to the dGPU.
If you want to hook your laptop up to a TV or monitor you need to log out of your system, log back in with drivers and compositor reconfigured to use your dGPU. It’s part of why I moved from my 1650Ti gaming laptop to a notebook only using AMD’s integrated graphics - it just felt beyond janky
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.
I look forward to the havoc this will cause with all my themes and widgets in the coming weeks lol.
And already merged into NixOS. Insane how quick that was.
FYI: an interesting video on How KDE Plasma 6 Was Made
Just look at that lineup. Plasma 6 is absolutely awesome.
