How do you make a great desktop into a fantastic desktop? Easy — chip away at the rough bits, polish the good stuff, and add awesomeness. After 29 years of development, KDE’s got the foundation nailed down. Plasma 6.5 is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone.

Ready to see what’s new? Let’s dive into Plasma 6.5!

Highlights:

  • Automatic Theme Transitions: Configure when your theme will transition from light to dark and back.
  • Caret Text Navigation: Zoom now swoops in to where you type
  • KRunner Fuzzy Search: Even if you type it wrong, KRunner will find it!
    • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Same. I always try it out and run into some critical bug causing me to abandon it.

      My Linux Mint install with Cinnamon “just works”, so I’ve been sticking with that and hoping Wayland support goes stable soon, because I hate X Server.

  • HeyMrDeadMan@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    My only beef with KDE is just that there’s always been ‘too much’ of it. Like, every settings screen and right-click context menu just like, goes on for days.

    There needs to be a prominent toggle switch between ‘Turbo Nerd Mode’ and ‘Babby’s First DE’.

  • Obin@feddit.org
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    5 months ago

    End of 2025 and still missing a replacement for Khotkeys. Plasma is still great all in all, but after almost two decades on KDE I feel like I’ve outgrown it and tried to switch away a couple times now. Time to stop procrastinating and getting on with writing my own wlroots compositor.

      • Obin@feddit.org
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        5 months ago

        Sadly no. I know this one and there is a couple of similar applications out there that all work pretty much the same, using a virtual uinput device to do low-level remapping of key to key. You can do macros or chords with these, but that’s not what I’m after, and in any case, I prefer to do remaps and macros like that first on my QMK keyboard directly if possible, then XKb second.

        Khotkey on the other hand could (among other things) remap keys per window. For example you could say that for key presses sent to Firefox (which has no built-in way to redefine hotkeys), make Ctrl-W not close the window but do this thing instead, or use these keys to move between Ctrl-f search results. These remaps would then affect Firefox and only Firefox, while with apps like the one you linked, remaps would always affect the entire system.

        Another feature was freely configurable mouse gestures that can work in any application and do different things in each application.

        The reason we don’t have anything on wayland is that there is no generalized way for third party apps to intercept, modify, redirect or inject key events. Even global-hotkeys are still lacking in support and lackluster and complex in implementation. This is by design and there are good reasons for this, but it leaves the job of implementing this functionality (as so much on wayland) with the compositor, i.e. here Plasma, Kwin or some other module that’s tightly integrated with them.

        • paper_moon@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Ahhh I see. Well damn because that functionality does sound pretty useful, sad that its currently broken with Wayland.

  • Uairhahs@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I guess KDE remembering your previous monitor layout after temporarily switching to built in only for laptops is still too big an ask. Related merge has work done but is indefinitely closed and shelves. What a shame.

  • TechLich@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    And Debian Sid is still stuck on 6.3.6 :(

    Hopefully they figure out the qt update thing and get the new version packaged soon?

  • MrSulu@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Came to say what most have already: It works already as well / better than Gnome, doesn’t require superduper hardware, stable, why the feck did I wait until 2025 to try it? Not looking back.

  • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Am I the only one who thinks it looks ugly? Don’t get me wrong, they are improving it in many ways and it’s going in the right direction, plus a ton of features and customizability, but when I look at Gnome I don’t doubt for a second where I want to be.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      A colleague always complains that KDE looks like Windows. She does also get jealous, though, when she sees me using poweruser features.

  • DiamondOrthodox@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Unfortunately, KDE is quantity over quality. I like the look and feel for the most part, but out of all the mainstream DEs, I’d say it’s the buggiest. GNOME with too many extensions is absolutely less stable, but vanilla KDE is embarrassing for stability, even on Linux Approved hardware.

    • muhyb@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      If you knew/remember the first days of KDE 5, it was the buggiest DE ever invented at that time. However nowadays I barely even see any bug in KDE, at least for my use cases. And I’m a WM guy who use KDE out of laziness.

    • suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I’ve experienced far fewer bugs on KDE 6 than Mint or Cinnamon, and I refuse to use GNOME. What else are you comparing against?

      • dinckelman@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        They are comparing against a mix of “trust me bro” and “i’ve heard that…”. The local classic

        • DiamondOrthodox@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          You’re making assumptions. I’ve used GNOME since 2008, with extensive use of KDE and Cinnamon too in later years. I’ve used other DEs such as XFCE for niche applications. KDE - for me - has always been buggy despite being the most feature rich. This is just my experience. You don’t have to trust me.

          Edit: Currently daily driving COSMIC. It was a little rough in the Alpha stages but it’s now very stable for me.

      • DiamondOrthodox@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        Cinnamon I’ve found to be buggy too. Panel and wallpaper glitches, black screens on wakeup, to name a few.