The KDE team released KDE Plasma 6.7 today, and with it comes a long list of improvements, new features, bug fixes, new old themes, and so much more. A new feature that is sure to please those among us who use virtual desktops: you can now have different virtual desktop setups per display. It’s been a long-requested feature, so it’s great to see it makes its way to the KDE users. I despise virtual desktops, but I’m happy to see something that I assumed was already part of KDE to finally actually become available.
Another major feature in KDE Plasma 6.7 is something we’ve already talked about: the return of the classic Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4.x days. These themes have seen extensive work over the past year or so to make them usable on the latest KDE release, which includes tons of bug fixes, visual nips and tucks, and countless additions to the collection of assets required to make a modern KDE theme look complete. This includes a ton of new icons in the old styles, light and dark modes, accent colour support, and much more. There’s still work left here, including adding support for QtQuick/Kirigami applications – which brings us to the next major new addition to KDE 6.7
This is also something we’ve already talked about: Union. I won’t repeat what I already explained last time Union came up, but suffice it to say that Union effectively unifies the various different ways KDE applications are themed, allowing theme designers to use relatively standard CSS to create themes that cover every aspect of the KDE user experience. Before Union, theme designers had to create individual, unique themes for a variety of parts of KDE – the Plasma desktop, QtWidgets using QStyle, QtQuick/Kirigami – which was a ton of work, and in the case of QtQuick/Kirigami, wasn’t really possible at all. As such, without Union, KDE’s theming is essentially broken, and Union fixes that. For now, Union is not enabled by default, and must be installed and enabled separately for testing.
Of course, there’s a ton of other smaller new features, changes, and bug fixes as well. KDE Plasma 6.7 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.
Why is everyone obsessed with features rather than stability? I want to use KDE but uses 2-3GB idle and seems sluggish. At this point it competes with Windows!
You mean compared to Windows 2000 or something from that era. Because recent versions like 10/11 are whole lot more bloated and all and much more sluggish. At this moment KDE Plasma is quite low on resource usage. Especialy considering all the power, customization/flexibility and features it offers. Even comes close to truly lightweight desktops like LxQt and similar. But yeah if you need truly lightweight desktop then why not use those instead.
Are you using X11 or Wayland?
Since I did switch to wayland, KDE is very snappy, not sluguish at all anymore. But maybe your hardware has the opposite effect.
About RAM, mine seems to take 1 to 2 GB, in a full session. I am running version 6.7.
Plasma 6.7 has a lot of new performance optimizations. There is one that isn’t really mentioned in any of the review articles but I saw a post about it on one of the forums that I’m failing to find now. There was a change made with OpenGL that should reduce RAM usage but the effect is hard to measure because it is apparently quite variable depending upon which applications you run. Certain OpenGL calls are no longer made or loaded and they should release more quickly as well. It might be worth trying after the 6.7,1 release to see if your use case is affected.
Also KDE Plasma 6 has, at last, landed in Slackware-current!
Glad to see Slack still alive. It is the distro I started my Linux jouney with. Although I used it for only a very brief time as it was quite hard for me back then and soon switched to RedHat and then finaly to Mandrake because they had KDE and such a user friendly installer and system settings and all.
I found Linux in the opposite direction, I started with Corel Linux for a very brief period in the late 90s, followed immediately by Red Hat. I ran that for a while until I discovered Slackware, and it was my main OS for most of the next ten years apart from my own BeOS era where that was my main (late 2000 to some time in 2002 I believe). Since then I’ve tried nearly every major Linux distro and most derivatives, about half of the ones that were ever listed on DistroWatch and some that never were popular enough for that site. I’ve used Void Linux as my main OS for the past decade until very recently when I switched to OpenBSD full time, though I keep a Void installation on a spare computer to stay current with Linux stuff.
As for KDE, I never really liked it until Plasma 6 when it started to feel more cohesive and consistent. Still, I prefer Xfce especially since it’s the most complete and stable full DE for OpenBSD. On really low-resource devices with smaller screens I use i3 with Xfce apps.
What am i missing, i have been using default kvantum theme for qt4/5/6 applications for a long while. What parts are not themed?
There are 2 themable parts of Qt: QWidgets, and QML. These have separate theming engines, and every theme needs to be developed for both. Union is essentially a generator of QWidgets and QML themes, to keep both in sync and the entire desktop consistent.
https://akselmo.dev/posts/what-are-breeze-widgets-quick-union/
Every time I test plasma I find myself underwhelmed and then pushed away somehow. I’m not sure what it is about it that does that. It looks like a great desktop and very sensible in it’s layout and operation. I will check the latest version out, certainly, but I expect to go happily back to XFCE and Cinnamon and live there until the next release piques my curiosity.
Maybe GTK is genetic?!
I think an issue is that KDE has a vast amount of customization available, and it doesn’t necessarily begin with a set of defaults that appeal to users of other desktops.
This makes sense.
I personally dislike GTK almost passionately, so I can fully understand the opposite 🙂