KDE Plasma 6 has been released – and this is an important release with two massive low-level stack upgrades.
With Plasma 6, our technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of our application framework, Qt, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland. We have done our best to ensure that these changes are as smooth and unnoticeable to the users as possible, so when you install this update, you will see the same familiar desktop environment that you know and love. But these under-the-hood upgrades benefit Plasma’s security, efficiency, and performance, and improve support for modern hardware. Thus Plasma delivers an overall more reliable user experience, while paving the way for many more improvements in the future.
Aside from this, there’s so much in this release it’s hard to know where to begin. My favourite is the overhaul of KDE’s default Breeze theme, which now uses far, far fewer frames, meaning there’s fewer borders-on-borders. Spacing has also been made more consistent within Breeze. Both of these efforts make KDE applications and UI elements look a bit less cluttered and busy, which, while easily missed if you don’t look for it, certainly cleans things up nicely.
Another important improvements is the addition of support for HDR displays and colour management.
Plasma on Wayland now has partial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR). On supported monitors and software, this will provide you with richer and deeper colors for your games, videos, and visual creations.
Set an ICC profile for each screen individually and Plasma will adjust the colors accordingly. Applications are still limited to the sRGB color space, but we are working on increasing the number of supported color spaces soon.
To improve Plasma’s accessibility, we added support for color blindness correction filters. This helps with protanopia, deuteranopia or tritanopia.
Of course, this release is accompanied by updates to a large number of KDE applications, and several default settings in KDE have been changed as well to better suit what most users would expect. Plasma Search has been overhauled as well, making it faster and less resource-intensive, and giving users the ability to better control how search results are displayed.
There’s a lot more here, so be sure to dive into the release announcement, KDE Plasma 6 will find its way to your distribution or operating system of choice over the coming weeks and months.
Not sure when this will make its way into mint & debian stable, but with any luck it will solve the issues that have been preventing me from transitioning to wayland!
I am running kde plasma 5 with wayland on arm (vm on m1 mac) after i disabled the power management and sleep settings it ran pretty good. That may be a problem originating from UTM or Qemu… i transitioned the vm to wayland 6 weeks ago…
gagol2,
What about remote control/screen sharing to work with nvidia hardware?
I imagine I’ll try again soon enough, but but thus far wayland’s failed me. Meanwhile everything’s been working fine under X.
Remote access i dont need on this vm. Xrdp is my goto solution for remote sessions…
Is all this “but it doesn’t work on Wayland” really just because of nVidia? And then somehow Wayland gets the blame? That’s ridiculous.
(I don’t mean to blame you for that narrative, Alfman, the thought just occurred to me right now. I really wonder how much of “wayland sucks” comes from nvidia’s crappy drivers.)
CaptainN-,
We can blame nvidia for some of the glitching under wayland…
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317
I really don’t know if these glitches are completely fixed or not. There were happening unpredictably for me. It didn’t matter for me though because the other broken features (that aren’t nvidia’s fault) were already show stoppers. Wayland broke remote control & screen sharing on my desktops. Until that gets resolved, I can’t use wayland since I dependent on these features. My kids can’t use it either. I’ll need to see if there’s any change with this latest KDE…with any luck it could be fixed now but I don’t want to say wayland works before I’ve had a chance to test it myself.
There was some positive news the other day for the NVK driver as well ( Open Source NVIDIA ). NVIDIA is still a major source of the “Wayland not ready” narrative but it does seem that things will get better this year. With so many Linux desktops using Wayland by default and NVIDIA working better with Open Source, that side of things seems to finally be turning the corner.
It will take a while for all this to work its way to average users though. Many of these things will come together for the first time in the Octoberish time-frame when the fall distro releases come out.
Debian Stable will probably end up being when Trixie releases, probably another year or two. Hopefully Plasma 6 will make it into Trixie in time.
I’m long time Debian&Ubuntu (15y). Been looking for an alternative on and off to dodge systemd (had enough of the random hanging shutdowns). MXLinux – KDE+X+OpenRC. Will be moving to this soon to try out. Be nice to see if they get Plasma 6 on MXlinux too. I remember moving to KDE4 as soon as it was released (that was traumatising but battled through). I’m not afraid to give it a go. If Wayland works nicer than it does not for me I’ll have another go.
I tested it today on a decade-old laptop with a fresh install of KDE neon, and so far I’m pleasantly surprised.
This is great news. I recently started using JDE Plasma 5 on Wayland in Tuxedo OS and hand been positively surprised by how well it handles resolution scaling, even on X apps (which were showing up tiny when running under X).
Meant KDE of course – what happened to the Edit button?