After the very successful release of KDE Plasma 6.0, which moved the entire desktop environment and most of its applications over to Qt 6, fixed a whole slow of bugs, and streamlined the entire KDE desktop and its applications, it’s now time for KDE Plasma 6.1, where we’re going to see a much stronger focus on new features. While it’s merely a point release, it’s still a big one.
The tentpole new feature of Plasma 6.1 is access to remote Plasma desktops. You can go into Settings and log into any Plasma desktop, which is built entirely and directly into KDE’s own Wayland compositor, avoiding the use of third party applications of hacky extensions to X.org. Having such remote access built right into the desktop environment and its compositor itself is a much cleaner implementation than in the before time with X.
Another feature that worked just fine under X but was still missing from KDE Plasma on Wayland is something they now call “persistent applications” – basically, KDE will now remember which windows you had open when you closed KDE or shut down your computer, and open them back up right where you left off when you log back in. It’s one of those things that got lost in the transition to Wayland, and having it back is really, really welcome.
Speaking of Wayland, KDE Plasma 6.1 also introduces two major new rendering features. Explicit sync removes flickering and glitches most commonly seen on NVIDIA hardware, while triple buffering provides smoother animations and screen rendering. There’s more here, too, such as a completely reworked edit desktop view, support for controlling keyboard LED backlighting traditionally found in gaming laptops, and more.
KDE Plasma 6.1 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough, but of course, you can compile and install it yourself, too.
The only fully featured and sane desktop environment left in the world. If KDE manages to screw it up too, then it’s over for humanity. No pressure.
What? Mate, Cinnamon, and even Budgie seem pretty sane to me. What is not sane about them?
In a way yes, there are a lot of options out there. Still if we are really talking about a fully featured, no compromise, classical desktop environment, then KDE is it, the last one in the world. All other mentioned desktop environments are lacking in some way, compared to KDE. Saying that isn’t true is being in denial. On top of that i personally don’t believe anybody would be capable of producing a similar project, as KDE is ATM, without investing 20 years in it. Nobody today would do that, no FOSS or commercial entity.
Lacking? For example?
Back in the day I wanted multiple virtual desktops with 3 screens setup. Could not achieve that or could only do it to put virtual desktops in a row. On KDE I use 3 rows with 3 columns setup. Also could not snap windows through screens. Taskbar panels setup gave me hard time or I could not show desktop related taskbars on all my screens at all. Shortcuts were not available or sometimes changeable. But to be truthful it was two or more years ago.
Better if i explain this one the other way around, that is with KDE there isn’t anything lacking. Compromises aren’t being made, if you need something it’s there. With other desktop environments you can’t rely on that anymore. Likely something will be missing and you will need to accept that and compromise. Or some developer decided they know better, then users, and you just have to endure it. On where with KDE you don’t need to make such compromises. For now they go that extra mile and keep us spoiled. Hopefully this doesn’t end anything soon, as if it does, then a bunch of compromises is all that will be left.
I have the same experience of all other desktops lacking compared to KDE Plasma. Be it in flexibility/configurability/customization, or by just not having all the neat features Plasma offers out of the box. It may look the same on the surface but when you get used to all these features and you switch to using the other desktops you quickly get annoyed by missing what you were used to, like special window/application rules for window manager or other WM features not available, or the excellent keyboard shortcuts system, or the Activities mechanism, KDE Connect integration with mobile phones, KRunner, …
KDE sucks. It looks like a toy. If you have more than 6 apps open, it collapses all into small squares. Really horrible. I am sure you can do whatever you mention with the other DE’s or with any addon.
@JRepin Exactly that. It’s all the little things combined, that are still developed as a part of KDE project and maintained too. If KDE ever gives up, we don’t have that any more. It’s unrealistic another FOSS or commercial project could replicate that in foreseeable future. I feel that we really should do everything in our power to keep KDE sustainable as is. @kwanbis No, you really can’t do that. GNOME might have some add-on and with some tilling window managers you have tight control over windows. But this are all specialized things, not something intended for general public. On top of that no, KDE doesn’t suck and it doesn’t look like a toy.
In a way the remote desktop feature is amazing. The most amazing to me is the lack of it at the lowest most common logical level: wayland.
gagol2,
I agree it should have been a core wayland feature that only had to be implemented once. Now everyone is forced to implement it separately, which obviously has been a problem for feature fragmentation. It is taking some time for all wayland desktop implementations to provide remote desktop, but hopefully we’ll reach a point where these problems will be behind us.
Isn’t it just RDP?
I agree it should be done at the protocol level. That way you could do like with X11, just run an individual app without the need to launch a full desktop.
Yes, it uses RDP, we can consider adding support for more protocols if the need arises.
The remote protocol itself is not implemented in the compositor, but it’s a separate server binary.
The part in the compositor is the sharing of the rendered buffer itself, which is indeed done with a common component used by other compositor as well such as Mutter: Pipewire that offers among the other things an interface to do screen sharing of all kinds (is the same thing used to do the taskbar window thumbnails for instance)
Very interesting, thank you for the information. It seems there is more commonality between compositors that the news and general opinion lead to believe.