KDE PLASMA 6 review: was it worth the wait?

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#KDE #Plasma #Linux #linuxdesktop #kdeplasma

Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
00:26 Sponsor: Proton VPN
01:46 Qt6 and Wayland
05:15 Visual changes
07:21 New desktop features
12:03 Settings changes
14:00 Applications changes
16:15 Was it worth the wait?
18:21 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
19:32 Support the channel

Plasma 6 moved to Qt6 entirely, and it's also the first version with fully complete wayland support, and Wayland is actually the default session. And that Wayland support is pretty flawless in my experience.

And this release also brings a few cool things, courtesy of Wayland: HDR is now supported, provided your display also support it. You can also set a color profile for each display individually, on Wayland as well. And finally, you also get color blindness correction filters in the settings.

First, the theme is now lighter on the eyes. They have removed a bunch of the blue borders that every single panel inside of an app had, so the whole feel of the desktop is similar, but also nicer, you don't have that many lines that draw your eyes. Highlighted items in list views are also different, now with rounded corners and a little bit of spacing.

Another visual change is the floating panel by default.

The defaults have changed drastically First, single click to select is now the default, with double click to open. Tap to click on touchpads is also the default now, and they've disabled scrolling on the desktop to switch workspaces.

It's now way easier to change panel configuration. The previous messy pop-up was replaced by something much more visual, which will absolutely be a better experience. You get visual representations of the settings you're changing, with combo boxes to select what you want, and tou can now auto hide the panel.


Another big change is the combination of the overview and the present windows effect. It feels like the older overview, except, it looks a lot like GNOME's. What has changed is the touchpad gestures, and these are much, much better. You also get the desktop cube back.

Another change is the ability to just click inside of a scrollbar's area to move the content directly to that area. Finally, Krunner got faster, way faster, and now lets you reorder the various elements that it shows when you search for something.

Visually, the settings are less busy. Gone are the double rows of icons at the bottom of a page, they now mostly moved to the toolbar of the settings app, meaning that settings pages now look a bit nicer. They've also reduced the number of pages that were opened by clicking a button inside of another page, so things are easier to find, and the settings were reordered into other categories.

You get a new sound theme preference page, and, easier configuration of which app will open a broad category of file.

Dolphin received changes to its settings as well, reordering a bunch of things, and it gained kjeyboard shortcuts to access the toolbar buttons and the disk space usage bar that lives in the status bar. You can also now right click a folder to open it in split view.

Spectacle, the screen recorder, now shows a tray icon when it's recording your screen, you can click it to end the recording. It also support recording a part of your screen, and has new keyboard shortcuts to handle all of this. Everything will now be saved by default in the pictures screenshots directory, you can change that of course. It also support VP9 to record videos, and can be used using the CLI

Konsole has redesigned settings, and will use less ram. Text selection now works for chinese, korean or japanese, and every tab now uses a separate cgroup, meaning the entire app will no longer be killed if your system needs to kill a process to save somle resources