Thanks for all the hard work! I've been a KDE user since Xandros was a thing, and it's been a great experience, thanks to people like you making it possible!
Thanks for all the hard work! I've been a KDE user since Xandros was a thing, and it's been a great experience, thanks to people like you making it possible!
I really like KDE Plasma, it provides so many useful tools and features while also offering a tonne of customization options. However, I feel like I'm in a constant uphill battle to get things...
I really like KDE Plasma, it provides so many useful tools and features while also offering a tonne of customization options. However, I feel like I'm in a constant uphill battle to get things working properly due to the numerous bugs I deal with regularly. Although I am cautiously optimistic as I see they're really trying to get Wayland working smoothly.
Switching to Wayland has been, and continues to be the leading cause of Plasma 5 related issues I face. The amount of bugs I encounter and workarounds I need is just too much. It's everything from graphical glitches and the screen being way too saturated, to software I regularly use glitching out or just flat out refusing to launch. I've used the "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb" environment variable to fix that last issue way too many times.
I genuinely hope that things have improved with Plasma 6 + Wayland, because like a lot of people I was tired of X11 10+ years ago.
More recent blog posts also mention a lot of Wayland specific things they have addressed. So, at the very least, it should be much improved compared to Plasma 5.
This is great! But at the same time I'm actually weirdly disappointed by this release. KDE major releases have always been massive changes in both architecture and styling, so even with all the...
This is great! But at the same time I'm actually weirdly disappointed by this release. KDE major releases have always been massive changes in both architecture and styling, so even with all the changes in this one it really doesn't feel like a "true" major release. The screenshot comparisons in particular look like they're 98% identical.
I do like the Matrix, Mastodon, and YouTube clients, but are they really new to KDE 6 or have they been around for a while?
We wanted a stable base to work cool things on. It was way better to concentrate on only one thing at the time, which in this case was porting from Qt 5 to Qt 6. More cool stuff will come, but we...
We wanted a stable base to work cool things on. It was way better to concentrate on only one thing at the time, which in this case was porting from Qt 5 to Qt 6.
More cool stuff will come, but we wanted Plasma 6.0 to be "stability first."
(Note that this is the general vibe i've been getting and not any official statement, im just one dev in the bucket of many KDE devs)
Just chiming in to say thanks. I'm using KDE on EndeavorOS and love it. There's a few small issues here and there so I think focusing on reliability this time was a wise choice.
Just chiming in to say thanks. I'm using KDE on EndeavorOS and love it. There's a few small issues here and there so I think focusing on reliability this time was a wise choice.
As a contrast, I'm quite happy to see it. I haven't used KDE for years, in part because I'd heard that the past major releases were buggy. This time it sounds like they went for reliability.
As a contrast, I'm quite happy to see it. I haven't used KDE for years, in part because I'd heard that the past major releases were buggy. This time it sounds like they went for reliability.
I really appreciate the focus on reliability because that is what kept me away for so long. But now KDE is reliable, has wobbly windows AND desktop cube?! 2024 is truly the Year of the Linux Desktop™
I really appreciate the focus on reliability because that is what kept me away for so long.
But now KDE is reliable, has wobbly windows AND desktop cube?! 2024 is truly the Year of the Linux Desktop™
I totally get that. But the vision and exciting technology KDE offered with their major releases were exactly why I was willing to put up with the instability! It always felt like it was the...
I totally get that. But the vision and exciting technology KDE offered with their major releases were exactly why I was willing to put up with the instability! It always felt like it was the future of computing.
That's fair. Otoh I used LXQt and LXDE before it for many years because it worked well enough and ran reliably, where if I tired to use kde I'd get frustrated trying to adjust settings that didn't...
That's fair. Otoh I used LXQt and LXDE before it for many years because it worked well enough and ran reliably, where if I tired to use kde I'd get frustrated trying to adjust settings that didn't work, or running really slow. For me the future of computing wasn't that exciting, but being able to use retro hardware was much more important
I daily drove linux machines for years and I would always match the DE with the hardware I had. KDE was always the "high end" experience, but there were a number of times when I'd be using LXDE or...
I daily drove linux machines for years and I would always match the DE with the hardware I had. KDE was always the "high end" experience, but there were a number of times when I'd be using LXDE or another relatively lightweight option. I have a particular love for Blackbox and it's minimalism, but it's just a bit too minimalist for me these days.
To be honest, that's probably because you are focussing on what's visible. Which mostly is a lot of refinment and tuning. There are some big changes under the hood though, one of the more...
To be honest, that's probably because you are focussing on what's visible. Which mostly is a lot of refinment and tuning.
There are some big changes under the hood though, one of the more important ones the switch to Wayland as a default. This alone does warrant a major release imho.
Had been using Plasma for a couple of years on Kubuntu 22.04 but lately it had been getting really buggy with Nvidia (Nvidia is often likely to blame for a lot of issues but still...), where it...
Had been using Plasma for a couple of years on Kubuntu 22.04 but lately it had been getting really buggy with Nvidia (Nvidia is often likely to blame for a lot of issues but still...), where it had been just fine before. So I tested a few DEs and landed on Cinnamon (the one Linux Mint uses by default). After some trial and error and cleanup/rescue, I was able to purge most of KDE from my system and install Cinnamon instead and I'm enjoying it. So far, way less buggy on Nvidia and everything feels more stable again. Less customizable, but more stable. I was able to work around some of the customization limitations just by using alternatives. I'm pretty happy now and I don't think Plasma 6 would solve the issues I was having, not that I know whether it would backport to 22.04 LTS anyway.
I think when it comes time that Kubuntu LTS has a new full OS version available, I might do a complete system reinstall and jump to Mint or something else since the update would really screw with things
I'm back to my old ways using a tiling wm (river) + CLI tools, but if there is a DE that makes me switch and feels right to me is Plasma. But the experience with Plasma on Void Linux were always...
I'm back to my old ways using a tiling wm (river) + CLI tools, but if there is a DE that makes me switch and feels right to me is Plasma.
But the experience with Plasma on Void Linux were always subpar to me. I'm considering switching to Fedora 40 when it releases with Plasma 6.
Hope you like it!
Thanks for all the hard work! I've been a KDE user since Xandros was a thing, and it's been a great experience, thanks to people like you making it possible!
I'm fairly new in the team, been doing stuff for about ~2 years now?
I really like KDE Plasma, it provides so many useful tools and features while also offering a tonne of customization options. However, I feel like I'm in a constant uphill battle to get things working properly due to the numerous bugs I deal with regularly. Although I am cautiously optimistic as I see they're really trying to get Wayland working smoothly.
Switching to Wayland has been, and continues to be the leading cause of Plasma 5 related issues I face. The amount of bugs I encounter and workarounds I need is just too much. It's everything from graphical glitches and the screen being way too saturated, to software I regularly use glitching out or just flat out refusing to launch. I've used the "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb" environment variable to fix that last issue way too many times.
I genuinely hope that things have improved with Plasma 6 + Wayland, because like a lot of people I was tired of X11 10+ years ago.
Wayland support should be much better. See for example these blog posts from one of the main developers of KDE:
More recent blog posts also mention a lot of Wayland specific things they have addressed. So, at the very least, it should be much improved compared to Plasma 5.
This is great! But at the same time I'm actually weirdly disappointed by this release. KDE major releases have always been massive changes in both architecture and styling, so even with all the changes in this one it really doesn't feel like a "true" major release. The screenshot comparisons in particular look like they're 98% identical.
I do like the Matrix, Mastodon, and YouTube clients, but are they really new to KDE 6 or have they been around for a while?
We wanted a stable base to work cool things on. It was way better to concentrate on only one thing at the time, which in this case was porting from Qt 5 to Qt 6.
More cool stuff will come, but we wanted Plasma 6.0 to be "stability first."
(Note that this is the general vibe i've been getting and not any official statement, im just one dev in the bucket of many KDE devs)
Just chiming in to say thanks. I'm using KDE on EndeavorOS and love it. There's a few small issues here and there so I think focusing on reliability this time was a wise choice.
Make sure to report those small issues so they can get fixed! :) https://bugs.kde.org/
As a contrast, I'm quite happy to see it. I haven't used KDE for years, in part because I'd heard that the past major releases were buggy. This time it sounds like they went for reliability.
I really appreciate the focus on reliability because that is what kept me away for so long.
But now KDE is reliable, has wobbly windows AND desktop cube?! 2024 is truly the Year of the Linux Desktop™
I totally get that. But the vision and exciting technology KDE offered with their major releases were exactly why I was willing to put up with the instability! It always felt like it was the future of computing.
That's fair. Otoh I used LXQt and LXDE before it for many years because it worked well enough and ran reliably, where if I tired to use kde I'd get frustrated trying to adjust settings that didn't work, or running really slow. For me the future of computing wasn't that exciting, but being able to use retro hardware was much more important
I daily drove linux machines for years and I would always match the DE with the hardware I had. KDE was always the "high end" experience, but there were a number of times when I'd be using LXDE or another relatively lightweight option. I have a particular love for Blackbox and it's minimalism, but it's just a bit too minimalist for me these days.
To be honest, that's probably because you are focussing on what's visible. Which mostly is a lot of refinment and tuning.
There are some big changes under the hood though, one of the more important ones the switch to Wayland as a default. This alone does warrant a major release imho.
They're not new to KDE 6 but they did arrive very recently.
Had been using Plasma for a couple of years on Kubuntu 22.04 but lately it had been getting really buggy with Nvidia (Nvidia is often likely to blame for a lot of issues but still...), where it had been just fine before. So I tested a few DEs and landed on Cinnamon (the one Linux Mint uses by default). After some trial and error and cleanup/rescue, I was able to purge most of KDE from my system and install Cinnamon instead and I'm enjoying it. So far, way less buggy on Nvidia and everything feels more stable again. Less customizable, but more stable. I was able to work around some of the customization limitations just by using alternatives. I'm pretty happy now and I don't think Plasma 6 would solve the issues I was having, not that I know whether it would backport to 22.04 LTS anyway.
I think when it comes time that Kubuntu LTS has a new full OS version available, I might do a complete system reinstall and jump to Mint or something else since the update would really screw with things
I'm using KDE Neon right now and just got the upgrade. I wanted it to be exciting but to their credit, KDE put out a solid release.
I'm back to my old ways using a tiling wm (river) + CLI tools, but if there is a DE that makes me switch and feels right to me is Plasma.
But the experience with Plasma on Void Linux were always subpar to me. I'm considering switching to Fedora 40 when it releases with Plasma 6.