KDE Plasma 6 - Is it Good?

Today I talk about my month long usage of KDE Plasma 6.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
1:48 First Look at My Destkop
3:21 Floating Panels
6:01 The Reordered Settings
7:49 Under The Hood Changes
8:14 Wayland is Finally Good on Plasma
11:19 Stable KDE?
14:50 Some Negative Things...
15:07 Panels
18:20 I've Talked "Tiling" Before
20:23 Wayland is better, but still not perfect
23:07 Wrapping Up
23:20 Lowering Expectations
27:10 Goodbyes

#kde #plasma6 #thelinuxcast

[niccoloveslinux]

You can have rounded corners without any script, you can customize the look of it, the floating margins, etc., all through themes -- either by installing a different one, or editing a couple of values through a GUI it a SVG file

[pcallycat]

I love the floating panel, I just wish they'd make it possible to make it not 'de-float' the second you make a window big.

[esra_erimez]

I'm not a tiling window person. In fact, I'd say that I'm tiling challenged. But, I find the "tiling" in KDE to be a happy medium.

[SecretAgentBartFargo]

KDE6 is amazing. It's not perfect. It is amazing though. KDE has some of the best bundled apps i've used also. Kate is the most usable and refined gui text editor. Way to go KDE!

[guss]

Notes from a long time Plasma user:
- I wasn't thrilled about the system settings reorder as well... But it is more newb friendly now. Frankly, I almost never run System Settings anymore - i love that you can search for and launch KCMs directly from the main menu.
- crashes: Wayland recovery is currently a Plasma-only thing, but I hope other toolkits and desktops adopt it - David Edmundson has patches for everyone.
- I agree that panels aren't that customisable. For example you cant put two panels on the same edge, side by side.
- Workspace pager - there's a 3rd party widget that has dots for workspaces like the new GNOME switcher. I personally use workspaces in two rows which makes the pager much more compact.
- tiling: still needs a lot if work. I like the magnetic split borders, but otherwise the tiling overlay is ridiculous and needs a lof more work. I think the idea was to get the infrastructure in, but theres a lot of missing parts that were supposed to be delivered later, but that didn't happen. I think the original developer got a life.
- The screen capture portal works great (and I have 2 external monitors) and most problems with it are in the applications that use it. That being said the problem with the missing screen sounds like a real KDE problem. Hit me up on discuss kde and I'll try to help.
- updates - the default in plasma is to do offline updates, like they do in Windows. I dont know if it's something that can work in SuSE, but this process works well for upgrades oh Ubuntu-type and Fedora-type OSs. If you like to update in place (which I do) you should be aware of the possible problems and be proficient enough to tackle them.

[teilteilnehmer]

In my experience, Plasma 5.27 is really stable. Plasma 6 is pretty buggy.

[CyperN]

KDE is known for its extensive customization options. While I appreciate the additions sometimes less is more useful than more.

[scottofcanes]

17:42 "Compact Pager" makes the desktops display as singular numbers instead of a preview of the entire workspace contents.

[htxnerd]

First 10 seconds is my exact experience with KDE. Even made a rant video about it.

[archpenguin]

I love Plasma 6! A bit wonky at first, but it's much better now. I use it on NixOs as my daily and on Arch (spare SSD)

[artemsmushkov]

It's very funny that by introducing "tiling" KDE devs just broke good tiling implementation for KDE. Bismuth was kind of replaced by Polonium but it depends on KDE "tiling" that was too buggy in 5.27 at least.

[illuminerdy]

plasma has a "minimal pager" thats just dots with the selected desktop's dot filled white

[SzBenedek]

I didn't have big crashes neiter on plasma 5 nor plasma 6, but small bugs ang glitches stayed the same.

[chozendroid]

I could be wrong, but I feel like complaints about "sub-optimal" tiling in a full desktop environment seem a bit nitpicky. DEs inherently cater to a different userbase/workflow from tiling window managers. It seems to me like that actual userbase is simply not substantial enough to necessitate work on integrating full nuanced TWM support out of the bow, when there are typically many other bugs and features that require more attention. I feel like its perfectly reasonably to expect that more niche features like these for "average" desktop users should exist in third party projects, extensions, and addons - especially since a number of wonderful tiling window managers already exist for people who need that workflow.

[phonewithoutquestion]

First, KDE Wayland and SDDM would eventually have an awful time together, hanging on a black screen after a while. This didn't get fixed in the final versions of 5.27.

Second, and more egregious, the infamous "rm -rf /" can be arbitrarily hidden in global themes. KDE needs to pull themselves together.

[korysovec]

Been using Plasma 6 on my Arch desktop since it was released to extra repo, I absolutely love it when compared to 5. Basically all bugs and issues I had with plasma DE are now fixed, sure the editing could be done a bit nicer, perhaps an option to lock or save pre-made panels (so you don't accidentally delete them or move them to another screen when updating).

When it comes to floating panels, I was using them in Plasma 5 as well, but they were quite buggy on mutli-screen setup, sometimes reacting with windows on the wrong screen or not reacting with windows at all. I haven't had similar problem with 6.

One weird thing, my bluetooth service was not starting up every now and then, forcing me to remove and re-add the BT modules to the kernel and rebooting. For some weird reason it started to work just fine when I updated to Plasma 6.

[zebobm]

I made a clean install for Plasma 6, full format install de Fedora 40, and completely clean profile to avoid bringing old customizations. The only issue is that Polonium is nowhere as features full as Bismuth and is very buggy for me, especially with mpv.

[matthewmoore]

Set your workspaces to two rows, and the pager will get small. Just fyi

[debasishraychawdhuri]

It's still buggy. The pinned apps lose the logo and often do not start the app.

[Bunstonious]

I like KDE6, I had a buggy experience while updating (my whole system crashed) and then I had a few bugs for about a week after with kwallet until I updated. It's been good so far.