I'm Switching To KDE Plasma 6 But...

It's almost time for KDE Plasma 6 to come out and I'll absolutely be swapping over to it but I do have a few concerns for my personal workflow that I wanted to put out there in case others are planning to give it a look.

==========Support The Channel==========

==========Resources==========

=========Video Platforms==========

==========Social Media==========

==========Credits==========
🎨 Channel Art:
Profile Picture:

#KDE #Linux #OpenSource #FOSS #GNOME #XFCE

🎵 Ending music
Track: Debris & Jonth - Game Time [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds.

DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.

[Resumocebut]

Brodie missed the opportunity to write "Koncern" on his board.

[itjustcrashed]

~“I won’t be using a desktop anytime soon”
“I’m switching to Plasma 6”

[meskes]

Plasma 6 is worth it. It’s very nice. The bad part is that we don’t have any Kwin scripts at KDE look yet, due to them needing ported to the new api.

[cameronbosch]

KDE Plasma 6 could be the KDE 3.5 or GNOME 2.32 of Linux, something that just works and is rock solid. I'm going to it as soon as it is released on the Arch repos.

[BoyanOrion]

Can't handle tiling due to loss of screen real estate per application. Always running full screen apps in separate workspace is what works best for me regardless of the desktop environment.

[iodreamify]

As a regular Plasma user, very much looking forward to your thoughts

[RobBoudreau]

Something that might be of interest Brodie, with kwin it has the ability to tile windows to sides and corners natively. To get a window to tile in a corner with the keyboard instead of dragging it there with the mouse, use shortcut keys to say... tile to the right side, then immediately use the shortcut to tile to the top (or bottom) and the window will corner tile. The downside of course is you can't tile more than 4 windows on a workspace, it only does side and corner tiling (and there's no gaps), but it works without having to use the new "tiler", which requires using the mouse. I never found a need to have more than 3 windows open on a workspace (and even that's rare), so it works fine for me.

You'll want to rebind the keys for sending the windows to the sides and moving between them (the defaults are, umm... odd), but it works.

Something that I think will drive you crazy is multiple monitors. Kwin doesn't do independent workspaces per monitor. If you switch from say workspace 1 to workspace 2 on the left monitor, the right one also switches. They're tied together. Pinning a needed app to all workspaces on one monitor works as an option, but it's a poor substitute for independent workspaces.

[burein_ita]

Good luck backing up your plasma configuration.

[torspedia]

I'm looking forward to giving Plasma 6 a good go when it's finally released, along side Cosmic. It's a good job I have two machines. 🙂

[yusefaslam]

Plasma 6 is a great experience, everything is so smooth on Wayland and the GUI feels clean and easy to use.

[OraOraOra]

Can't wait for future KDE Plasma Videos! Hop you milk that topic good and give it a fair shot!

[EvanEdwards]

I have used KDE with pwm, Ion, i3, and AwesomeWM, and currently have it extremely scripted with bash to do all kinds of fancy tiling using the numpad for a extremely fast workflow. I will have to rewrite it for Wayland and KDE 6, likely with Polonium in mind (I may or may not use it). I've also used Blackbox, Openbox early on (I started with KDE 0.8, coming to it from CDE and earlier stuff). I think KDE historically works incredibly well with any window manager you want to use and functions quite well in a tiling mode.

[prpl-wtf]

KDE Plasma reminds me of how much I liked tiling window managers.

[esra_erimez]

I envy people who can use a tiling window manager. I've been using KDE since my dad gave me a used laptop with it on it. I can't seem to make the transition to a non-floating window workflow.

[TeddyBearKilla]

For plasma, I wish you could save KDE panel configs, I like latte-dock and am used to it. But if I want to try the updated KDE panels I have to always use them, can't save the config or toggle it off if I don't want to use them anymore.

[supremesonicbrazil]

I use KDE on a daily basis for a few years already (also have used i3 for a while so I'm familiar with both workflows) and honestly never had much of a problem with it. Only thing that annoys me is that (at least on Debian and Arch IIRC) some stuff that I have no use for like Konqueror or Baloo is set as "hard dependencies". When I try purging any of them, the system tries removing Plasma itself as well.

You'd say "well Plasma needs those things to work right? So it's the bare minimum", and I would agree with you. But then I installed Gentoo on a VM out of curiosity and found out Plasma can work on its own with absolutely nothing but the emoji selector somehow (which is only there because I haven't figured out yet how to remove it specifically). Now I'm left wondering what the hell the word "minimal" even means anymore.

[benkato_]

I'm using KDE Plasma with the standard configuration for 4 years now and honestly, I really like it.
I do have some kwin rules, like placing windows (Authy/Discord/keepassxc) to a specific place on my second monitor, but aside from that, I didn't change anything else, aside from cosmetics (breeze-dark theme, icons).
The out of the box experience was really great even in 2020 and I'm really hyped for Plasma 6. :3

I wanted to get into virtual desktops and the mentioned "semi-tiling" feature, but never really bothered to do so xD

I think that people like you, who are more used to tiling window managers, KDE might be a little bit clunky (idk if thats the right word? xD), but you can turn it into something really cool. :D

[jeffreyjoshuarollin]

I don't have many complicated needs, and as you say, the OBS problem doesn't really exist in Plasma, but I've been running Plasma 5 on Wayland for, ooh, probably a couple of years now, and it's almost flawless. Provided Plasma 6 doesn't screw anything up a la KDE4, it should be good.

"Maybe one day, I'll daily drive GNOME." Don't do that to yourself, man.

[cuarmento]

Something im sure you won't like is that KDE 5 (and apparently KDE 6 as well) doesn't support independent workspaces per monitor (it kinda does, but it is a lame "solution"), it's the reason I dont use workspaces when i am using Plasma

[kuhluhOG]

6:35 On my setups I put Meta+T to "open the terminal" because I try to have all Desktop related stuff reachable via Meta and the rest of the modifier keys are there for the applications.