The KDE desktop will get an overhaul with Plasma 6 [LWN.net]

By Joe Brockmeier
February 28, 2024

It has been practically 10 years since
KDE Plasma 5,
which is the final main launch of the desktop.
On February 28 the undertaking announced its “mega launch” of KDE
Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear 24.02 — all based mostly on the Qt 6 growth framework. This
launch focuses closely on migrating to Wayland, and aspires to be a seamless
improve for the person whereas bettering efficiency, safety, and help
for newer {hardware}. For builders, loads of work has gone into eradicating
deprecated frameworks and reducing dependencies to make it simpler to write down
functions focusing on KDE.

What’s in Plasma 6

For the aim of this text, we’ll largely take a look at Plasma and Frameworks, as Gear 24.02
accommodates too many functions like KMail, Kate, and the Kdenlive
video editor that deserve extra consideration in their very own proper. I ran Fedora
Kinoite’s nightly
releases with pre-release Plasma 6 packages, which has proved pleasantly
secure and performant on an getting older ThinkPad X280 with 16GB of RAM and a
Core i7-8650U CPU.

The distinction between Plasma 5 and 6 is clear, however not
pronounced. Customers who’re comfy with Plasma 5 are unlikely to really feel
discomfited with Plasma 6, or have a tough time adapting to the adjustments
sprinkled all through the desktop. Plasma 6 has
a lot of adjustments to default settings. The massive change, after all, is Wayland
as the default graphical session.

Plasma 6 additionally has a smattering of smaller, much less controversial adjustments. For instance, previous to
Plasma 6, the desktop defaulted to single-click to open a folder, launch a
program, or open a file. Customers coming from different working methods or
Linux desktop environments are sometimes used to double-clicking to do these
issues. Now, KDE upstream has relented on utilizing a single-click to open information and
defaults to double-click as an alternative. Distributions like Fedora, Kubuntu, and
Manjaro had been altering the upstream default anyway, so KDE developer Nate Graham suggested
disabling the characteristic. “Distros are nearer to customers and clearly the suggestions they have been
getting is that double-click is a greater default…Let’s admit it and change
to double-click by default ourselves“.

Plasma 6 can also be presupposed to get rid of the default of utilizing the scroll
wheel on the desktop to change digital desktops. Nonetheless, this setting is
nonetheless lively in Fedora Kinoite as of this writing. Scrolling to change digital
desktops has been the default for a while, however Graham argued in one other proposal
to disable the characteristic as a result of it could actually simply shock customers with sudden
and undesirable conduct. Customers preferring the previous conduct can toggle it
again on within the “Mouse Actions” settings beneath “Desktop Folder Settings”,
so it isn’t going away completely. One other change to scrolling conduct
on this launch is that clicking on a scrollbar strikes the window to
the
location clicked, relatively than one “web page” at a time. That is meant to
cut back the quantity of twiddling with the scroll wheel to maneuver up or down a protracted
“distance”, with a view to be a greater choice for customers with repetitive pressure accidents
(RSIs) — or for customers who’d prefer to keep away from RSIs within the first place.

Breeze is Plasma’s default theme and it has been up to date for Plasma 6, but it surely’s a delicate change
— type of like repainting a room and altering the colour from “flat white”
to “eggshell white”. It has some adjustments to spacing that make it really feel a
little much less crowded, and it has fewer traces separating UI parts. The System
Settings software has additionally been revamped. This can be extra noticeable, as
among the settings have migrated to new areas. The good factor about KDE
is that a lot is configurable, however discovering configuration settings continues to be
a problem in Plasma 6. For instance, the aforementioned setting to scroll
digital desktops is discovered within the Desktop Folder Settings software, however
not within the System Settings software beneath the Digital Desktop settings.

Dolphin, KDE’s file supervisor,
had its configuration settings redesigned to make them simpler to navigate. The
prior model of Dolphin included six tabs of settings for navigation, its
context menu, startup conduct, view modes, conduct of the trash, and
normal settings. The redesign condenses this into 4 tabs, scooting the
navigation choices and startup choices into the brand new interface tab. It additionally provides
a fifth tab for person suggestions, with choices to contribute statistics and
take part in surveys. These are, as one would count on from an open-source
undertaking that respects its customers, set to share no knowledge by default. Customers
who want to take part, although, can select simply how a lot participation
they’re keen to interact in. This ranges from sharing only a few particulars
like model of the applying and working system, to extra telemetry
like display decision, time Dolphin is used, what number of community shares are
out there, and extra.

The Dolphin interface adjustments are minor. As an alternative of exhibiting current
information from at the moment and yesterday, Dolphin now reveals current information and up to date
areas. Settings for file historical past are system-wide, and located in System
Settings relatively than Dolphin’s settings — customers can go for maintaining
historical past “without end” or a interval of months, or flip off historical past completely. (Days or
hours don’t seem like an choice.) Customers also can specify the functions
allowed to entry file historical past, relatively than granting entry to any software.

Plasma 6 on Wayland has some help for high
dynamic range (HDR) and color management, relying on the applying
and if one has a supported monitor. Sadly, the screens I’ve available aren’t
supported. One factor that did work properly, nevertheless, was setting the
scaling for a laptop computer monitor and exterior monitor, independently. It was straightforward to set the
exterior monitor to 100% scaling whereas the ThinkPad display was set to 125% in order that home windows appeared
to be the identical measurement when moved from one monitor to the opposite.

The Plasma Search characteristic, which is a part of KRunner and the
Kickoff
software launcher, has been refactored
and is claimed to be a lot quicker on this launch. The discharge announcement
claimed main speedups for looking out native paperwork and for functions,
whereas lowering CPU utilization. It is onerous to confirm this, however KRunner did really feel snappy
when performing net and doc searches. Spectacle,
KDE’s screenshot utility, now takes screenshots and recordings of the complete desktop, an software
window, or only a number of the display. This guarantees to be a useful device
to create tutorials, or share a recording of software conduct when submitting
a bug.

KDE giveth, and KDE taketh away. As is widespread with main updates, some
options and settings have been eliminated as a result of design adjustments or problem
with underlying drivers or software program. For instance, GUI configuration for Synaptics
touchpads and evdev
enter gadgets has been eliminated as a result of the drivers have been outdated with libinput
in Wayland. Unmaintained options just like the Air theme,
icon
view for System Settings, and KHotkeys
had been all scuttled on this launch. The power to seize
wallpapers from the Unsplash free inventory picture website was eliminated as a result of API
changes and the QuickShare
applet for file switch was dropped as a result of it by no means labored as
supposed.

See Also

Ask HN: Does (or why does) anybody use MapReduce anymore?

Below the hood

Although Plasma 6 might not really feel like a significant replace, loads of work has gone
into KDE Frameworks 6 to make it doable. I requested KDE developer
Carl Schwan by e mail concerning the developer-facing adjustments and plans for KDE 5 now
that Plasma 6 has been launched. Schwan stated many of the work in
Frameworks 6 was about lowering relatively than including options. Schwan pointed
to removing of deprecated frameworks, like KHtml, the KJS javascript engine,
and KHotkeys. The undertaking has additionally labored to eliminate deprecated Qt APIs,
reminiscent of QtCodecs, and to lower dependencies between frameworks so exterior
Qt functions can simply use one or two KDE frameworks. Schwan additionally stated that
KDE has eliminated loads of APIs “which had been barely used or […] have higher
alternate options both in one other framework or in Qt itself”. Particularly,
he famous that KDE’s plugin system has moved from two APIs to a single API.

Schwan stated that Qt 6 itself did not have many API adjustments, however
it did add an abstraction layer for graphics APIs like Metallic, Vulkan,
OpenGL, and DirectX “as an alternative of solely supporting OpenGL+Angle”. In
addition, Qt has switched to CMake, away
from the qmake
construct system, which Schwan stated helped rather a lot to enhance developer
tooling. Lastly, Qt 6 introduced a lot of enhancements to Qt Wayland,
which Schwan stated had been pushed ahead partly by KDE builders.

Help for KDE 5 and X11

Plasma 6 is more likely to be a bit of
bit tough across the edges for some time, and customers may wish to evaluation known
issues earlier than deciding to improve. Clearly
Plasma 6 will not be instantly out there in most
distributions, however customers can discuss with KDE’s neighborhood wiki for instructions
on easy methods to check Plasma 6 straight away. Customers can select to build
from source, attempt the KDE neon
testing version, or attempt one of many different distribution-specific strategies for
Fedora, Gentoo, KaOS, NixOS, or openSUSE.

There isn’t any rush to change — KDE 5 just isn’t fairly out of the image
simply but. On February 12, on the Plasma growth checklist, David Edmundson said
he’d seen sufficient patches that ought to go
into 5.27 to warrant one other launch. Justin Zobel agreed
and famous that “many distros will not [adopt] it for some
time. Main bugfixes and safety fixes ought to undoubtedly
proceed being utilized till such time that almost all main distros
have up to date to six“. Valorie Zimmerman, from the Kubuntu undertaking, said
that is excellent news for the reason that subsequent long-term help (LTS) launch for Kubuntu is
coming in March and will not be based mostly on Qt 6. On February 19, Jonathan Riddell reported
the Plasma group deliberate to do a Plasma 5.27.11 launch on March 6.

Although many within the Fedora undertaking are desperate to drop X11 support, KDE upstream
plans to proceed together with X11 help for customers who depend upon it within the
brief time period. Customers can count on to see help
in Plasma 6 as properly, however Schwan says there’s “no mounted timeline” with
varied estimates starting from two to 5 years earlier than help is absolutely
eliminated. He pressured that there will likely be “loads of communication
beforehand” and the undertaking “actually will not drop the help from
at some point to the opposite”.

General, Plasma 6 appears to be like to be a easy improve for customers, and
KDE Frameworks 6 appears to be a strong basis for the subsequent few
years of KDE growth. It ought to be attention-grabbing to observe how
Plasma evolves over the subsequent few years.

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