4 ms·

KDE Plasma 6.0, and KDE Gear 24.02 released

117 points by jrepinc 3y ago

jrepinc 3y ago
KDE Neon with Plasma 6 now available https://blog.neon.kde.org/2024/02/28/kde-neon-6-available-now/ https://blog.neon.kde.org/2024/02/28/kde-neon-6-available-no...
atadier 3y ago
Congratulations to the KDE team for shipping this release! Plasma is now more polished than ever after months of development and QA on the 6.0 branch. This is a great milestone to achieve and sets in a new era for the adoption of the KDE desktop. Cheers!
jrepinc 3y ago
FYI: an interesting video on How KDE Plasma 6 Was Made https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/e6e8f177-22f1-432a-9c7f-ab76b17a5b54 https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/e6e8f177-22f1-432a-9c7f-ab76b17a...
SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
I wonder for how long the will keep supporting X11.
- ognarb 3y ago
  KDE developer here. Probably for a few more years but there is no timeline yet, but then we do we will definitively announce it some times before (e.g. a year) and are likely to make the release before that an LTS version.
  - p4bl0 3y ago
    Congrats on the mega-release to you and all the team who worked hard to get there! I really love KDE. I'm a small time contributor to the project but every time I've been very welcomed and guided all the way through the merging of my contributions on Kate and related projects (KTextEditor, KXMLGUI, etc.), and also Dolphin Plugins. I started using KDE after a very long time without any desktop environment at all, for years before, I did not even have a graphical file manager installed on my systems. I was pretty happy like this: everything was very efficient, no bloat was running on my system that I didn't chose to, I knew how everything worked, etc. Good times. One day I decided that I couldn't seriously continue to tell people to switch to Linux while not having a clue what it's like to use it as a muggle, so I decided to try installing a full DE and start using GUI for real (up to that point my only graphical applications were Firefox and Inkscape from time to time, even my emails were in Emacs etc). I made a bit of looking around to compare Gnome and KDE and decided that KDE was closer to what I'd like. It's now been a few years already and I love it, really. Anyway, all that to give more substance to my big thanks and congratulations :).
    - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
      I personally like gnome a bit more, but it has terrible fractional scaling on hidpi.
  - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
    Font rendering on HiDPI was worse (slightly blurrier, many probably won't notice, but annoys me a lot) on Wayland than X11; probably because X11 had different scaling step, friendlier to the way freetype scales. Many other things just worked better on X11 than on Wayland. I wonder if the problem was solved in Plasma 6 (almost sure it was not).
    - ognarb 3y ago
      Qt6 now support the wayland fractional scaling protocol which should improve the situation quite a bit for applications ported to Qt6.
- coffeeaddict1 3y ago
  Core KDE apps like Krita still don't support Wayland natively, so my guess is that it will take years before they drop support.
  - abrouwers 3y ago
    I'm ignorant, doesn't this come "for free" with Qt6 support? Krita is a bit of an exception, because it's still on Qt5, but "core KDE" apps, as released in kde-applications 24.02, are compiled against Qt6 on my arch install.
    - coffeeaddict1 3y ago
      Well, firstly the team still has to port Krita to Qt 6. That's not trivial because Qt 6 dropped support for Angle and Krita relied on it (especially on Windows where OpenGL drivers aren't the best). So they will need to figure that one out (last I heard they were thinking of manually patching Qt 6 to support Angle again). Secondarily, Qt 6 still has quite a few bugs (e.g. related to input) that will need fixing or patching so that Krita can use it.
      - abrouwers 3y ago
        Yeah, that's fair. I was more taking point with "Core KDE applications," where krita is more of an outlier compared to KDE Gear apps.
frankjr 3y ago
Congratulations on the release. Installing this as soon as it hits Arch's stable repositories.
keyb0ardninja 3y ago
Thank you KDE developers, you're the best! Thank you for all your hard work. Thanks also for making the KDE community the most friendly and welcoming. Plasma 5 has been a joy to use for the last 10 years and I'm sure Plasma 6 will be even better!
nubinetwork 3y ago
Question for the kde devs on hn... how does kde handle input methods now? I was using ibus and mozc but I started getting error messages about ibus crashing because it was already running, so I want to set it up the way kde wants me to. Thanks
- ognarb 3y ago
  The prefered input methods for Plasma is Fcitx5 but the situation is not perfect yet. But with Wayland, this opens a few new possibilities: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/new-ideas-using-wayland-input-methods/ http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/new-ideas-using-waylan...
jlpcsl 3y ago
Awesome. Been running Plasma 6 since Beta 2 and it is running very stable. Simply the best computer desktop environment there is out there. Even closed proprietary alternatives don't com close. Thank you to all KDE developers and all other contributors for making this possible
guappa 3y ago
The cube is finally back!
panick21_ 3y ago
I have always been a GNOME person and haven't used any KDE since decades ago. I should give it a try again. Looks good.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  I am trying recent kde again on one laptop and mostly like it a lot. It looks relatively slick and a lot less amateurish than it used to. But, right click on konsole and the context menu is just an absolute mess. I use that a lot and can’t believe they fucked it up so bad. Enough that I consider removing it for cinnamon occasionally.
- Expurple 3y ago
  KDE is pretty stable these days, in a good way. 6 doesn't look very different from 5, it mostly upgrades the tech stack and sets some nice defaults
- amlib 3y ago
  I'm kind of in the same boat. I used to be an ardent lover of KDE 3 and KDE 3 MOD. Ever since KDE 4 released my interest diminished and once gnome 3/gnome shell became stable at version ~3.2 I switched to it. It was a love and hate relationship for a while but within a few years gnome had become so much nicer to use (from a defaults, "just works" kind of view) than kde that I stopped giving it any chances to pull me back. I guess this is the best time to try KDE again! I really like how desktop centric it is with the more denser application design. And it seems to look half-decent now, instead of whatever they had back in the Oxygen days. I hope GTK/Gnome integration has gotten better...
FabbbDev 3y ago
So glad to hear Plasma 6.0 is finally here, can't wait to dive into Wayland! Just made a donation for the first time, the KDE team really deserves it.
- jlpcsl 3y ago
  Well deserved yes. I also became a supporting member. Here is where you do it https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/ https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/
LorenDB 3y ago
Awesome to see that KDE Connect will finally support Bluetooth! Just to be clear, has this backend been added to the Android app or is this a Linux-only feature? I remember being told once that there were limitations (perhaps in Google Play?) preventing the release of a Bluetooth backend.
subjectsigma 3y ago
Man, I really like KDE, it is my preferred desktop on Linux, but something is going on. I downloaded the most recent version of Kubuntu to set up a new Linux desktop and it was unusably buggy. I first blamed my Nvidia card but after switching around between drivers I couldn’t make anything work. Animations would glitch, apps would randomly crash, etc. I eventually installed XFCE and it’s rock solid. I hope going forward some of these stability issues can be fixed.
- troyvit 3y ago
  I had the same problem with Kubuntu. I switched to kde-neon and pretty much all of my problems went away. XFCE is awesome though.
alyandon 3y ago
Many thanks to the KDE team for providing a modern desktop experience that I can tweak and customize out of the box to my personal liking.

117 points by jrepinc 3y ago

KDE Neon with Plasma 6 now available https://blog.neon.kde.org/2024/02/28/kde-neon-6-available-now/ https://blog.neon.kde.org/2024/02/28/kde-neon-6-available-no...

atadier 3y ago

Congratulations to the KDE team for shipping this release! Plasma is now more polished than ever after months of development and QA on the 6.0 branch. This is a great milestone to achieve and sets in a new era for the adoption of the KDE desktop. Cheers!

jrepinc 3y ago

FYI: an interesting video on How KDE Plasma 6 Was Made https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/e6e8f177-22f1-432a-9c7f-ab76b17a5b54 https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/e6e8f177-22f1-432a-9c7f-ab76b17a...

SomeoneFromCA 3y ago

I wonder for how long the will keep supporting X11.

ognarb 3y ago
KDE developer here. Probably for a few more years but there is no timeline yet, but then we do we will definitively announce it some times before (e.g. a year) and are likely to make the release before that an LTS version.
- p4bl0 3y ago
  Congrats on the mega-release to you and all the team who worked hard to get there! I really love KDE. I'm a small time contributor to the project but every time I've been very welcomed and guided all the way through the merging of my contributions on Kate and related projects (KTextEditor, KXMLGUI, etc.), and also Dolphin Plugins. I started using KDE after a very long time without any desktop environment at all, for years before, I did not even have a graphical file manager installed on my systems. I was pretty happy like this: everything was very efficient, no bloat was running on my system that I didn't chose to, I knew how everything worked, etc. Good times. One day I decided that I couldn't seriously continue to tell people to switch to Linux while not having a clue what it's like to use it as a muggle, so I decided to try installing a full DE and start using GUI for real (up to that point my only graphical applications were Firefox and Inkscape from time to time, even my emails were in Emacs etc). I made a bit of looking around to compare Gnome and KDE and decided that KDE was closer to what I'd like. It's now been a few years already and I love it, really. Anyway, all that to give more substance to my big thanks and congratulations :).
  - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
    I personally like gnome a bit more, but it has terrible fractional scaling on hidpi.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
  Font rendering on HiDPI was worse (slightly blurrier, many probably won't notice, but annoys me a lot) on Wayland than X11; probably because X11 had different scaling step, friendlier to the way freetype scales. Many other things just worked better on X11 than on Wayland. I wonder if the problem was solved in Plasma 6 (almost sure it was not).
  - ognarb 3y ago
    Qt6 now support the wayland fractional scaling protocol which should improve the situation quite a bit for applications ported to Qt6.
coffeeaddict1 3y ago
Core KDE apps like Krita still don't support Wayland natively, so my guess is that it will take years before they drop support.
- abrouwers 3y ago
  I'm ignorant, doesn't this come "for free" with Qt6 support? Krita is a bit of an exception, because it's still on Qt5, but "core KDE" apps, as released in kde-applications 24.02, are compiled against Qt6 on my arch install.
  - coffeeaddict1 3y ago
    Well, firstly the team still has to port Krita to Qt 6. That's not trivial because Qt 6 dropped support for Angle and Krita relied on it (especially on Windows where OpenGL drivers aren't the best). So they will need to figure that one out (last I heard they were thinking of manually patching Qt 6 to support Angle again). Secondarily, Qt 6 still has quite a few bugs (e.g. related to input) that will need fixing or patching so that Krita can use it.
    - abrouwers 3y ago
      Yeah, that's fair. I was more taking point with "Core KDE applications," where krita is more of an outlier compared to KDE Gear apps.

frankjr 3y ago

Congratulations on the release. Installing this as soon as it hits Arch's stable repositories.

keyb0ardninja 3y ago

Thank you KDE developers, you're the best! Thank you for all your hard work. Thanks also for making the KDE community the most friendly and welcoming. Plasma 5 has been a joy to use for the last 10 years and I'm sure Plasma 6 will be even better!

nubinetwork 3y ago

Question for the kde devs on hn... how does kde handle input methods now? I was using ibus and mozc but I started getting error messages about ibus crashing because it was already running, so I want to set it up the way kde wants me to. Thanks

ognarb 3y ago
The prefered input methods for Plasma is Fcitx5 but the situation is not perfect yet. But with Wayland, this opens a few new possibilities: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/new-ideas-using-wayland-input-methods/ http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/new-ideas-using-waylan...

jlpcsl 3y ago

Awesome. Been running Plasma 6 since Beta 2 and it is running very stable. Simply the best computer desktop environment there is out there. Even closed proprietary alternatives don't com close. Thank you to all KDE developers and all other contributors for making this possible

guappa 3y ago

The cube is finally back!

panick21_ 3y ago

I have always been a GNOME person and haven't used any KDE since decades ago. I should give it a try again. Looks good.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
I am trying recent kde again on one laptop and mostly like it a lot. It looks relatively slick and a lot less amateurish than it used to. But, right click on konsole and the context menu is just an absolute mess. I use that a lot and can’t believe they fucked it up so bad. Enough that I consider removing it for cinnamon occasionally.
Expurple 3y ago
KDE is pretty stable these days, in a good way. 6 doesn't look very different from 5, it mostly upgrades the tech stack and sets some nice defaults
amlib 3y ago
I'm kind of in the same boat. I used to be an ardent lover of KDE 3 and KDE 3 MOD. Ever since KDE 4 released my interest diminished and once gnome 3/gnome shell became stable at version ~3.2 I switched to it. It was a love and hate relationship for a while but within a few years gnome had become so much nicer to use (from a defaults, "just works" kind of view) than kde that I stopped giving it any chances to pull me back. I guess this is the best time to try KDE again! I really like how desktop centric it is with the more denser application design. And it seems to look half-decent now, instead of whatever they had back in the Oxygen days. I hope GTK/Gnome integration has gotten better...

FabbbDev 3y ago

So glad to hear Plasma 6.0 is finally here, can't wait to dive into Wayland! Just made a donation for the first time, the KDE team really deserves it.

jlpcsl 3y ago
Well deserved yes. I also became a supporting member. Here is where you do it https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/ https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/

LorenDB 3y ago

Awesome to see that KDE Connect will finally support Bluetooth! Just to be clear, has this backend been added to the Android app or is this a Linux-only feature? I remember being told once that there were limitations (perhaps in Google Play?) preventing the release of a Bluetooth backend.

subjectsigma 3y ago

Man, I really like KDE, it is my preferred desktop on Linux, but something is going on. I downloaded the most recent version of Kubuntu to set up a new Linux desktop and it was unusably buggy. I first blamed my Nvidia card but after switching around between drivers I couldn’t make anything work. Animations would glitch, apps would randomly crash, etc. I eventually installed XFCE and it’s rock solid. I hope going forward some of these stability issues can be fixed.

troyvit 3y ago
I had the same problem with Kubuntu. I switched to kde-neon and pretty much all of my problems went away. XFCE is awesome though.

alyandon 3y ago

Many thanks to the KDE team for providing a modern desktop experience that I can tweak and customize out of the box to my personal liking.