KDE PLASMA 6 review: was it worth the wait?

plasma 6 is now officially released and it's been more than a year since the previous release of that desktop while 5.27 was awesome plasma 6 brings a ton of good stuff whether you're already a KD user or you would just like to try it and maybe move to it so we're going to look at everything new in plasma 6 my experience with it and also add this message from our sponsor this video is sponsored by protonvpn the encrypted and private virtual private network from the creators of proton mail protonvpn lets you bypass censorship and region locking by connecting to a server anywhere in the world so you can stream any content you like from any service without restrictions or access parts of the internet that your country doesn't want you to have access to and thanks to their VPN accelerator proton VPN is also really fast it also comes with net Shield an ad malware and tracker blocker that makes your private browsing even better and safer and protonvpn doesn't keep any logs meaning that they don't track or record your browsing activity at all and they can't disclose it to anyone it can even integrate with the tour Network and it comes with apps for Windows Mac OS Linux Android and iOS or as a browser extension protonvpn is free and if you want even faster speeds and more features you can upgrade to a paid plan protonvpn is also included in your free proton mail account so you can transition your entire Digital Life to a private and encrypted solution so click the link in the description below and get started with protonvpn Okay so let's get the technical changes to plasma 6 out of the way so we can focus after that on the features and the pretty visual changes plasma 6 moved its back end to cute 6 and entirely meaning that everything should benefit from better efficiency better performance and better security as well it was a necessary transition and all components of the default plasma experience move to that you shouldn't really notice any of that but just know that it's a better base for the plasma developers to work on plasma 6 is also the first version that makes whan it's default recommendation they ship with Wayland and all the focus for new features is on way although certain features might make it to X11 if they have the time or if it's even possible to make them on X11 dros can still choose to ship plasma 6 with X11 as the default but that is not what the desktop recommends and that whand support is pretty Flawless in my experience everything was Zippy smooth it didn't crash it's super reliable even on an Nvidia GPU of course it doesn't fix the issues that whan has itself or the applications that don't support it natively like wine or proton for example but where the general experience of whand in plasma 5.27 was solid in plasma 6 it is just perfect the mouse cursor is more responsive even when the desktop itself stutters under load latency was greatly improved especially for games and on top of that if the composit or crashes it will no longer kill all your open apps they'll be safely moved to a backup compon depositor while kwin recovers and takes over again it also looks like the X whand Video Bridge has been added to handle screen sharing from X11 apps running on whan although it might have been the dr's work to add that I've seen it included by default in feda 40 and in KD neon so if you used whan previously on KD you will keep using it and it's going to be better than in the previous version and if you didn't like whon before chances are your problem is fixed in here but if you just liked whan because it's whan then well yeah you're sticking to X11 anyway now this release also brings a few cool things courtesy of whand HDR is Now supported provided your display also supports it it's not complete yet it lacks the ability to render mixed SDR and HDR content at the same time but for full screen videos games or pictures you'll be able to see them in HDR you can also set a color profile for each display individually on Wayland as well plasma will then adjust the colors on screen following that profile apps will still only use the srgb color space but the plasma team has plans to add more spaces and finally you also get color blindness correction filters in the settings to make things more legible I'm not color blind so I cannot judge their efficiency but there are plenty of options to handle most color blindness types so I'm sure it will make a difference for a lot of people so yeah the backbone of PL Asma 6 is really really solid I've been using it since the second release candidate and it never crashed on me once and I can safely say it is not the bug ridden mess that KD5 was when it released this one is super polished and very stable now for the pretty visual changes there isn't a lot to cover here but there are a few changes plasma still looks like plasma it is still using the breeze theme and icons but they were refined a little bit first the theme is now lighter on the eyes they have removed a bunch of the borders that every single panel inside of an app had so the whole feel of the desktop is similar but also nicer you don't have as many lines to separate the content to draw your eyes separators are just one pixel lines now there's no blue overlay on top of each selected panel it just looks better nothing looks like it's nested inside of the app it's just more streamlined status bars at the bottom of apps also now have a line above them to separate them from the rest of the application highlighted items in list views are also different now with rounded corners and a little bit of spacing I think it looks okay it's similar to The Highlight effect that you would get in a menu bar the controls have been made more consistent they tend to have more similar Heights and sizes meaning that the alignment of buttons and combo boxes and search fields in the toolbars will feel better as well it is definitely not a huge change but apps do look less busy and more polished so it's a good change all around it's just not a revolution in terms of how plasma looks another visual change is the floating panel by default your own settings won't be overwritten but for new users the panel will now hover over the bottom edge of the screen and in terms of usability it is unchanged compared to how it was you don't have to aim precisely for the exact icon you can click under the panel and it will still activate what you clicked or what you intended to click and that's about it for the visual changes plasma 6 looks like KD plasma 5.27 it's just a little bit less busy more legible more streamlined I think the changes are good but if you didn't like breeze before you will still not like how plasma 6 looks now for the desktop related features because that's really what will change your experience with plasma so first the default they have changed drastically it will not affect how you use your computer if you just upgrade in place but for new users those defaults make a lot more sense first single click to select is Now the default with double click to open in theory single click to open is easier and more logical but the truth is most users that come to Linux are already used to another OS and all other operating systems use double click to open so it makes sense to to move to that you obviously can still go back to single click to open if you prefer that tap to click on touchpads is also the default now which is normal it should always have been and the task switcher that comes up when you press alt plus tab is a more familiar grid of thumbnails instead of the side column plasma used before the team also disabled scrolling on the desktop to switch workspaces the option is still there if you want to enable it but for newcomers it will avoid weird behaviors that they just did not understand now that's it for the defaults they also removed a few options from the rightclick menu on the desktop you can still reenable them but the menu looks less busy those are same defaults and they'll be better for newcomers to Linux and 2kd because they're closer to what they're used to now for the changes that will affect everyone first panel configuration the previous messy popups and rulers were replaced by something much more visual which which will absolutely be a better experience you get visual representations of the settings that you're changing with combo boxes to select what you want you can change the heights the opacity the position the alignment the length and the visibility all in one place and you also gained a new Option the ability for the panel to dodge Windows meaning that the panel will be visible at all times unless a window covers it at which point it just gets out of the way and you can bring it back by pushing your mouse cursor against the Ed Ed that the panel rests on it is the auto height feature that I needed that has been missing in plasma for a long while it's long overdue and it's awesome to finally have it again now another big change is the combination of the overview and the present Windows effect in itself it feels like the older overview except it looks a lot like gnomes where your current desktop has rounded Corners hovers over a blurred translucent background with a strip of virtual ual desktops on top and a krunner search field under it what also changed are the touchpad gestures and these are much much better you don't have to repeat the same gesture twice to go back to your desktop after opening the overview it is now as good as gnome's activity View and as nice to use with Dodge pad gestures I have nothing to criticize here it's just a stellar improvement over everything you don't feel like these animations and effects have been tacked on the based desktop you feel like you're actually interacting with the desktop itself which was the goal so Props it really really works well now you can also get the desktop Cube back I could only make it work if I had four virtual desktops I didn't write with more it's not more functional than the overview it's probably worse it's not more usable than the overview it's probably worse but it is pretty and it did help convert a lot of users back in the day so why not another change is the ability to just click inside of her scroll Bar's area to move the content directly to that area you don't have to drag the scroll bar or use the mouse wheel you just click where you'd like to go and the scroll bar jumps there finally krunner got faster way faster and it now lets you reorder the various elements that it shows when you search for something provided you add them to your favorit and the reordering is not really wizzy Weg like you have to drag an element and drop it on top of another before it gets reordered it's not super usable in terms of interface but you can actually sold the results in the order that you want them to so these are some pretty cool refinements and cool features it's not as much as I had hoped for a full year of development but at the same time it does make KD feel a lot more polished especially on the overview side of things and the panel configuration so those are really great changes and whether you're newcomer or someone used to KD they're just going to make your workflow better now for the changes in the settings because it's plasma and it needs to change its settings with every single release first visually the settings are less busy gone are the double rows of icons at the bottom of pages they now mostly move to the toolbar of the settings app meaning that settings Pages now look a bit nicer and the space that the app uses is used better as well they've also reduced the number of pages that were opened by clicking a button inside of another page so things are easier to find and the settings were reordered into other categories that will make more sense to certain people and less sense to others it is a side grade it doesn't really improve navigation in the settings it's just a different way of sorting them some people will like it I personally don't care now you do get a new sound theme preference page to change the sounds that your desk toop will play for certain actions and the default sound theme was also revamped it's now called ocean it sounds okay it reminds me a lot of the PS5 sound effects I generally just disable most of these sounds anyway and finally you also get easier configuration of which app will open a broad category of files you can set for example an app for all audio files or an app for all video files instead of handling that for each file type you can still do that of course but it's easier to apply sweeping changes they also touched up and merged and revamped and made other settings Pages more legible it's definitely an improvement but it doesn't make those settings easier to navigate there's still a lot of options everywhere if you like that you're going to be okay with it if you didn't you're still going to be lost personally I'm used to it by now but I will admit the settings in KD will never look streamlined or easy because there are just too many options and that's what what KD is here for and let's finish this tour with the changes to the applications dolphin received changes to its settings as well reordering a bunch of things and it gained keyboard shortcuts to access the toolbar buttons and the dis space usage bar that lives in the status bar you can also now right click a folder to open it in split view spectacle the screen recorder now shows a tray icon when it's recording your screen you can click that icon to end the recording it also supports recording just a part of your screen and it has new keyboard shortcuts to handle all of this everything will now be saved by default in the pictures SL screenshots directory or the pictures SLC screencasts directory and of course you can change that it also supports vp9 to record videos and you can also invoke it using the command line Kate the text editor has a new Json parser that's apparently way faster it now supports text to speech it can also sync the scrolling in split view and it has more automatic setup options for a variety of languages console has redesigned settings as well and will now use less Ram text selection now works for Chinese Korean or Japanese languages and every tab now runs in a separate cgroup meaning the entire app will no longer be killed if your system needs to kill a process to save some resources KD connect can now connect to other devices using Bluetooth only and it now supports mdns meaning you should see available devices now instead of having to hunt them down or use their IP address to connect to them its settings also now live in the system settings instead of their own window and a bunch of apps also receive changes like the contact Suite received a ton of work although the interface is still extremely complex and unwieldy kadon live received the ability to replace an audio or a video clip in the timeline and also better easing modes for various transitions neoch chat The Matrix client now has a welcome page to set up an account or create one and it now supports spaces and toodon the masteron client now let you set focal points on images you can hide boosts and replies in the timeline and it has a better first launch experience so plasma 6 it took a year to arrive and was it worth the wait honestly I think so yes it is not a revolution it's not like the transition from KD 3.5 to kd4 or even from 4 to 5 it's more like a move from KD 5.27 to something like KD 5.50 you do get a lot of refinements to the theme to the settings and to the apps and the desktop feels more polished and less like a jum ball of parts that sort of plug into each other but it is still KD plasma if you loved it you will probably love it even more it just got better if you didn't like it chances are you will still not like it and if you're a newcomer to Linux it's probably going to be a better starting point than it ever was before what is more interesting is the new underlying stack with a solid foundation using cute 6 and with whan support being as close to perfect as can be while we wait for the last few protocols that are still missing plasma 6 is in a fantastic place to move the Linux desktop into the future or into the present if like me you have moved to Wayland a while back and you haven't touched X11 that all old thing in a long long one whatever your case is you can still use KD plasma with X11 and if you use whand you will love your experience even more because plasma 6 basically fixes all the remaining issues that KD had under whand so yeah now you can wait for your Dro to actually ship plasma 6 to you if you use Fedora you'll get it in April with Fedora 40 if you use kubuntu or any obuntu base drro you will not get it until October which is a long while if you use Katy neon you'll get it automatically and if you use a rolling release drro chances are it's going to come in the coming weeks or month personally I will wait for tuxedo OS to bring those packages from KD neon into the dro I'm sure it will take a few weeks but I'm also sure they will give me the update relatively soon and speaking of tuxedo they're also the sponsor of this video if you need a new computer to run Linux on and you want to support a company that actually supports Linux instead of get giving your money to a company that only shipes their devices with Windows then take a look at the link in the description below and look at tuxedo computers they make laptops desktops and nugs that run with Linux out of the box and all their devices are very customizable they have a big big range that will cover every price point and every need whether you need an office laptop all the way up to a giant workstation or gaming tower or a gaming laptop you can open all the laptops and also repair them and upgrade them you can pick from a variety of components you can have your own logo engraved on the lid you can pick your own custom keyboard layout it's just really really solid I only use tuxedo devices these days the whole Channel runs on a tuxedo Infinity Book Pro 16 and all my gaming is done on a tuxedo Cube running Holo ISM so if you need a new computer you want to run Linux and you want to give your money to a company that actually supports Linux and contributes patches Upstream then click the link in the descrip and get yourself a device from tuxedo they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did you know what to do there's a like button subscribe button a notification Bell icon the comment section and all that good stuff and if you really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links to support it down in the description including patreon and YouTube memberships which will actually get you access to a daily Linux and open source news show from Monday to Friday so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one [Music] bye

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 172,433

Keywords: linux, open source, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, opensource, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2023, linux vs windows, linux tutorial 2024, plasma 6, kde plasma 6, kde plasma release, plasma 6 review, plasma 6 hdr, plasma kde linux, linux plasma, linux kde, kde neon, plasma 6 overviews, kde wayland, plasma 6 wayland, kde 6, plasma wayland nvidia, plasma 6 release date, how to get plasma 6, plasma 6 arch, plasma 6 ubuntu, plasma 6 fedora

Id: mtaQroi75M0

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024