KDE Plasma 6 released
The long anticipated upgrade to the Plasma desktop has been released with huge improvements.
On 28th February, Plasma 6 (built on top of Qt6) was released. One of the biggest changes is that Plasma now defaults to the Wayland display server, with experimental support for HDR. X11 will be supported for the foreseeable future and users can still select it upon login.
The desktop has also overhauled how it deals with workspaces. Mercifully for inept touchpad users, scrolling via the desktop no longer automatically switches users from one workspace to another. You can still use touchpad gestures to summon the new overview screen to display and select individual workspaces, however. The much-loved desktop ‘cube’ effect has also returned.
While we’re talking mouse movements, for the first time Plasma now defaults to doubleclicking for opening files and folders. (You can still switch back to single-click if you wish.)
The desktop still uses a tweaked version of the Breeze theme but now also incorporates a floating panel by default. It defloats when you’re touching a window, including when said window is maximised.
Plasma also now ships with a new default sound theme, Ocean, which adds new sounds to improve usability, such as for connecting and disconnecting devices.
On 5th March, KDE released Plasma’s first point release (6.0.1), which fixes various bugs including keeping files and folders visible as they’re moved between screens. The new Overview effect has also been tweaked to allow closing via the top-left hot corner, while a bug has been fixed in the Plasma panel that caused it to disappear when users tried to add widgets. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6