What’s going from Plasma?
Plasma 6 will contain many new bells and whistles, while some existing features face the chop.
Work has been proceeding on the upcoming Plasma 6 desktop. According to the KDE Community Wiki, it’s built on top of Qt 6 and is tentatively planned to be released in late 2023 or early 2024. The new desktop isn’t pre-installed on any stable Linux distro but the KDE website explains how to deploy the current build on operating systems like KDE Neon Unstable.
Forthcoming new features include a significantly faster cursor, even when system resources are low. There’s also plans for a sound theme page in system settings. Still, there are also current Plasma desktop features that are being removed for version 6.
Speaking on his website on 26th July, KDE developer Nate Graham explained that a full list can be found at https:// community.kde.org/Plasma/ Plasma_6#Removals. However, he also goes on to explain the context behind some of these changes. One of the main differences is the removal of KHotkeys, a very handy feature that traditionally enabled users to create global shortcuts using keys and even mouse gestures. Nate explained that not all these features work well with Wayland, and other aspects are buggy because the project hasn’t been in active development for some time. Plasma 6 will remove KHotkeys altogether in favour of KGlobalAccel, which also supports global keyboard shortcuts.
Other planned removals include the Windowed Widgets runner, whereby widgets could appear in search results. This caused confusion for users, who might believe widgets were actually fully featured apps. Plasma 6 is also removing some ways in which global font DPI and icon size can be changed to simplify the desktop interface.