Opinions on KDE Plasma 6

Overwhelmingly positive.

30

99% positive. Wayland works flawlessly. HDR didn't cause issues (all AMD hardware).

The only issues I have off the top of my head are

1: Some icons in the system tray and system settings menu (the 'Clipboard' icon on the dock and the 'Touchscreen' tab in settings, and a couple others) display as a blank rectangle sometimes. Other times, they display as they should. Haven't even bothered looking for a solution as it doesn't effect usability in the slightest.

2: Certain pop up menus for dock applets, ie the Bluetooth applet, display incorrectly. I actually saw a post of another user having this issue, where the window only shows as a small square, and can require a re-log to actually make it work.

Other than these minor glitches, nothing has given me any issues.

26

To 2.: I only had that issue appear when launching Firefox or Vivaldi. Might have been a custom widget. Wiped my install and now the issue is gone? Sadly wasn’t able to diagnose the issue any further

1

Good

23

It’s like al KDE projects IMHO. Good on the surface and works well. But use it for any length of time and you will find problems, unfinished areas, or parts where it was implemented without considering why it was like this in the first place.

For example, plug your 1080p laptop into a display with 4K and watch are your desktop icon gets sorted by a-z randomly instead of keeping the order you had it.

Or try to add a calendar even to your system by clicking the calendar which is found in the date and time on the taskbar.

Online accounts added to the system do not integrate into other KDE apps requiring additional signin.

I feel this is probably caused from KDE’s team being small, but having a large suite of apps.

19

Sounds like you have a pretty okay experience but some specific things don’t work - please take some time to report bugs if you haven’t yet!

2
- I've moved away from KDE for a while now. Been using Cinnamon since.
  
  And most of my "bugs" are more missing features than anything.
  
  4
Poor integration with Google was a major reason to go back to Gnome.

What’s the value of to do app, calendar, events if I can’t have it synchronized across devices.

2

I recently switched from being a long time GNOME user over to KDE Neon. It has been a nearly flawless experience.

My biggest complaint so far is the lack of NFS support in Dolphin, which I use for my NAS. GNOME Files had native support for NFS. Now I have to manually mount from CLI and then it'll show up in Dolphin (eventually I'll setup fstab, but haven't done it yet).

12

Argh I found out the same thing about NFS! I was so confused!

You can still put it in FStab though, if you want it accessible on boot. :)

1
- Yeah I'm going to do that when I use my machine next. Was just nice having it as a favorite shortcut on the side and only mounting it when I needed it.
  
  2
How is experience with mounted samba drives?

I found that apps don’t see them easily, which is a usability problem.

1
Have you considered smb? Dolphin natively supports it.

1
- I have both but prefer NFS over it for speed. SMB before multichannel used to choke pretty hard on Linux. It's better now, but NFS is still the better protocol.
  
  1

It works fine for me. Not on wayland but that's down to my Nvidia card and I hope explicit sync will sort it out.

12

Definitely noticing more bugs than I did on KDE 5, but I'm happy for the new features and over ease of use 👍

9

Works very well. Only issue is missing ported extensions and the cursors lol.

For some reason all cursors made for plasma 5 are blurry, so the existing "breeze plasma 5 cursors" dont work that well.

And I miss "minimal desktop switcher" as the Plasma 6 alternative just makes Plasma desktop crash for some reason.

9

IMO the best Linux desktop experience that you can get right now

7

Hi! I currently am on LMDE with Cinnamon (after trying a lot of distros and DE). I use laptops and so I am curious about trying wayland, which can offer a better experience with gestures, as far as I understand. Gnome is cool, but it is not flexible and I don't want to install extensions over extensions. So I am thinking about KDE 6, again. I like it but at a certain point it drives me crazy. There is always something that doesn't work well. Maybe it's because I change too many things. I don't know. Anyway, is it true that KDE 6 is not really stable yet or its stability level is simply the usual one?

6

I hardly change anything in Plasma. In my experience Plasma 6 is about as stable as Plasma 5.27 is/was. I rarely see a crash, freeze or inconsistancy I didn't cause myself.

8
- Good to know. I'll give it a look then
  
  2

I had to wait a little for my favorite widgets to get updated to 6, now I'm good.
I have been using the Wayland session for a while (I was on for months on 5), and it solved so many multi-monitor woes it has been worth the switch. So far my only complaint is that remote access solutions are rather limited on Plasma, with Sunshine and Moonlight being the only consistently working solution, as Krfb (VNC) crashes randomly, doesn't handle modifier keys well and forces you to click "OK" on a dialog every startup, thus making it useless for unattended access (Plasma issue).

Other than remote access, no complaints.

5

Screensharing is broken, pretty good other than that

4

It’s some apps still being broken, not the desktop. Screen sharing works perfectly fine for me in Slack, Teams (unofficial app by IsmaelMartinez) and web browsers. There’s also X11 to Wayland video bridge that can be used as temporary workaround in unsupported apps.

7
- This is good to know. It is one of the things that most interest me.
  
  2

I use the wayland session on an Intel machine with no dedicated GPU, works flawlessly for me.

4

Fixed most of my problems with Nvidia+Wayland. I still have to keep the explicit sync patched Xwayland around until it gets a new release, but other than that it works nearly flawless.

4

Really needs more stability and to solidify its modifying features, not have them a bit everywhere. Really cant have a black screen bug every time I put my PC/Laptop to sleep

4

works fine for me, didn't really see any big issues.

4

Looks really sleek with the new floating panels, and being able to turn a panel into an icon task manger is still nice, and the new overview window is great for workflow.

However multi monitor support is still garbage. Like 3/4 of programs will never remember their size and position, so you have to make a never ending list of kwin window rules, which then end up affecting other windows you don't want to. Other things like right click menus will show up on the wrong monitor way off in a corner get old real fast. Its like the cartoon spiderman meme of 3 Spiderman's pointing at each other. Qt6, Wayland, and kwin all pointing the blame of why its like the way it is, while bug reports rack up another year of no fixes.

HDR having a toggle and working is really nice, but when it was on and I booted up a game, the in game options wouldn't allow me to turn on HDR.

4

Like 3/4 of programs will never remember their size and position, so you have to make a never ending list of kwin window rules, which then end up affecting other windows you don’t want to

That's Wayland specific isn't it? X11 behaves a lot better in that regard

4
I have not had a single issue with a right click menu or a window not remembering size or position with multi monitors on tumbleweed

4
the HDR by my understanding is basically just automatic conversion, not actually support for programs to use HDR on their own. I've been using gamescope to run games in native HDR.

2

it works fine for me

3

Works great for me. I’m on X11 for now as an application for work refuses to work with Wayland - support page and I haven’t tried figuring out how to get it to use Xwayland.

Now that I think about it, I had one issue with screen tearing but that was more a driver issue with Nvidia.

3

Mostly positive althought there has been no shortage of bugs. That said, when I did a clean installation (not an upgrade), most of them disappeared, so I guess I'd recommend a fresh install. I still wouldn't say it's as stable as Gnome or Cinnamon, but the trajectory KDE have been on when it comes to making their DE less janky has been amazing recently.

There's been a lot of subtle UI improvements that make KDE feel a lot less disjointed, although you still see it here and there.

The improvements to the overview (Gnome activities view clone) are great.

Compared to the absolute shit show that was Plasma 4 and 5 for their initial releases, Plasma 6 is amazing. It's still not my DE of choice, but I keep it on one of my systems just to see the progress.

3

I haven't noticed a huge difference from kde 5. Wayland works for normal browsing and computer use but breaks when I play games so I'm still on x11.

3

Why can't I inline two tab bars? I want a center island with a task manager and an island on the right with a system tray.

Otherwise it's peachy.

3

working very well for me, and the most thing that i notice is scaling at 125% now not being blurry.

3

They borked some features which I used and haven't fixed them yet.

3

Which ones?

3
- I use the fullscreen start menu. I can't select search results with keyboard anymore.
  
  Inverting window colors doesn't work for me anymore, after they set the default to wayland. (I used it for app's which don't have a dark theme)
  
  Focus stealing prevention (global setting and window rules) doesn't work anymore.
  
  window positioning guidelines keep flickering in and out of existence all day, even when I don't resize any windows.
  
  6

Anecdotal, but for me worked a lot better with my monitors (both the same exact model though). On plasma 5 they had trouble waking up after suspending

3

Pretty good overall. I had Dolphin crash on me once, and even killing and restarting the process didn't help, only a system restart fixed the issue. Not sure what that was all about, I could access files just fine with other applications.

It also has some smaller bugs/lack of polish. The keyboard layout switch overlay/hint/toast appears at the correct position only for the first time, after that it snaps to the top-left corner of one of the connected displays.

I've also had the system tray icon popups reduce their width and height to 0 more than once, requiring a change in the config file under ~/.config to correct this issue.

2

I tried it on my laptop. Apps that used to run without any problems would terminate randomly. I also tried it on desktop with AMD video card and didn’t observe this issue.

Overall i went back to gnome 3 days later.

1

Only issue for me is that the KWin scripting API doesn't work the way it did so my custom shortcut doesn't work.

1

I have no what extra it provides, all I know is I was debugging for a while after the update, and I had to make compromises because of bugs I couldn't fix. Soooo

1

It was a bit rocky coming over from Plasma 5, but settled in nicely now.

1

Works mostly fine for me, but for some reason the system tray popups don't work on my 2nd monitor most of the time, but sometimes they seemingly randomly work. Otherwise completely smooth sailing.

1

It was unstable in my case (AMD and Intel graphics), the UI is not great in my personal opinion and to me it just looks and feels like a low-budget beginner OEM system. Sorry KDE devs but that's my opinion

-2

Absolutely unusable for one big reason: still no good tiling options in KDE. They got me hopeful with their tiled area system but then dropped the ball on execution. An OS without tiling is functionally unusable for real work. There aren't even any good KWin scripts for it. At least Windows has stuff like FancyWM. Will not be using any time soon. GNOME, with the ability to install Pop Shell 2, is by far the superior DE, and it's not even close, and I'll stick to that for most things and a WM/compositor (in this case Hyprland) on my main machine. KDE is and will continue to be trash until they can add true tiling support. Might as well some 1980s looking WM like OpenBox. That's what KDE is. Old and unusable. Nothing else they "improve" matters since the core of operations doesn't function.

-10

bro thinks the whole world revolves around his schizo tilling demand

11
Chill dude. Bismuth for Plasma 5 was amazing, and Polonium is shaping up to be a great succesor on Plasma 6. This is open source. You can fight and support your cause. But your attitude would make Pop Shell devs burn their own project down out of fear 😅.

7
- Bismuth for Plasma 5
  
  Nah. I couldn't get behind Bismuth either. You had rigid ways you could arrange your windows with no way to adjust.
  
  For instance, you can't get a layout like this with Bismuth (or any dynamic tilers that I know of, i.e. dynamic tilers aren't worth using):
  
  --------------------------------------- | A | B | | |--------------| |----------------------| C | | E | F |--------------| | | | J | K | ---------------------------------------
  
  The closest in Bismuth would be using master and slave like:
  
  --------------------------------------- | A | B | | |--------------| | | C | |----------------------|--------------| | E | J | |----------------------|--------------| | F | K | ---------------------------------------
  
  Which isn't nearly as useful
  
  I gave Plasma a genuine, honest try, both 5 and 6, and it was a complete let down.
  
  But your attitude would make Pop Shell devs burn their own project down out of fear
  
  Nah bc the Pop Shell devs have done an AMAZING job. The new COSMIC will make KDE and GNOME look like pet projects when it drops.
  
  1
I don't really want to give some of your hyperbolic statements credibility by replying, but - I've been loving Mudeer for tiling. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a true tiling window manager and my setup does straddle the line between tiling and floating, but it works great for me.

4
- I'll give it a look
  
  1