Plasma/Plasma 6
< Plasma
Plasma 6 is built on top of Qt 6, and was released on February 28th, 2024.
This page contains packaging notes about how to correctly package a Plasma 6 session, as well as information about what's in each Plasma 6 release.
Packaging notes
See the following pages for information about correctly packaging a KF6/Plasma 6 session:
Per-version changes
Plasma 6.0
New features
- Overview and Desktop Grid effect combined into one with better gestures
- Color management support for sRGB applications on Wayland
- HDR support on Wayland
- More types of default apps can be chosen
- Custom sort ordering for KRunner search results
- Desktop Cube effect returns
- Make wallpaper settings available in System Settings app
- "Dodge Windows" (aka "Intelligent auto-hide"/"Intellihide") visibility mode for Panels, replacing the old "Windows Can Cover" mode
- When rebooting, ability to opt out of installing a downloaded offline update
- "Shake to find cursor" KWin effect (off by default for now, but that may change)
- Colorblindness correction filters
- Support for sound themes
- New "Ocean" default sound theme
- Conversion between time zones in KRunner
- Islamic calendar support
- Power profiles OSD
- Display mirroring/reflection on Wayland
- Simultaneous password + fingerprint/smartcard/etc. auth on lock screen
- The Autostart KCM can now provide detailed technical information about why entries failed to start
- Optional automatic background crash reporting
User interface changes
- Make QtWidgets-based apps less framey
- Panel settings exposed in a much nicer way
- Icons throughout Plasma now all come from the systemwide icon theme, not the Plasma Style
- No more chunky page footers in System Settings
- Re-organize System Settings sidebar
- Smooth mouse wheel scrolling in QtQuick-based software
- Split Battery & Brightness widgets and integrate Night color into one of them
- Visualizer for Night Light transition time
Changes to default settings
(i.e. all of these things can be changed back if you don't like them)
- The Wayland session is now the default in SDDM
- Files and folders are now selected with a single-click and opened with a double-click
- Enable touchpad tap-to-click by default on Wayland
- "Thumbnail Grid" is the new Task Switcher style. Plasma 5's former default "Breeze" Task Switcher has been renamed to "Sidebar"
- Clicking on the scrollbar track now scrolls to the clicked location
- Scrolling on the desktop no longer switches virtual desktops
- The keyboard shortcut used to open the Activity Switcher has been changed to Meta+A
- Use Floating panel by default
- App launchers in the Traditional Task Manager no longer disappear when launched
- In the non-icons-Only Task Manager, app launcher icons no longer disappear the first time their app is launched
Developer-facing changes
- PlasmaComponents 2 has been removed. All usages should be changed to their PlasmaComponents 3 equivalents.
- Widget API has changed, and all widgets need to be ported. See the Plasma 6 widget porting guide to learn how
- Icons in Plasma styles are no longer honored; all icons now come from the systemwide icon theme. Plasma themes should migrate their icons to their companion icon themes, if they have one. For more information, read this.
- Icons requested by name with the
-symbolicsuffix will now always return a symbolic icon if the icon theme has one. Icon themes with colorful and symbolic versions of icons should suffix the symbolic versions with-symbolic. For more information, read this. - The first page in Welcome Center can now be customized. See the README file at https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-welcome for details on how to do this.
- The location on disk where Welcome Center finds custom pages has changed to
/usr/share/plasma/plasma-welcome/extra-pages/.
Removals
- KHotKeys (which provides the "Custom Shortcuts" page in System Settings) - it was unmaintained for over 7 years and its core functionality overlapped the newer, maintained, and better supported KGlobalAccel system. The Mouse actions app may be usable as a replacement for KHotkeys' mouse gestures feature
- The "Windowed widgets KRunner runner - it was confusing users into thinking that widgets (which are intentionally very small and limited) were apps
- The "Grid", "Informative", "Small Icons", "Text Only", and "Thumbnails" Task Switchers - they were worse than other existing ones
- The "Force Font DPI" setting on Wayland - the per-screen scaling system is now considered the only supported method of doing systemwide scaling
- The ability to configure (some) icon sizes semi-systemwide - It didn't work in more places than it did work, and people were trying unsuccessfully to use it instead of more suitable methods of scaling the system
- Per-Activity power settings - they were largely broken, increased code complexity of a fragile part of the system, and were and mostly possible to approximate using other settings
- The Air theme - it was unmaintained and somewhat broken
- Unsplash Picture of the Day provider - it stopped working after Unsplash revoked public API access due to abuse by AI data model training scrapers
- "Save settings for only this specific display arrangement" feature in KScreen - it was too buggy and nearly impossible to fix
- System Settings Icon view - having multiple navigation views for a settings app was just weird
- Windows Shares KCM - It was hyper-specialized and did not work properly in a variety of cases
- GUI support for the Synaptics touchpad drivers - driver unmaintained for years and has has not been recommended for a long time
- GUI support for the Evdev mouse driver - removed to de-complicate backend logic since Libinput is required anyway and includes a better mouse driver
- Quick Share widget - it was completely broken in Qt6, and even in the past when it was working better, it still never worked very well and suffered from multiple unfixable bugs
- "Active screen follows mouse" setting - it caused confusion for users of multi-screen effects when the active window and cursor were on different screens; now the screen considered active is always the one with the active window on it
- Touchpad widget - it did very little and was quite broken, and we were unable to make it work better in time for 6.0. It may return later, though
Plasma 6.1
Oops, forgot to do it. Someone fill this in!
Plasma 6.2
For digital artists
- Option to re-bind the drawing tablet stylus buttons to different types of mouse clicks
- Option for how to map drawing tablet area to screen area
- Drawing tablet calibration wizard
- Test mode for drawing tablet settings
Color Management
- More complete support for the Wayland color management protocol (too many MRs to link)
- Turned on support for the Wayland color management protocol by default
- Improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles
- Tone mapping
- Significant performance improvements for HDR
Power management
- Per-monitor brightness control
- Ability to override apps that are blocking sleep or screen locking
- Battery widget's icon now shows a power profile badge too
- The Battery Monitor widget once again stays visible while the computer is charging
- Meta+B shortcut to switch power profiles now cycles through them individually
Discover and system updating
- Ability to shut down after applying an offline system update, not just reboot
- Discover now supports PostmarketOS
- Discover now helps you write better reviews
- Discover now present apps' license information more accurately
Accessibility
- Full Sticky Keys support on Wayland
- Colorblindness filters now appear in the Accessibility KCM
- Overhaul UI of Accessibility KCM for greater… accessibility!
Weather widget
- Night forecasts for NOAA weather provider
- Now shows "feels like" temperatures for providers that support it (NOAA and EnvCan, currently)
- More information for BBC weather forecasts
- Now uses information-poor providers only as a fallback
Input device configuration
- Support for turning on the "autoscrolling" feature of the Libinput driver
- Option to disable smooth scrolling in KDE apps
Networking
- Support for Enhanced Open (OWE) Wi-Fi security
- Support for WebAuth for SAML-based network authentication
UI/visual design
- Accent color is now respected when using the Breeze Dark Plasma theme or Breeze Twilight global theme
- Better layout for System Tray expanded grid view
- Overhauled Widget Explorer UX
- The Meta+V clipboard popup now uses the same UI as the Plasma widget
- Redesign the Keyboard KCM
- Modernize the Thunderbolt KCM
- Use the same "Open With" dialog everywhere
- More rich visualizations of Plasma features in Welcome Center
- Connecting or disconnecting a screen now plays a sound
- By default, can now drag Breeze-themed windows only from header areas, not from everywhere
- Removed KWin Morphing Popups effect because it was unfixably buggy
Miscellaneous
- Option to disable window outlines in the Pager widget
- "Minimize All" widget now only minimizes windows on the current virtual desktop and activity
- Ability to name your custom shortcuts
- Integrated cropping tool when setting your user avatar
- Once-a-year donation request notification
- Tearing now works out of the box with a new enough kernel
Technical
- Memory page in Info Center
- Implemented the alpha-modifier KWin protocol
- Initial implementation of SVG cursor theming, and ported the Breeze themes to use it
Plasma 6.3
Tablets and other input devices
- Regained the ability to disable a touchpad while a mouse is plugged in
- Customizable stylus pressure curve for drawing tablets
- Re-mappable/swappable stylus button functions
- Overhaul Drawing Tablet KCM UI to better support its growing amount of features
- Add stylus pressure and tilt information to the tablet tester
- Map a portion of the tablet surface, and redo how the mapping is visualized
- Limit the pressure range of a stylus
Screen & window management
- Pixel grid effect at very high screen zoom levels
- Option to prefer screen color accuracy at the expense of some system performance
- Reduced blurriness with fractional scale factors
- HDR on "SDR" laptop displays
- color management for night light, making it both correct and look better 1 2
- Windows lower in the stacking order no longer instantly raise when dragging stuff out of them
Desktop & Panels
- Clone a panel
- Desktop widgets are slightly translucent, just like panel widgets
- "Show Target" item in desktop context menu for links
- Fixed most known bugs related to desktop icons losing their positions
- Greatly improved performance of dragging desktop icons to select them
Widgets
- Category switching on hover in Kickoff is optional and off by default
- Symbolic category sidebar icons in Kickoff are now optional
- Digital Clock now displays more than 5 calendar events per day
- Printers widget shows each printer's queue inline
- Task Manager widget's grouping indicator follows the accent color
- System Tray tries to show a symbolic icon for 3d-party apps when it can
- Can jump between categories in KRunner-powered searches using PgUp/PgDn and Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down
- Widget Explorer gives you the opportunity to remove all instances of a widget
- Nighttime forecasts when using a Deutscher Wetterdienst weather station
- Help Center, Info Center, and Welcome center appear in a new "Help" category in launcher menus
- "Settings" launcher menu category has been folded into "System"
Notifications
- "You missed n notifications" popup after exiting Do Not Disturb mode
- Consistent close button style and new Notification popup timeout indicator
Discover/system updating
- Displays when an app is published by its developer, or verified by a trusted third party
- Highlights sandboxed apps whose permissions will change after being updated
Accessibility
Technical
- System notification that explains what happens when something was terminated because the system ran out of memory
- Info Center shows number of battery charge cycles
- Info Center shows all GPUs
- GPU stats on FreeBSD
- Support for the xdg_toplevel_icon Wayland protocol
- KWin rules are disable-able
- Respects the system's configured network connectivity check URL
- Pre-authorize apps and system components to allow remote desktop usage
Plasma 6.4
Window Management
UI/visual design
- Darker Breeze Dark color scheme
- UI overhaul for Info Center energy page
- UI overhaul for KMenuEdit app
- Darkened background behind authentication dialogs
- "Animations" page in system settings for easier configurability of animated effects
- Lock screen UI shown on one screen at a time (the one with focus or the pointer)
- Lock screen password synced across multiple screens
Notifications
- Speed graph in file transfer notifications
- Notifications retain their interactive features in the history view
- Notifications respect non-KDE apps' requests to play sounds
- Can send persistent notifications to the history
- Can install system updates straight from the notification about them
- Focused full-screen app engages Do Not Disturb mode by default
- "Your microphone is muted" OSD when an app tries to use muted mic
Widgets
- Newly-installed apps highlighted in Kickoff
- Playback rate selector in the Media Player widget
- Disks & Devices widget checks for and repair file system errors on devices
- App-provided System Tray icons can be individually hidden
- Sticky Notes widget can be pinned open
- Option to scroll through only windows of hovered task in Task Manager
- Option to badge Bluetooth widget with number of connected devices
- Large amount of visual and functional improvements to the Comics widget
Accessibility
- Can move the pointer using numberpad keys on Wayland
- Can activate zoom with three-finger touchpad pinch gesture
For digital artists
- "Relative mode" for tablet stylii
- More intuitive configurability of stylus buttons
- Easier to revert and recover from a bad tablet calibration
Color management
- HDR calibration wizard
- "Extended Dynamic Range" (note: different from HDR) support on monitors that support it
- Ability to limit color depth on monitors that support it
- Support for the P010 video color format, improving power efficiency with HDR video content
KRunner
Spectacle / Screenshots & screen recording
- Overhauled UX with less modal rectangular region overlay used by default
- Massively better-quality screen recordings when using the WebM format and/or fractional scale factors
File Management
System Monitoring
- Support for monitoring Intel GPU statistics in System Monitor app and widgets
- Per-process GPU monitoring for Intel and AMD GPUs
- GPU usage graph on System Monitor history page, plus alternate CPU graph
- "Background services" group on System Monitor's Applications page
- "Sensors" page in Info Center showing raw sensor data
- Free space monitor monitors everything, not just / and /home
Technical
- Plasma Browser Integration supports the Flatpak versions of Firefox and Chromium variants like LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium
- Support for the "Idle notify" Wayland protocol
- Support for the "Relative tablet dials" Wayland protocol
- Support for the "Toplevel tag" Wayland protocol
- Support for the "Color representation" Wayland protocol
- Support for the "Fifo" Wayland protocol
- Support for the "Single Pixel Buffer" Wayland protocol
- Support for the Clipboard portal
- Initial non-user-facing support for session save/restore on Wayland
- Less spam from Plasma in your system logs
Plasma 6.5
Aesthetics/Visual Design
- Rounded bottom window corners for borderless Breeze-themed windows
- Day/night global theme switching
- Day/night wallpaper switching
- Option to prefer light or dark versions of dynamic wallpapers
- Choose which Global Themes are shown on System Settings' landing page
Widgets & KRunner
- Starred/saved clipboard items
- Fuzzy matching for apps in KRunner-powered searches
- Global shortcuts found by KRunner-powered searches
- Much improved Sticky Notes when placed in a panel
For Digital Artists
Accessibility
- Text insertion point tracking in Zoom effect
- Many small changes throughout Plasma to improve text readability, reduce flickering, and use visual effects for anything that plays a sound
System
- Clipboard sharing in RDP server
- RDP server lets you use existing user accounts
- Printer ink level monitoring and notifying of low levels
- Install hardware drivers in Discover
- Quick toggles in System Settings' sidebar
- Configuration page for portal-based app permissions (not just Flatpak permissions)
Technical
- Support for "overlay planes" which will, once driver support is stable enough to enable it by default, help to reduce GPU and power usage with many apps
- Support for the "Picture in Picture" Wayland protocol
- Support for the "Pointer Warp" Wayland protocol
Plasma 6.6
Plasma/widgets
- Create your own global themes from current settings
- Connect to Wi-Fi networks via QR code
- Skin tone filter in Emoji Selector app
- Option to change Task volume by scrolling over it
- Global actions to seek backwards or forwards in playing media
- Window List widget gained many features, including open-on-hover, hiding the app/window icon, and configurable filters for which windows to show
- Lock/Logout widget lets you configure the order of icons
- Pin buttons for the Web Browser and Audio Volume widget when placed standalone on a panel.
- Alt-double-click on desktop items to see their properties
- New mobile wired network page
Appearance & style
- Visual overhaul of the XDG portal dialogs
- Nicer, more consistent margins for list items and header toolbars in Kirigami-based apps
Accessibility
- Configurable intensity for frames/outlines
- Monochrome/grayscale colorblindness filter
- "Slow keys" on Wayland
- "Always centered" pointer mode for the Zoom effect
- Support for the new XDG "reduced motion" setting
Spectacle/screenshots/screen recording/screen-casting
System
- Initial release of plasma-keyboard, a replacement for the Maliit virtual keyboard
- Initial release of plasma-login-manager, a replacement for SDDM
- Initial release of plasma-setup, a wizard for OOBE/OEM setup
- Optional automatic brightness adjustments on hardware with an ambient light sensor
- Option for virtual desktops only on the primary screen
- USB portal
- Font installation support in Discover on supported distros
- Support for hardware-based screen content sharpening
- Crash reporting for non-KDE app crashes
- Support for oo7 secret service provider
- KWin better supports using game controllers as input devices
System Monitoring
- Use the full command of a process to search for it
- Add re-nice dialog to set priority of processes with a UI
Performance/efficiency
- Reduced idle memory usage and fixed a number of specific memory leaks
- Smoother animations with high refresh-rate screens on Wayland
- Vastly improved screen mirroring support on Wayland
- Custom screen mode support on Wayland
- Per-DRM-plane color pipelines on Wayland
- Aurorae window decoration engine was rewritten, fixing many bugs and performance issues
Plasma 6.7
Plasma & widgets
- Light/dark mode toggle switch in Brightness & Color widget
- Option to set keyboard shortcut for global push-to-talk
- Option to set keyboard shortcut to clear notification history
- Easy selection of mixed skin tone emojis in Emoji Selector app
- Customizable sorting and grouping in the Window List widget
System
- Easy setup for printers shared from Windows networks
- support for the ext-background-effect-v1 Wayland protocol
Roadmap: Plasma 6.7, but not merged yet
- upscaling without blurriness in the Zoom effect
- Customizable touchpad gestures
- Per-screen virtual desktops
- Tablet touch strip configurability
- Location services KCM
- Union theming system tech preview Info on Union Theming System
- Show GNOME-style "background apps" in the system tray
- Respect your preferred style of storage units in System monitor