Plasma/Plasma 6

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:

• Frameworks 6 packaging notes
• Plasma 6 packaging notes
• Gear 24.02 packaging notes

Per-version changes

Plasma 6.8

Input

• Amharic virtual keyboard layout

Plasma 6.7

Visual style

• Round list and grid view highlights in QtWidgets apps
• Click effects for menu items
• Sliding notifications effect
• Union theming system tech preview

Plasma & widgets

• Light/dark mode toggle switch in Brightness & Color widget
• Switch virtual desktops with scroll or Page Up/Page Down in Overview
• "test your microphone" feature
• time zone offsets in Digital Clock widget
• Type-ahead support on the desktop (off by default to preserve muscle memory)
• Vietnamese lunar calendar support
• Option to set keyboard shortcut for global push-to-talk
• Option to set keyboard shortcut to clear notification history
• Global Menu widget shows menus for apps on other screens by default
• Middle-click Digital Clock to open Calendar app
• Easy selection of mixed skin tone emojis in Emoji Selector app
• Customizable sorting and grouping in the Window List widget
• Add and remove favorites from Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard via drag and drop
• "Recent Locations" item in Kicker

Window management

• Per-screen virtual desktops
• Option for Alt+Tab window switcher to only appear on primary screen
• Windows can also be excluded from screenshots

Input

• Press-and-hold keys for special characters (when Plasma Keyboard is enabled)

For artists

• Option to sync mouse and stylus pointers
• Apply an ICC profile while HDR mode is active

Discover

• Overhaul of Discover's browse lists and app page header
• grouping on the "Installed" page

Printing

• Easy setup for printers shared from Windows networks
• Fancy new print queue viewer app
• "Number of active and queued print jobs" badges on Printers widget

Performance

• Better performance and lower power usage for CPU-rendered apps
• Better performance and lower power usage for some full-screen apps
• Better performance and lower power usage for Intel GPUs via support for "Overlay planes"
• Lower RDP latency

System

• Show GNOME-style "background apps" in the system tray
• Duplicate network connections to facilitate easy batch-editing
• Control whether colors change at low brightness levels on many AMD laptops
• Respects your preferred style of storage units in System monitor app and widgets
• Configure preferred calendar app on Default Applications page
• Configure location for the new "Projects" folder
• Support for the xdg-session-management-v1 Wayland protocol
• Support for the ext-background-effect-v1 Wayland protocol
• Support for the xx-fractional-scale-v2 Wayland protocol
• support for the xx_text_input_v3.2 Wayland protocol
• support for version 2 of the Input Capture portal
• Support for the portal notifications system

Oxygen

• Restore Air Plasma style
• Support adaptive opacity with Oxygen Plasma style
• Support different panel positions with Oxygen Plasma style
• Add Air global theme
• Add Oxygen Dark color scheme and make it the default for the Oxygen Dark global theme
• Provide classic Air and Horos wallpapers
• Add Oxygen Light global theme to support automatic day-night theme switching

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

• Up-scaling filter for the Zoom effect
• "Always centered" pointer mode for the Zoom effect
• Configurable intensity for frames/outlines
• Monochrome/grayscale colorblindness filter
• "Slow keys" on Wayland
• Support for the new XDG "reduced motion" setting

Spectacle/screenshots/screen recording/screen-casting

• OCR in Spectacle
• Windows can be excluded from screen recording/screencasting

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 6.5

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

• Support for configuring tablet dials
• Support for configuring tablet touch rings

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 6.4

Window Management

• Per-virtual-desktop custom tile layouts

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

• KRunner knows about colors

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

• Option to move local files on drag-and-drop, rather than asking every time

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 6.3

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

• visual indicator for latched and locked modifier keys

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 6.2

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 6.1

Oops, forgot to do it. Someone fill this in!

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 -symbolic suffix 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

Roadmap: Unknown release, and not merged yet

• Make window titlebars (slightly) accent colored by default
• Consolidate desktop folder layouts
• Remove the "Disable (Some Plasma) Tooltips" setting
• Remove some redundant and confusing Notification settings
• Consolidate Wallpaper kcm with login screen and locking screen
• Customizable touchpad gestures
• Tablet touch strip configurability
• Location services KCM