Plasma/Plasma 6

Plasma 6 is built on top of Qt 6 and was released on February 28th, 2024. This page outlines important information and major changes coming in Plasma 6.

Known issues

On the KDE side:

• Plasma 6 issues
• Frameworks 6 issues + Plasma 6 issues
• All Qt6-related issues across all KDE software
• In a built-from-source dev session on top of a distro-provided Plasma 5 session, KWin effect IDs have changed, so they appear duplicated in the Effects KCM and you need to disable one of each, or else both play at the same thing and there are weird visual glitches.
• In a built-from-source dev session on top of a distro-provided Plasma 5 session, Qt5-using QML apps don't launch because they'll try to use the KF6 Kirigami. Workaround: For those apps, create custom .desktop files with QML2_IMPORT_PATH set to the built-from-source KF5 location in the "Environment Variables" field, and an absolute path to to the built-from-source executable in the "Program" field. See also https://phabricator.kde.org/T16483.
• In a built-from-source dev session on top of a distro-provided Plasma session (5 or 6), your dev session will still use the system versions of KAuth helpers by default. This can lead to issues when certain components such as PowerDevil make use of newly introduced helper actions. Use plasma-workspace MR !1715 to overlay your build on top of /usr, or !3705 for a partially successful symlinking approach.

How to use/test it

Developers and adventurous users are encouraged to test or even live on Plasma 6, to help get it into a releasable state faster. Before doing so, remember the rules of Plasma 6:

• Read through the list of major bugs and only use Plasma 6 in production if none of them is a deal-breaker for you. Maintain regular backups! This is mandatory.
• When you encounter an issue in Plasma 6 that was not present in Plasma 5, check the list of issues to see if it's already been reported. If you don't find anything, submit a bug report and add the "qt6" keyword to it.
• If you are technically able, try to fix issues you encounter yourself.

Options for testing Plasma 6 include the following:

• Arch Linux As of 2-28-24 You must enable the extra-testing repo in your pacman.conf
• Build from source
• Fedora E.g. from https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/nightlies.html download and use "KDE live" and "Kinoite dvd-ostree".
• Gentoo Linux
• KaOS ISO
• KaOS Install
• KDE Neon Unstable ISO
• Nix Flake
• openSUSE Krypton At the last step (installation summary), select "Software" and tick "Plasma 6 Desktop Base".

If you're a distro packager reading this and your distro offers a Plasma 6 ISO/repo/etc, please add it to this list in alphabetical order!

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/.

Work that's been decided on but not implemented yet

Postponed to Plasma 6.1, in progress

• Make window titlebars (slightly) accent colored by default
• Fake session restore on Wayland (just re-opening apps that were open last time)

Postponed to Plasma 6.1, not started yet

• Bring SDDM into KDE
• 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

Packaging notes

This section is aimed at packagers/distributors for information about correctly packaging a KF6/Plasma 6 session. Please see:

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

User-facing 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

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

• 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 6.4

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 6.5

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 6.6

Plasma/widgets

• Option to change Task volume by scrolling over it
• Connect to Wi-Fi networks via QR code

Accessibility

• Configurable intensity for frames/outlines
• Monochrome/grayscale colorblindness filter

System

• Option for virtual desktops only on the primary screen
• KDE Initial System Setup wizard for OOBE/OEM setup
• USB portal
• Support for hardware-based screen content sharpening
• Crash reporting for non-KDE app crashes

Performance/efficiency

• Reduced memory usage

Roadmap; not merged yet

• Tablet touch strip configurability
• Location services KCM
• Automatic brightness adjustment on devices with light sensors
• plasma-keyboard (new on-screen keyboard)
• plasma-login SDDM replacement
• Union theming system tech preview