Plasma/Plasma 6

Plasma 6 is built on top of Qt 6 and is scheduled to be released in early February 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 5 session, all actions using KAuth are not working at the moment. Examples of such actions include changing the screen brightness and saving root-owned files in Kate and KWrite. See https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kauth/-/merge_requests/45#note_754877.

Upstream:

• Deleting network connections doesn't work
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473012

• Clicking on apps' System Tray icons has no effect
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472003
  • Fixed in Qt 6.5.3

• Plasma crashes when receiving a notification from KDE Connect
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472964
  • Fixed in Qt 6.5.3

• System Settings crashes nearly constantly when switching pages
  • https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-112306
  • Fixed in Qt 6.5.3

• System Settings crashes when quitting
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=470598
  • Fixed in Qt 6.5.3

• Plasma and apps crash when dragging anything into another app
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=470925
  • Fixed in Qt 6.6

• Opening URLs/Links in many apps doesn't work at all
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472300
  • Fixed in xdg-utils, but there's no new release yet

• On Wayland, with scaling, QML windows have content drawn at the wrong scale until manually resized
  • https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtdeclarative/+/447075
  • Fixed in Qt 6.5.3

• Bluetooth device discovery is broken
  • https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472910
  • https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/513362
  • Fixed in Qt 6.5.4 and 6.6.1

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:

• Build from source
• Fedora KDE nightly Qt6 repo - Discussion in #kde:fedoraproject.org on Matrix
• FreeBSD ports overlay
• KaOS ISO
• KaOS Install
• KDE Neon Unstable ISO
• OpenMandriva Cooker

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/.

User-facing changes

New features

• Overview and Desktop Grid effect combined into one with better gestures
• Per-screen color management support for up to sRGB colorspace screens on Wayland
• Per-screen HDR support on Wayland
• More types of default apps can be chosen
• Custom sort ordering for KRunner search results
• Desktop Cube effect returns
• 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
• 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

Changes to default settings

(i.e. all of these things can be changed back if you don't like them)

• 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

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 "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 or only this specific display arrangement" feature in KScreen - it was too buggy and nearly impossible to fix
• Remove System Settings Icon view - having multiple navigation views for a settings app was just weird
• "Windows go below" Panel visibility modes - lost for technical reasons, not as a result of an intentional design decision; may return if we can find a way to support the feature on Wayland with the layer-shell protocol
• 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 applet - 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

Work that's been decided on but not implemented yet

In progress

• Make the Wayland session the default one
• Make wallpaper settings available in systemsettings and consolidate with login screen and locking screen

Not started yet

• Bring SDDM into KDE
• 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
• Split Battery & Brightness widgets and integrate Night color into one of them
• Intelligent auto-hide aka "dodge windows"

Packaging notes

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

Sources

Most of the required sources are not released. For Frameworks and Plasma the development work happens in master branch. Some applications use master for their KF6 development work and support building against Qt5 or Qt6, others have a dedicated kf6 branch. See here for machine-readable information for the right branch.

The following frameworks will not be part of KF6:

• kdelibs4support
• kdesignerplugin
• kdewebkit
• kemoticons
• khtml
• kinit
• kjs
• kjsembed
• kmediaplayer
• kross
• kxmlrpcclient

The following non-frameworks modules are obsolete:

• kross-interpreters
• kwebkitpart
• khotkeys

The following new frameworks will be part of KF6:

• kcolorscheme
• ktexttemplate
• ksvg
• kstatusnotifieritem
• kuserfeedback

New Plasma modules:

• kglobalacceld
• plasma5support
• ocean-sound-theme

Plasma modules moved from frameworks:

• plasma-framework
• kactivities
• kactivities-stats

Plasma modules moved from other releases:

• print-manager
• wacomtablet

The following new non-frameworks modules are relevant:

• kmoretools
• kdsoap-ws-discovery-client

Coinstallability

For frameworks and other relevant libraries we aim for being able to install both a 5 and a 6 version without conflicts. However there are cases where this cannot be provided out of the box, e.g. because a framework contains runtime parts that must only exist once. Some projects have build flags to disable such problematic parts that should be applied to the KF5 build:

• kguiaddons: -DBUILD_GEO_SCHEME_HANDLER=OFF
• baloo: -DBUILD_INDEXER_SERVICE=OFF
• kglobalaccel: -DKF6_COMPAT_BUILD=ON
• kwallet: -DBUILD_KWALLETD=OFF
• plasma-framework: -DBUILD_DESKTOPTHEMES=OFF

• drkonqi: -DWITH_PYTHON_VENDORING=OFF - once the python deps are packaged

The icon frameworks only include assets. Only the KF6 one should be installed. These are:

• breeze-icons
• oxygen-icons

Qt5 compatibility

For compatibility with Qt5-based apps (first- and third-party) we need Qt5-based variants of several modules in addition to Qt6-based ones. These modules include:

• Breeze/Oxygen, for correct application style. This also applies to third-party QStyles
• plasma-integration, for correct Qt integration
• kio-extras, for various kio-related things
• various kio-* things
• various non-Frameworks libraries as needed

A Qt5 build of kwayland-integration is needed for Qt5 apps to work properly on Wayland. No Qt6 builds is needed.

Breeze, Oxygen, and plasma-integration, support building for Qt5 and Qt6 in the same build.

AppStream

AppStream 1.0 is required, which no longer honors legacy metadata locations, including /usr/share/app-info/(xml|xmls) and /var/lib/app-info/(xml|xmls). If your distro is currently storing metadata in one of these locations, it needs to be moved to /usr/share/swcatalog/xml or /var/lib/swcatalog/xml. Icons also need to move. See https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-CatalogData.html#spec-asxml-filenaming for more information.

If this migration is not performed, Discover in Plasma 6 will not be able to see any of your distro's apps.

PAM configuration

To enable simultaneous password+fingerprint authentication on the lock screen, PAM configuration files need to be adjusted. The TL;DR version is to just copy the GNOME/GDM ones, which will now work for KDE's lock screen too. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kscreenlocker/-/merge_requests/163 for details.

Pending Upstream Changes

Several upstream changes that were necessary are not merged and/or released:

• appstream 1.0 is needed for Qt6 support. This means current main branch for now since 1.0 is not released
• xdg-utils needed a change to support KDE_SESSION_VERSION=6. A new release is needed
• libaccounts-qt, signond, signon-plugin-oauth2, signon-ui need changes for Qt6 support. MRs are pending. Meanwhile a fork of libaccounts-qt, signond, signon-plugin-oauth2, signon-ui can be used
• kdsoap Qt5/Qt6 is not fully coinstallable
• Enabling libproxy in Qt: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/494754. This can/should already be enabled in the build options downstream. Without it KIO/KDE apps doesn't handle proxy config