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 without manual user intervention. 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.

Known upstream issues, no fix yet:

Emoji Selector lags when changing categories
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478379
- https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-120007

With NVIDIA GPU, KRunner and Kickoff popups sometimes stop appearing when opened
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455913
- https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwayland/+/503674

Fixed upstream, but without a release yet:

Deleting network connections doesn't work
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473012 (Fixed in Qt 6.7)

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)

For built-from-source dev sessions, SDDM displays empty/incorrect session titles
- Fixed in SDDM after 0.20.0 was released, but there's no new release yet

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 E.g. from https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/nightlies.html download and use "KDE live" and "Kinoite dvd-ostree".
Gentoo Portage package.masked
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/.

User-facing changes

New features

User interface changes

Changes to default settings

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

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 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

Postponed to Plasma 6.1, in progress

Postponed to Plasma 6.1, not started yet

Packaging notes

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