Plasma/Plasma 6

Plasma 6 is built on top of Qt 6 and is tentatively planned to be released in late 2023 or early 2024. This page outlines important information and major changes coming in Plasma 6.

Known issues

On the KDE side:

• List of issues

On the Qt side:

• System Settings crashes nearly constantly when switching pages
  • https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-112306
  • Fixed in Qt 6.6

• 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 6.6

Developer-facing changes

• Widget API has changed and all widgets need to be ported. See the Plasma 6 widget porting guide to learn how.
• On Wayland, Plasma panels, sidebars, KRunner, and Yakuake are now positioned using the layer-shell protocol.

User-facing changes

Additions

TODO add some

Changes to default settings

• "Thumbnail Grid" is now the new default Task Switcher style. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/53.
• Use "Clicking in scrollbar track: Scrolls to the clicked location" setting by default. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/92
• Scrolling on the desktop no longer switches virtual desktops. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/55

Removals

• KHotKeys (which provides the "Custom Shortcuts" page in System Settings) has been removed because it was unmaintained for over 7 years and its core functionality overlapped the newer, maintained, and better supported KGlobalAccel system. See https://phabricator.kde.org/T2050.
• The "Windowed widgets KRunner runner has been removed as it was confusing users into thinking that widgets (which are intentionally very small and limited) were apps. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/67.
• The "Grid", "Informative", "Small Icons", "Text Only", and "Thumbnails" Task Switchers have been removed as they were worse than other existing ones. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/63
• The "Force Font DPI" setting has been removed on Wayland as the per-screen scaling system is now considered the only supported method of doing systemwide scaling. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/62.
• Per-Activity power setting have been removed as they were largely broken, increased code complexity of a fragile part of the system, and were and mostly possible to approximate using other settings. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/60.
• The Air theme that was previously shipped by default has been removed as it was unmaintained and somewhat broken. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/57

Work that's been decided on but not implemented yet

• Make double-click the default setting. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/72.
• Bring SDDM into KDE. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/91.
• Make the Wayland session the default one. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2188.
• Make window titlebars (slightly) accent colored by default. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/78.
• Use Floating panel by default. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/73.
• Consolidate desktop folder layouts. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/68.
• Change the release schedule to two per year. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/52.
• Remove the concept of icons in Plasma themes. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/82.
• Remove the ability to configure (some) icon sizes systemwide. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/58.
• Remove the "Disable (Some Plasma) Tooltips" setting. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/83.
• Remove System Settings Icon view. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/65.