Plasma/Plasma 6

From KDE Community Wiki

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:

  • 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 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 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.

On the Qt side:

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 of 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:

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.
  • On Wayland, Plasma panels, sidebars, KRunner, and Yakuake are now positioned using the layer-shell protocol.

User-facing changes

New features

User interface changes

Changes to default settings

Removals

Work that's been decided on but not implemented yet