KDE Plasma 6 Alpha Approaches Next Week With The Soft Feature Freeze

[CommunityMember]

Yeah, Fedora is a cutting-edge distro that exists to push forward the state of the art and force the world around them to evolve. And that's fine, it's their role. Anyone using Fedora should be excited by this kind of thing.

Last I knew (skimming the discussions) there was an individual who has stated their plan to provide an out-of-KDE-SIG plasma-x11 rpm for those whose applications will not work with XWayland in the timeframe of F40. I have little doubt there will not be edge applications that do not work well with XWayland if they have not migrated to full Wayland support, but right now we don't know how many apps (or how large the community) that will be come F40 time, as many apps have a plan to get to either Wayland support or XWayland functionality RSN.

[TemplarGR]

Plasma 5.27.9 working so well, and asking myself how am I going to let it go. But I can't stop myself being excited about Plasma 6 either. There was news a couple weeks ago about Windows becoming a subscription service. Linux with Plasma and Wayland is so good now that I could just delete the Windows partition before that happens. Hmmm, maybe I should ...

Wait, you still have a windows partition?

[Luke_Wolf]

I'm sure KDE is making good progress towards its 6th major release.

But I still can't figure out what's going on with Discover. Devs clearly don't want to fix it. They don''t want to kill it. But they still waste time on things like


While a simple search in Discover is still fubar (has been that way for years and it will continue to be like that for the foreseeable future):

Unfortunately both the Gnome Software Center and KDE's Discover suffer from the fact that packagekit and both GUI package managers are really primarily a Red Hat project with the rest of the distros not wanting to give up their own personal frontends layered more directly over their package managers... and even Red Hat has basically given up on that idea and is providing DNFDragora instead so...

[TemplarGR]

Unfortunately both the Gnome Software Center and KDE's Discover suffer from the fact that packagekit and both GUI package managers are really primarily a Red Hat project with the rest of the distros not wanting to give up their own personal frontends layered more directly over their package managers... and even Red Hat has basically given up on that idea and is providing DNFDragora instead so...

Which is a shame, i loved packagekit!

[Nocifer]

While I liked what I saw when I tried 6th version built with kdesrc, it's a shame they haven't had time / manpower to finally unify input methods management within 1 applet for switching layouts. Seriously, this is a huge advantage of Gnome over Plasma that Gnome users don't need to install and configure 2 ways of switching keyboard layouts / input methods that sometimes clash with each other, they just press their usual keycombo and switch to whatever language they want to write in. This could be such a great usability improvement.
On a sidenote, I haven't heard of any news regarding Wayland multi-touch touchpad gestures customization, I guess no progress on this? Sad...

ngraham
What about this? Please...

There was a vote back in ~2019 and this ended up being postponed for after Wayland support is fully implemented, because like many such deeply involved things (another example would be proper multi-monitor support), implementing this for Xorg would be its own beast and the KDE devs decided back then to focus on Wayland and only add major new features to the Wayland side of things, keeping the Xorg version practically feature-frozen. Meanwhile, the developer of Fcitx was looking into ways of integrating it into KDE a couple of years ago. So there's already some thought going into this by multiple people, and I'm hopeful that with Plasma 6.x things will begin moving faster on this front.

Wait, you still have a windows partition?

Unfortunately, a Windows partition is still needed/desired for some things:

1) Firmware updates for Linux-unfriendly vendors (e.g. Samsung drives)
2) Access to devices with software-only feature configuration (e.g. LG monitors or Creative sound cards)
3) Playing online games with friends who won't play Linux-friendly games :-)

I consider myself fully Windows-free, but I do keep a Windows LTSC partition around for these reasons (which I only boot once in a blue moon).

[direc85]

I've been using Plasma 5 with Wayland for ~1.5 years in my work laptop and longer in my daily driver, and the majority of gripes has been solved. The experience is smooth and functional to such extent I don't hesitate saying Fedora isn't too early on dropping x11.

By far, without any doubt, my biggest rage inducer with Wayland? Electron.

[lowflyer]

Dear Nate,
Please stop using QML and make KDE great again.
Please!

[Rovano]

There are already distribution(s) that you install, add the alfa Plasma repository, and you can try.

Numlock on login screen
Isn't there anywhere in where hidden settings for Login Manager? I would like to turn on Numlock for login screen. I have SDDM. When I was looking for it, I found different levels where Numlock can be turned on. Just write a few letters in the config. But I would appreciate the settings in the click form.

So I thought. When the BIOS turns on my Numlock, is it turned on even when I enter a password in front of the boot?

[guglovich]

Hurry, right now only, the Wayland stable!

[ngraham]

Dear Nate,
Please stop using QML and make KDE great again.
Please!

Ok, I will stop using QML. As a result you can expect me to stop contributing to Plasma, System Settings, Info Center, Discover, System Monitor, Spectacle, Elisa, NeoChat, Filelight, Skanpage, Cuttlefish, Kamoso, and all other QML-based KDE software. Hopefully this outcome matches your expectations.