KDE Plasma 6.0.2 Delivers Another Week Worth Of Bug Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.0.2 Delivers Another Week Worth Of Bug Fixes

Last week saw Plasma 6.0.1 for an initial batch of bug fixes for this major desktop environment that debuted the week prior. Out today is Plasma 6.0.2 with another round of bug fixes that have been addressed over the past week...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.0.2

[Chugworth]

I received the version 6 upgrade in Arch, and it has been working pretty good. So far the most interesting thing I've seen has to be the HDR support. Of course right now you have to add some unofficial packages to actually see HDR content, but it does work in MPV and in games. You can confirm the content is in fact displaying as HDR by turning the SDR brightness down low in the display settings. The brightness of the HDR content should remain the same. You can also tell without doing that by simply dragging around the window of the HDR content. There is a shift in brightness and a bit of color distortion as you drag the window.

The blog post here has more information on how to make it work:

https://planet.kde.org/xavers-blog-2023-12-18-an-update-on-hdr-and-color-management-in-kwin/

[Turbine]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

The design is just as awful as Plasma 5. They really need to overhaul the design to have a basic and advanced toggle. Because having settings you might only set once clutter up all the UI's is good for nobody.

[X_m7]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

The design is just as awful as Plasma 5. They really need to overhaul the design to have a basic and advanced toggle. Because having settings you might only set once clutter up all the UI's is good for nobody.

The main point of Plasma 6 is really just the upgrade to Qt6, so KDE won't be forced to keep backporting fixes to Qt5 (and still put up with stuff that's been fixed in Qt6 but can't be backported to Qt5 without breaking other stuff, mostly Wayland specific things like native fractional scaling or surviving compositor crashes/restarts), plus getting rid of old unmaintained stuff that can't be removed in a Plasma 5.x release, it was never meant to include drastically changing the design like some might expect given the version number change.

As for the basic/advanced thing, it's been discussed enough times in KDE that there's an "official" explanation for it here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involv...advanced_modes

This design pattern is not always wrong, but must be used sparingly. The pattern can work when implemented as a sort of progressive disclosure model where a view first presents data in a simplified form, but more detail about each item can be shown on a sub-page, separate window, or a collapsed view. For example, the Colors KCM has a "basic" accent color feature and a grid view of all the installed color schemes, but each color scheme can be fully edited in a separate window, by clicking "Edit" on it -- the "advanced" view.

However the basic/advanced paradigm does not work for grouping and separating features, especially when explicitly using the terms "basic" and "advanced" in the user interface. The problem is that different users have different needs, and what one user considers advanced will be considered basic to another user. Also, even "basic" users may very occasionally have a need to use or configure "advanced" features. Users who doubt their technical prowess will fear entering the advanced view, while users of great ego will find the basic view insulting even if it meets their needs better than the advanced view.

[Elipsus]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

The design is just as awful as Plasma 5. They really need to overhaul the design to have a basic and advanced toggle. Because having settings you might only set once clutter up all the UI's is good for nobody.

I agree that the default Breeze theme isn't that great, but there's plenty of cool themes that feels much better, as for the settings clutter that's very difficult to establish what is basic and what is advanced

[bug77]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

The design is just as awful as Plasma 5. They really need to overhaul the design to have a basic and advanced toggle. Because having settings you might only set once clutter up all the UI's is good for nobody.

But there is a basic mode for Plasma. It's called Gnome and it's free to use.

[varikonniemi]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

Being based on Qt6 so many bugs that were not possible to be fixed on Qt5 are now fixed. Which means this is the first truly wayland ready release.

Kind of like how many trivial bugs in x11 cannot be fixed, so we would need x12. But the consensus was to drop the turd and switch to wayland.

[Nocifer]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

The design is just as awful as Plasma 5. They really need to overhaul the design to have a basic and advanced toggle. Because having settings you might only set once clutter up all the UI's is good for nobody.

For sure! And even better, they should move those advanced settings into a completely separate app called Plasma Tweaks, that way users will never get confused again about what is what (and where).

P.S. - Gee, a second article about KDE 6 fixing its bugs? I sure hope there won't be a third one in, say, 2 weeks from now. /s

[geerge]

Didn't they already change up a lot of the setting locations so that the commonly used ones are closer to the top?

[Smurphy]

What's the advantage to Plasma 6?

The design is just as awful as Plasma 5. They really need to overhaul the design to have a basic and advanced toggle. Because having settings you might only set once clutter up all the UI's is good for nobody.

Tastes and colors are not open for discussion. And because this is linux, you don't like it, you don't use it.
Shoo ....