For some reason, on Firefox this link closes my browser tab immediately when opening it. Even when right click -> open in new window. Never seen a website do that before. It works in Edge however...?
I recently have moved over most of my stuff to the Proton apps, and I'm loving them so far! I wouldn't have know about them without their sponsorship of you.
Is there a way to stop it defaulting to Wayland on boot? Wayland doesn't play properly with my Nvidia card (GTX-750TI 4gb) (only allows 30hz). Unfortunately I need to stay on x11 for that reason and that is resulting in me needing to change it manually every time I start the pc, which is even more annoying as it's a media PC that I allow to login automatically with no password. I think it is fantastic that you are prioritising Wayland but this defaulting-to-wayland issue will be affecting a lot of KDE-users who have Nvidia cards. It's a real shame since Wayland operates very well for me outside of this but there seems to be no way to get it to do anything about 30hz on my card.
I don't know what's happening with the bottom comments, quite the negative feedback towards KDE. I guess the default settings are not for everyone, but come on. I have never used anything else than GNOME, but I can't deny that KDE and XFCE and a lot of others look good as well
I would say that too. it's a fine desktop, they had a lot of work under the hood to bring it to this level. generally, as a beginner, I would suggest testing a few desktops before settling. and hint, you can install several desktop environments simultanously, and swap between them. it's not a choice where you are set for all time.
yeah he said that they intended this to be a evolution as opposed to a revolution since users don't like huge changes. But I did think why a major change for a evolution (but I understand being in aligned to QT versions, not sure if a end user needs to be aware of this for a desktop env).
Also One thing to note, HDR does not work inside Firefox yet. I heard Chromium inside Gamescope is possible but honestly, it's easier to use mpv paired with vk-hdr-layer-kwin6.
HDR feature is amazing, I can finally go full Linux since it doesn't make my monitors paperweight since without the option enabled, the screen looked horrible colours wise and also sharpness
@@malek6129 if SDR looks so borked on your screen there's something wrong with your monitor settings sharpness should never be different (or an issue in general) what screen do you have?
sometiems sharpness is different because HDR is a different TV/monitor profile like my asus pa329c has a separate sharpness setting for rec709/rec2020 (HDR) mode, just sayin@@malek6129
I'm glad KDE is focusing on subtle design changes which make the desktop more polished. For me, Linux Desktops always felt like "Good programmers, but bad designer". But I think it's going to change soon, seeing the polish of KDE 6.
i think the inherent implicit assumption that Linux Desktops will be used by programmers is the thing that does not let the year of the linux desktop happen.
@@britneyfreekThere's some great features in Linux Mint. Although there's just as much that doesn't work properly as well. I can't say I'm fan of Elementary OS either. I'd imagine Mac users would be right at home with it though.
Nice to see Plasma doing so many improvements. I've never really felt comfortable on Plasma but this version looks tempting. Gnome team has to work hard to keep up with the competition and that's good for everyone
Plasma Tips: - Setting application hot keys is super easy - open the menu and find the option you want to set/change the shortcut for, right click it (yes - right click on the menu) and select "Configure Shortcut". - Kate can run any bunch of text you want through a command line filter - great for `grep`ing and `sed`ing: select a bunch of text and press CTRL+\ - you'd get a dialog that asks you what command to run (and it has a history). It will then pipe the selected text into that command, grab the output and put it instead of the selected text. Don't like the result? just undo. No need to even save. - Did you know Krunner's unit converter can convert currency values? try it: press META to open the main menu and type "5 usd" to see how much is $5 in your favorite currencies.
All depends is what you do most often. If itnis navigating and opening stuff then single click is awesome. If it is selecting files for moving them around then I understand.
@marblexeno To be fair, KDE plasma was released 1 year before windows 10, if you said Windows 8/8.1 I would agree that, well apart from the whole start screen (Gnome 3 got you covered in that part 😂)
Never was a fan of Breeze and default setup of KDE. But customization of this DE is superb. And right now more things can be altered out of the box without spending a lot of time - for example behavior of the bottom panel. It is good that they made "just" a port to new QT, I remember what happend with KDE 4. Anyway I hope they will spend some time to make a replacement for Breeze.
I just think they should use a different color theme (both light and dark), but otherwise Breeze looks fine to me. Maybe some of the icons could be better, but I don't find them too bad.
I guess that's the problem for someone like me. My endless customization days are behind me, 15 years ago I was distro hopping, I was constantly switching between all the various distros. But now I have a lot of other things to do in my life and I really don't have the time or interest in spending my days customizing the desktop. I use GNOME for this reason, it works well enough and the defaults just work for me.
Little bit of feedback: at 5:49, it was rather confusing when the Plasma 6 and 5.27 swapped sides. For the purposes of a video comparing two things, I'd prefer consistency of the comparison over maintaining the continuity of the background. And thanks so much for all the videos you make, you've been a big part of me getting back into Linux. I don't comment much, so I didn't want to just nitpick something then vanish without a trace 😆
I agree. That threw me off for a moment, too. I also think that the newer version should always be on the right side. Time flows from left to right. (At least in our left to right reading culture.)
@@catto-from-heavendefinitely not. Windows 7 is clearly dated - plasma looks somewhat modern. In terms of usability it aims for that traditional desktop experience - which (surprise!) makes it MUCH better to use on a desktop than something like gnome.
I absolutely love the new Ocean sounds. You talked too little about this feature. They sound amazing and I love that you can easily change this like you change the theme. Props to KDE team.
I've been a KDE fan for a number of years. Tried GNOME, Cinnamon, LXQT, XFCE, etc. but always came back to a KDE distro sitting on Debian. I may be one of the folks that don't care a lot about Plasma 6 since I have my computers looking and doing what I want, however, I will get my inner nerd out and try it on another machine. Thanks for the great video!
For me, I've tried all the desktops. However there's always something or other that bugs me about some way they work. KDE just works and if it doesn't, its easy to change it to the way I want.
Only two things I didn't like: 1. The buttons to turn off and reboot the system don't work for some reason ._. (I'm using KDE Neon) 2. Wayland: My laptop hates it, whether I'm on KDE Neon, Arcolinux with Hyprland, EndeavourOS with Sway, etc. Else... it's Plasma, and Plasma is love. Plasma is life.
For the shutdown button to work you need to create a file named "org.kde.LogoutPrompt.service" on /usr/share/dbus-1/services/ with the contents: [D-BUS Service] Name=org.kde.LogoutPrompt Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/ksmserver-logout-greeter
I started on GNOME, moved to KDE because I wanted more customization, and moved to hyprland because I wanted tiling. Plasma 6 definitely looks nice though.
That's great news! I'm looking forward to upgrading to it! I've been running 5.27 on wayland for a long time now and I'm really looking forward to the "everything wayland" approach they're taking. :)
The desktop cube was what got me into linux first when i was 12y/o. So glad it's back. I would pend hours on end trying to install arch It was half my childhood.
I've used KDE for years, and the longer I use it, the more in love with it I am. Also with the new sound profile options for the system for notifications, that makes me SUPER excited, as I can totally see a new update in the future where they update KDE to allow for custom sounds. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YEARS. ADHD go brr, and sounds help with that on KDE (for me) so if they do that, I'm not leaving (not that I was going to anyways :D)
@wikingagresor I havent found those settings, also because I struggled to get them working. Particularly, I wanted to meme it out with sounds foe when I plug in or remove usb drives. The option barely existed, and didnt ever work
Single-click to open acts under the delusion that you will _never_ mis-click, and _never_ make a mis-take. Double-click to open may wear out a mouse more quickly for file browser interaction tasks (twice the clicks, duh) but you can click on something, have it highlighted and have that buffer of time to ensure with confidence you are clicking on the right thing before you click _again_ to confirm. It is also more able-friendly as some people have less refined control over their fine motor muscles. If you try to move the mouse but constantly click things by accident because a movement of the arm or hand causes fingers to accidentally press the mouse buttons, _rejoice_ as KDE has seen reason.
Great review! Straight to the point and no bs. I like the analogy of plasma 5.50, while i recognize the absolute importance of the underlying stack improvements and the amount of work it took(with the already small kde team size and funding) i also have to say that as someone who is still not on Wayland, doesn't have an hdr monitor, doesn't like either floating panels or the gnome workflow of workspaces, i wasn't as hyped for this release as the others. But i am glad the Kde Plasma team have succeeded in breaking this stereotype that big new Plasma transitions are always buggy.
I agree with most of what you said, though maybe the workspaces thing will be more enticing for me now if it works better. Couldn't get into it before. The one thing I am keen on is the better Wayland support, because I have poor eyesight and would like to scale my secondary, smaller screen up a bit. So far I've just made do with setting font sizes in applications on that screen, but separate, fractional global scaling would be nice.
@@KingArthurDentoh absolutely, Wayland is the important way forward. The only reason i've reverted back to x11 for now is Wine/Proton gaming and maybe some stability around video conferencing.
@@iodreamify Last I tried Plasma Wayland, Zoom went down to like 0.5 fps, so had to go back to X11. I have a suspicion that wasn't really a Plasma issue but more of a Zoom/NVIDIA driver issue, however, I have nothing to confirm that either. I just hope that Zoom and NVIDIA have improved their stuff as well, so that this time it'll work as expected.
On Wayland, if the screen and driver supports it (not sure about Nvidia) then in the display configuration you'd have the option to enable "Adaptive Sync", which is how VRR is called in Plasma. When set to "Automatic" it will let full screen Wayland applications control the refresh rate. I'm not sure what "Always" in that option means.
@@guss77 NVIDIA user (RTX 3060) here, i set it to "Always" if i want VRR when i'm gaming, and it works like a charm, honestly Wayland just works, besides from plasmashell freezing occasionally (with me needing to kill it and relaunch from a terminal with setsid prepended), Xwayland apps flickering (i originally thought it might be because i have a 360Hz display, but it happens even if i set it to 60, but with the flickering slower in that situation), and the whole thing shitting itself after a few days of uptime, where sometimes i can't even Ctrl + Alt + PrntSc + B out of it, and have to hold my PC's power button (i'm not too sure what causes any of this, but if it continues when Plasma 6 gets unmasked on the Gentoo repos, then i'll update, and report it to them, i'd try to see if it works on the KDE Neon LiveCD, but it does not want to display anything after booting, probably an NVIDIA thing, iykyk)
I will be honest, I tried to install Fedora KDE recently, and I really liked how many options there were but I genuinely felt like a lot of them stood in the way of making basic customizations and using my desktop. I wanted to stay on it for a little while longer, but I just like GNOME so much and feel like it doesn't really lack anything for my tastes, and so I just switched to Fedora GNOME almost immediately. I will give KDE a fair shot when I have a lot more time on my hands than I do now, because I recognize how powerful it is as a DE, but I just love GNOME's simplicity and the modularity of extensions a bit too much at this point.
@oneplays7842 I don't disagree that KDE is superior when it comes to how powerful and versatile it is. And yeah, some extensions break way too often on GNOME. But honestly, all extensions I use work consistently and work great, and so I don't feel like I am missing out.
I've been using KDE for a number of years now (before that Deepin and Pantheon were my go tos as I'm rather fond of more minimalist aesthetics) but as I've watched Plasma 6's progress along the way my biggest concern is how "OOOH SHINY KEYS" people can be. I'm for sure looking forward to 6 but for me the improvements with switching to QT6 and the usability improvements are what I'm most happy about. Second to that would be Wayland improvements (I've been using Wayland for about 2 months now). But I can see a lot of people not understanding all the improvements that are under the bonnet and getting all angry and disappointed because visually, there's not a massive change. I like my eye candy, don't get me wrong, but just because Plasma 6 isn't going to visually change heaps doesn't make it a shit update.
Couldn't agree more. This way all about transitioning to QT6, improving Wayland to be fit for default, and maintaining stability whilst doing so. Anything else is a bonus and I think they've struck a good balance.
Honestly improvements to the backend are big hype for me, I wish more people understood the amount of work it takes to migrate things, test, fix and polish
The sensible way is to open something by clicking it once, like you’d do on a smartphone. But no one is used to that.m, so it makes sense to have single click to select
@@TheLinuxEXPThat's hardly sensible because a computer is not a smartphone. Edit: There's far more that can be done on a computer. For example you may select something to drag it onto a program. Or you may select multiple things, but they may not all be next to one another. Or you may be selecting something just to show it in the preview. Single click to open only makes sense for folders in miller column view, or perhaps with the details view in the drop-down. Or you may select something to run a keyboard operation.
@@TheLinuxEXP well, smartphones don't have a keyboard interface, how can you select a single file and cut or copy it on single click to open, my one hand is on the keyboard and other is on the mouse, i can click a file and ctrl + x or c faster than left click cut or copy.
I really, REALLY want to like KDE, especially now that they have great support for fractional scaling. But it still looks pretty "busy" and clunky as UX and theme.
I don't generally deal with the UI a lot, so I was an xfce person for the last 8-10 years. I tried kde last year and I liked it so much that right now all of my Linux systems that have a GUI are all using kde. It just gets out of the way for me. Most of my workflow is cli based, so I probably end up interacting with the GUI less than 10% of the time so I like that kde allows me to customize things how I like instead of trying to force me to use a different workflow or instead a bunch of extensions that break with every update
Is that related to KDE or QT? Because afaik, flatpak takes your system GTK theme and if you don't configure it, that will result into the wrong theming.
@@draftofspasiba2 Idk about browsers, but many GTK flatpaks are influenced by libadwaita now, so the only way to override the theme for them is to create a filesystem override for ~/.themes and maybe ~/.local/share/themes and then manually set the GTK_THEME environment variable.
I switched to Gnome when plasma 5 first came out because I didn't like how plasma was. I am a Fedora user when plasma 6 beta came out I downloaded a nightly build to check it out and fell in love again. I am running a nightly build of Fedora KDE on my main laptop and have had no issues. I am really impressed with what they did.
Wait spectacle can record videos now? Pretty sure that in and of itself is new. Glad to have a native screen recording tool, because using OBS to do basic screencasts felt pretty overkill.
It could tap onto SimpleScreenRecorder which is quite small and pretty good at what it does. No need to launch OBS for such a simple thing. But I agree that by itself Spectacle was not able to record videos up till now.
my problem with the default KDE style for many years has always been: too many lines and details/too cluttered, not very refined/minimalistic. I much prefer the minimalistic look of Gnome. But I understand the customization power of KDE that allows one to make a lot of changes. And it's always good to have options/competition.
Lines and details are beautiful. I HATE the minimalist look that became so en vogue with Windows 10 and is now the standard where everything looks the same and you have to search through a dozen of flat, monochrome icons to find what you're looking for, rather than being able to tell them apart from a glance!
I'm glad that you had a much better experience with Plasma 6 than I did. When I upgraded from Fedora 39 to 40, it resulted in various missing elements (not just because my icon set was not Plasma 6 ready, it was and could be fixed by switching to another icon theme and back, it would just nuke the icons on every boot), settings being randomly changed and general unresponsiveness. It was compounded by glitches and errors with Fedora itself, unrelated to KDE, which resulted in me having to reinstall my OS. This is especially annoying as in-place upgrades between major versions of Fedora worked fine for me years previously. Now that I've got a reinstalled OS with Plasma 6 working as intended, it's nicer. Some of the settings being shuffled around are a bit questionable to me, but as you said it's different, not necessarily an improvement or a downgrade. The improvements to KDE Connect are also greatly appreciated, as connecting new devices is a breeze now, although they didn't fix the shared clipboard bug which routinely clears your clipboard.
I now have Fedora 40 with KDE 6 on a couple of machines, desktop & laptop. It's a revelation! It's the proverbial quantum leap forward. Overview mode and Alt+tab are game changers. It is really, really very nice. Excellent even. Struggling to think what improvements I'd like to see. This brings KDE at least on a par with Windows for ease-of-use and professionalism. (There are a couple of bugs with multi-monitor config but nothing major. I'm sure they'll be sorted if not already.) Bravissimo/a!
Clicking scrollbar and window moving to that exact point (no need to scroll) was also present on Plasma 5, but it wasn't the default. I switched it on and I love it. Every time I am on Windows, it bothers me that I have to scroll long sites instead one-click it. Unfortunately, in Arch. Plasma 6 is still not on stable repos, so Manjaro users, like me, can't get it yet (on Manjaro unstable we get the same packages as Arch stable). Can't wait!
@@yag-yet_another_gamerFor me Firefox obeys it 100%. Only in situations where site is not loaded fully, when you go to the bottom, it loads and scrollbar jumps up. Otherwise, it works just like with other apps or windows. If this doesn't work for you, there has to be some setting on your system that is preventing it to work. Check your settings or refresh the browser.
GJ and thanks to all the contributors. ❤ E2A: Except for Nicco. He gets my appreciation on his own channel and I don't want him double dipping. I only have so much thanks to share. :)
Plasma has always been my choice for desktop/large displays, that's their focus anyway. Smooth and configurable. Much prefer it to gnome, which I think it's better designed for laptops. Better Wayland support and better gaming is awesome. Makes me (almost) forget my ideal system, which would be an up-to-date Pantheon in a modern base.
funny how kde decides to go with double click as default. Whenever I have to use a windows computer, first thing I do is to change double click to a single click
Nobara upgraded to Plasma 6 for me today so I came here to see what the differences were. Anyone on KDE 5.x really has nothing to worry about. It's very familiar and works fine! Everything just feels a bit more polished. Thanks for the overview!
KDE is looking better and better each day. I say this as a Cosmic Gnome user. The Linux experience is constantly improving. Just think we could be using Windows on our personal computers.
I've been hyped about Plasma 6 for nearly a year, and I'm so excited that it's finally here! I use KDE Neon, so Plasma 6 is already available for me, but I'm holding off installing it since this week I need my laptop for some really important stuff, and with my luck, something's gonna go wrong and bork everything if I update now😅 The fact that Discover is teasing me to update isn't helping. Thank you Nick for reviewing Plasma 6!
So many people want HDR and video games to just work and be as good as windows. That's the only reason they don't switch to Linux, myself included. I only watch these videos to see if they have figured that out yet and fixed everything where it just works, and to its fullest potential with NIVIDA cards.
@@MeMyself-gf7fn Yea I'm in a similar boat as well. No one with the necessary hardware to support these features is going to make the switch until they're finally supported. It just feels too much like you're throwing money away.
I do love the various settings, but am undecided on whether I like having to go through everything for every update. But so far: yes! Much more fun than reining in Windows. 😜
Nice updates! Personally, I am an XFCE fan, so I genuinely prefer it's simplistic & minimalistic style, but I got to say GNOME & KDE have made great improvements overall!!
Seems to be more focused on the backend, with Wayland being the default and using QT6, though there are still quite a few of very welcome and nice changes. Overall not the most exciting update if you were looking for big graphical changes but I imagine upgrading the backend was a lot of effort which will enable the team to work on more fun stuff way easier and to introduce new fun things
I'll probably always prefer GNOME but I've got a small project I've spun up a VM for and I'm using KDE Plasma there. I find the experience a bit noisy but customization options are great. Looking forward to when Fedora pushes the update sounds good.
Looks good. I'm a relatively new Desktop Linux user and after starting with Qtile and I was liking it. I've had some issues though, so I've decided to test drive all other options for an extended period of time, one after another, just so I get to know what's out there and can then decide what I want to stay on. Currently I'm on gnome. Looking forward to trying KDE next.
I've been using wayland for over a year with an AMD and KDE and haven't had any issues. I also think wine is getting native wayland support quite soon.
I personally love the new default settings for Plasma 6. A lot of stuff that I've already been using. I'm on Kubuntu, so it will be a bit before I can use Plasma 6 myself, but I can't wait. It sounds like a nice upgrade from Plasma 5, which is impressive considering how stable Plasma 5 has gotten.
Well for what it is worth so far I've been very impressed. So much so that yesterday I ditched my long-standing venerable Arch install, and hopped across to the new Plasma 6 Neon. There are a few bugs, for example the need to write two missing scripts to enable the shutdown and restart GUI buttons to work... but on the whole, so far it has been pretty smooth, and I love the new cleaner less bloated design. Also - to my surprise - the Nvidia driver, whilst still a fiddle to install, does now seem to work reasonably well with wayland.
Coming from Windows, it really didn't take me long to learn KDE Plasma. Maybe an afternoon at most. I honestly feel like this will be my go-to desktop environment.
Yayy new KDE! Have they changed the action name for right clicking on a compressed folder from "extract here, autodetect subfolder" to something more intuitive? It's a wonderful feature that I use all the time, but the name is pretty bad so I think most people don't know what it does. Also maybe I should finally work on moving to an immutable distro
All of the new features seem really good - like fixing the mouse movements under wayland (hopefully scrolling is working correctly now too), double click to open as default is great also (it's one thing I always change with new installs and because it's buried, its hard to find to change). Definitely looking forward to Fedora 40 when it's released.
Plasma 6 is a almost perfect, the only gripe I have are the dated icons, everything looks polished but are rendered less polished due to icons, especially the folder icon of breeze
I personally use the Newaita-reborn icon set, which I prefer. It's clean. But as for Plasma themes, I haven't found better than Breeze overall so far. Others I've tested all looked less polished. So, that's Breeze for me, just with a different icon set.
I like the default changes. I also like that they left the options in if I do want to use them. Best of both worlds. IMO the defaults should be similar to other OS for simplicity and ease of use.
