Plasma 6.1 Is Good! But... 

You can help support the channel on Patreon and get weekly exclusive podcasts! patreon.com/thelinuxcast

Typo in the thumbnail gonna typo

I don't know if it is intentional to emphasize plasma's bugs, but the thumbnail I got was:"Plsama gonna plasma"

Your opening statement about your relationship with plasma reflects mine exactly. It's the best example of love/hate I can think of.

6.1 is nice but its been the first time I had bugs with KDE. I mainly have two: - Auto login doesn't work anymore, in 6 I had that enabled - on first system start, USB devices don't work, have to restart for them to work. Quite annoying that one

You missed your opportunity at 1:54 for the “Well, actually…” 🤓 Love the video bud, keep em’ coming ☕️

there is a setting in accesibility called shake cursor that makes the mouse get big , you can turn it off.

I've literally never seen that mouse pointer bug... but I think Brodie was also showing that off recently 😂

Wow! That wallpaper with the date/time widget is super cool!!!!! 😮

IDK how so many people have KDE work fine, for me it's always been too buggy. On the subject of your monitor issue, for me sometimes I don't get a desktop background on my secondary displays. 6 has been better, but it's just frustrating, and the developers seem somewhat hostile to focusing on quality for a bit rather than new features.

4:27 it's not a bug. It's a feature. The best Plasma feature ever

What font is that for the weekday? Imagine if the cursor getting bigger isn't a bug but just a way to find the cursor faster.

If you really wanted a stable distribution the answer isnt gnome but instead cinnamon. But cinnamon is faaar behind on the wayland front

Plasma still regularly has soft crashes for me, where the apps don't close, but the everything else restarts, especially when using meta+v for the clipboard. Also brightness widget regularly crashes if I interact with it since 6.1.

Yeah i had to stop using the floating for the top panel on my set up because the kinda brief stuttery flicker you have when maximizing is just too jaring lol

My experience with Plasma has been better on endeavour OS than tumbleweed for some reason I can't explain. I tried tumbleweed for a few months as it is a great underrated distro in my opinion, but I had issues with Plasma updates that didn't arise in endeavour or were fixed quicker than in tumbleweed.

Watching on KDE Neon with Plasma 6.1

I'm still on Plasma 5.27 and it's OK I guess. When it comes to me Plasma is one of the major things that brought me to Linux from Vista/7, I don't know whether I would use Linux if there was no Plasma.

I like XFCE and KDE. They are quite the contrast in many respects.

My Arch installation was packed with plasma 5 at the beginning for quite a long time, beautiful experience. I updated to Plasma 6 the first day it came out and now I'm on the 6.1 version. It has only one major bug with wine and kwin-wayland on par. When I play a game thru lutris by using Wine-TkG or Wine-GE, sometimes after playing constantly for about 2 or 3 hours kwin-wayland crashes killing my whole plasma session and not even letting me enter TTY which forces me to restart my whole PC. It's kinda painful but It doesn't happen when I use GE-Proton and gamescope while playing on Lutris so at least I have a workaround which lets me avoid X11. On other platforms there are no issues at all. Apart from that, I like the experience overall. I even moved to plasma 6 on my laptop. The desktop is smooth, good looking and very customizable. They still have X11 (yet) behind so if something goes bad with Wayland like in my case, you can always go back to X11.

I had a lot of these problems you speak of until I switched to from HDMI to Display Port cables.

I have only seen one bug after updating to Plasma 6, my bar got messed up and showed no application. I managed to get it working fine thanks to redditors, who had a fix up pretty fast. Ever since I moved to Plasma for one of my installations, I haven't been content with any other desktop environment. My primary is still i3 though and these two have made me use linux as primary driver (also steam's native support, which I think has been a game changer for Linux, bless gaben).

I think KDE and Gnome both have grown to a state where deciding which is better is literally impossible cause you can get rid of KDE's so-called bugs when not using the tons of features it gives you or you can make Gnome buggy adding tons of features to it , i love both of them and cannot really decide which works best for me , the only part that they differentiate for me is the hardware support which I think KDE works better for me (at least for now)[maybe because I'm using a very old laptop]

The cursor isn't a bug I already fixed this it can be turned off in settings it's called shake which makes the cursor bigger you can turn it off now if you want to I repeat this isn't a bug it's a feature :)

I really like the modularity of Plasma but it gave me a lot of TOC to apply a window decoration and 1 corner is nice and round but the other is round but whit a semi-translucent hard edge corner, when I drag an app on the panel to change the order and suddenly it switched for another app while I'm dragging it or the applications feeling mostly disjointed. That kind of small things just keep me on Gnome. I don't mind to change the Desktop environment but the TOC hits hard 😵‍💫

How is it thay kde has a problem, but cinnamon and gnome dont?

Im not touching kde until they resolve the issue that installing themes from the official kde site can erase your home directory and who knows what other vulnerabilities.

Nah, I'm a Cinnamon enjoyer and have no plans to move out.

for me, plasma just kinda... died. plasma would not stop crashing at all. plasmashell crashhandler messages in the tray every login, i had to restart plasmashell from the terminal, just everything did not work. but only on arch. it worked on fedora, debian didn't even have plasma 6 (didn't use Plasma/Debian anyway)... yeah. might switch back if this all gets fixed

Perhaps a criteria to be taken in account is power efficience. Have you measured how much power KDE consumes compared to Gnome? This can be an important factor for laptop users. Same can be said for certain distros that requires additional tweaks to match alternatives out of the box experiences.

Sticking with Plasma 5.27 on Debian.

No more than three shakes or you're playing with it.

Having watched Matt jump from one DE/WM to the other... I am just waiting for him to end up on Openbox.

I used Plasma 6 but found that windows for some applications did not display correctly hiding the control buttons from view. Irritated by this I went back to Cinnamon where I never experienced that.

For me Plasma after some usage time, was a disappointment and I went back to Xfce. Much simpler and at least it has the option to make the panel fully transparent compared the Plasma panel. KDE is supposed to the most customizable DE, but no option for a fully transparent panel or an option for the app image indicator to place on the bottom instead of on top.

I have also been running Tumbleweed with Plasma recently albeit on an old HP 8200 Elite SFF with a 1050 ti in it so that hardware is very old. It runs great with Wayland even. I had an issue where the cursor shake made it disappear until I updated which fixed it. I can't say for certain what the cause was.

i like plasma, but it runs heavy AF, like 5gb after startup on my laptop with Popos

I install kde because it's the best base for my hyprland configuration. 99% of the things you can do in kde still work in hyprland, which means you can customize hyprland look though kde Gnome sucks as a base for wm. Heck they even cockblock you from opening the setting in every DE except gnome. And idk if they fixed it (probably not), but bluetooth and wifi settings do not work on hyprland for some unkwon reasons.

Plasma 6 "upgrade intrusion" broke my Tumbleweed/Hyprland. I moved to Fedora 40/Hyprland with Gnome and extensions. No problemo. No Plasma for now. Maybe when Plasma 6.27 is released...

Plasma is full of bugs and is unstable. I used it for 18 months and when I stopped using it my computer became 100% solid. The only thing great about Plasma is the search and indexer. But even that is broken. You delete the index file and purge but the file errors remain. The devs seem to like new stuff and just leave the old stuff to rot. If you like eye candy and 1000s of settings then use Plasma.

Please try yazi-rs best file manager and in Rust

Thanks for the content Matt

Matt, are you running in Wayland or X11? I can't imagine that tearing happening in Wayland.

I do not buy the argument that bugs are necessary, thanks for clarifying that size is what's causing the necessary bugs. AYMK the hello world applications have no bugs... but I fail to see how large the string printed needs to be b4 you'll unintentionally and unavoidably add a bug? I feel it's clear to see that size is not the reason the bugs exist.

The mouse thing actually looks like it could be a pretty sweet feature if they did it right instead of it being a bug... you know how many times i have lost track of my mouse across 3 monitors as small as it is and moving it around causes it to get bigger so i can locate it would be pretty Fn sweet.. assuming when you stop it returns to the normal size.. AND its even worse if i am outside at the park with the kids...

Plasma. Probably not recommended for potato laptops. Too heavy with too many moving parts for me to want to mess with. Especially running over Arch. Even on good hardware, I'll likely stick with Xfce for as long as I can. Safe, reliable, predictable, light, and eminently customizable, usually without blowing-up in my face after an update.

Can't wait Tumbleweed + Cosmic 😍

had to remove kde cuz of wifi, could not find a decent solution to stop connection dropping

I use Kde and my desktop icons keep disappearing Trash and Home folder 😢

por que no los dos, but also what about other floating DEs? Cinnamon? Unity? Mate? they seem ancient compared to GNOME and KDE 6, but maybe they would work

My linux journey was I first used Ubuntu way back in early 2000's. It was an on and off thing. i used gnome. thought it was horrible back in the day. now that I had time with KDE. i went to give gnome an honest try on arch. I think gnome is way better than KDE. I don't know if it my age or that i am tired of taskbar. 25 years of windows. ya want a fresh desktop. All i know is that for now I am seeing gnome. Maybe in the future i will be in a steady relationship with Hyperland. I already played with it.

Even if adding bugs is unavoidable, all that's needed is for all improvements stall until any identified bugs are corrected... We don't need new features added on-top of bugs, that's nonsense(I should know, I'm full of that).

When i updated From fedora 39 to 40 plasma 6.0 was pretty broken 6.1 has been flawless though.

being full of bugs is not an exclusive of plasma. Gnome is as well. But at least on kde you have many features... they don't remove essential pieces of the environment just for the sake of a "minimalistic" look... and they don't try to bind their libraries to their idea of how a desktop should look, causing trouble to everyone else...

Plasma is under the star of experimentation. It still can't be really stable compared to other solutions especially when too much unreliable widget so called developers are around. They should be more XFCE driven in terms of stability and updates. And be careful with the widgets by the way. PS Such a nice desktop you have! Very similar to mine. As you noticed, the global menu on the upper bar is weird when you manage more screens because it shouldn't disappear when you drag a window to another monitor (I have a dual setup with a vertical monitor on my left, two DELL U24). The developers should just replicate the one from XFCE that is just perfect. In XFCE global menu, when you click on the desktop you have the desktop elements and all the home links, included recent documents: much more useful and, of course, it will keep itself if you drag a window on another screen, just like Mac OSX global menu.

KDE is useless as a daily driver. So is gnome. xfce is the best if customised well. But nothing to beat a nice window manager

I live plasma but it keeps crashing on heavy games I play so I went to hyperland or gnome

just updated to 6.1.1 recently, and there's a weird bug where the setting XML won't load properly

Great video! i used to like kde but now i just enjoy gnome as it just works for me in general.

just switched to endeavouros with cinnamon. so cool experience. way much better than mint. way less buggy than plasma.

Tried OpenSuse.. i like it. Also like EndevourOS as it doesn't waste my time like arch does as I am still a relative noob. Like Fedora but prefer Nobara as my Gaming Distro. Got a spare P520 Workstation tho. Gonna dual boot linux/win10 so I got Gaming Covered and its got 2 GPU slots so.. One Radeon, one Nvidia.. lol 🤣

i always liked KDE...BUT....there is always bugs..

I had a bunch of bugs with plasma 6 and the updates to qt6 but they pretty much all seem to be fixed with 6.1.1, I still have xfce installed though as a backup de haha, kde stays my favourite though

I have way more bugs in KDE 6.1 vs 6.0

Font: Anurati

You are really hoppy. :D I'm glad you came back to KDE, its the superior desktop environment over Gnome. Obviously I am joking and exaggerating for the sake of starting a war. :D Obviously this is also a joke! Man, I'm so funny today!

I use kubuntu as my base with i3wm. I only use kde every so often. 95% of time I'm in i3.

What font is that in your conky?

"Stable Gnome" lol, yeah right.

I guess I'm among the lucky ones who didn't have any issues like that with Plasma 6 and 6.1. Fingers crossed. Discover sucks though. I downright uninstalled it.

Does anyone know what's the cursor theme he's using?

I so prefer XFCE. All that eye candy isn't exactly great for performance for games. Example game would be War Thunder. Yes so available for Linux. I wouldn't do it the steam way though.

What theme are you using?

Wait a few years more and it will be as good as 5.27

Plasma has its issues for sure. I personally have had better luck with qt based apps vs gnome's gtk based apps.

If KDE have a good tiling manager like forge or popshell i might finally jump ship im not a fan of gnome extensions.

XFCE NATION REPRESENT

come on man, you have a secret love affair with plasma, right?

The thumbnail says ¨PLSAMA¨.

I'll give Plasma 6 a shot, when Steam OS adopts it. Or when GTK Apps don't look like sh. . on qt anymore.

Hey!

Another one of these. I get the idea, you've found some issues and would like to drive attention to them. However I do not think, get your issues in front of your fav streamer and have them do a video is helpful for the community. And because everyone has issues they would like for you to do a video on, it's rather unfair for you to not elevate issues for other ppl. Even if the person is a real pain, like me, it's a bad move for that to be the process.

Plasma is just to flat.

I think you just like complaining

It’s bad

first

plsama