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You can have rounded corners without any script, you can customize the look of it, the floating margins, etc., all through themes -- either by installing a different one, or editing a couple of values through a GUI it a SVG file

KDE6 is amazing. It's not perfect. It is amazing though. KDE has some of the best bundled apps i've used also. Kate is the most usable and refined gui text editor. Way to go KDE!

I love the floating panel, I just wish they'd make it possible to make it not 'de-float' the second you make a window big.

Plasma 6 on OpenSuse kalpa and Nixos rolling has been pretty much stable for me too.

Notes from a long time Plasma user: - I wasn't thrilled about the system settings reorder as well... But it is more newb friendly now. Frankly, I almost never run System Settings anymore - i love that you can search for and launch KCMs directly from the main menu. - crashes: Wayland recovery is currently a Plasma-only thing, but I hope other toolkits and desktops adopt it - David Edmundson has patches for everyone. - I agree that panels aren't that customisable. For example you cant put two panels on the same edge, side by side. - Workspace pager - there's a 3rd party widget that has dots for workspaces like the new GNOME switcher. I personally use workspaces in two rows which makes the pager much more compact. - tiling: still needs a lot if work. I like the magnetic split borders, but otherwise the tiling overlay is ridiculous and needs a lof more work. I think the idea was to get the infrastructure in, but theres a lot of missing parts that were supposed to be delivered later, but that didn't happen. I think the original developer got a life. - The screen capture portal works great (and I have 2 external monitors) and most problems with it are in the applications that use it. That being said the problem with the missing screen sounds like a real KDE problem. Hit me up on discuss kde and I'll try to help. - updates - the default in plasma is to do offline updates, like they do in Windows. I dont know if it's something that can work in SuSE, but this process works well for upgrades oh Ubuntu-type and Fedora-type OSs. If you like to update in place (which I do) you should be aware of the possible problems and be proficient enough to tackle them.

I'm not a tiling window person. In fact, I'd say that I'm tiling challenged. But, I find the "tiling" in KDE to be a happy medium.

In my experience, Plasma 5.27 is really stable. Plasma 6 is pretty buggy.

plasma 6 and arch here. runs great

17:42 "Compact Pager" makes the desktops display as singular numbers instead of a preview of the entire workspace contents.

Personally, Plasma 5 never gave me any issues whatsoever that didn't boil down to me doing something stupid, but Plasma 6 just likes to freeze every so often, sometimes every few seconds...often it stays frozen for several seconds, *sometimes* for over a minute. That's only the renderer or something like that BTW, audio and input and software all works properly but the screen won't refresh anything other than mouse movements, this never happened with Plasma 5.

KDE Plasma 6 has been pretty smooth for me on KDE Neon and Arch after the first patch about a week after the release. I was expecting more issues. It's been great!

KDE is known for its extensive customization options. While I appreciate the additions sometimes less is more useful than more.

I love Plasma 6! A bit wonky at first, but it's much better now. I use it on NixOs as my daily and on Arch (spare SSD)

Virtual Desktops size You can enable 2 Row display, which will make them smaller. It's not a setting of the widget itself, oddly enough, it's part of the KDE Settings at Settings > Window Management > Virtual Desktops . Look for the "1 Row" in right bottom area and change it to "2 Rows".

It's very funny that by introducing "tiling" KDE devs just broke good tiling implementation for KDE. Bismuth was kind of replaced by Polonium but it depends on KDE "tiling" that was too buggy in 5.27 at least.

First 10 seconds is my exact experience with KDE. Even made a rant video about it.

You can increase the rows in the workspace switcher widget, that way it will make it smaller, although this is not a good solution either. I find 3x3 workspaces the best way to use it.

for pager, go to settings and add more rows on your virtual desktops. might SLIGHTLY help

I love KDE Plasma 6.

Hello mate, what font are you using?

I could be wrong, but I feel like complaints about "sub-optimal" tiling in a full desktop environment seem a bit nitpicky. DEs inherently cater to a different userbase/workflow from tiling window managers. It seems to me like that actual userbase is simply not substantial enough to necessitate work on integrating full nuanced TWM support out of the bow, when there are typically many other bugs and features that require more attention. I feel like its perfectly reasonably to expect that more niche features like these for "average" desktop users should exist in third party projects, extensions, and addons - especially since a number of wonderful tiling window managers already exist for people who need that workflow.

plasma has a "minimal pager" thats just dots with the selected desktop's dot filled white

I've used KDE Plasma with hit or miss results. I always had trouble with KDE Plansma working on hardware especially if I tried to install it on potatoes. If I have some stout hardware, I might give Plasma another shot. Great work as always, Matt!!

Been using Plasma 6 on my Arch desktop since it was released to extra repo, I absolutely love it when compared to 5. Basically all bugs and issues I had with plasma DE are now fixed, sure the editing could be done a bit nicer, perhaps an option to lock or save pre-made panels (so you don't accidentally delete them or move them to another screen when updating). When it comes to floating panels, I was using them in Plasma 5 as well, but they were quite buggy on mutli-screen setup, sometimes reacting with windows on the wrong screen or not reacting with windows at all. I haven't had similar problem with 6. One weird thing, my bluetooth service was not starting up every now and then, forcing me to remove and re-add the BT modules to the kernel and rebooting. For some weird reason it started to work just fine when I updated to Plasma 6.

I didn't have big crashes neiter on plasma 5 nor plasma 6, but small bugs ang glitches stayed the same.

I miss all the grid functionality that was available in V5. (The current Meta-G option is not enough for my needs) Hopefully they will recreate it in future releases 😅

I'm using this minimal desktop indicator widget. Takes way less space than the default one. Also I made a personal kwin script for tiling. Not to make it automatically, because I actually like floating wm... but something like pressing a shortcut and tiling all the windows from that workspace without having to move each one individually.

Thank you- great video. I'm on Fedora so my KDE Plasma will be upgraded to 6 not long after Arch gets it. This fairly early adoption makes my a bit nervous, but you've assuaged my worries.

I made a clean install for Plasma 6, full format install de Fedora 40, and completely clean profile to avoid bringing old customizations. The only issue is that Polonium is nowhere as features full as Bismuth and is very buggy for me, especially with mpv.

New Linux user. Tried KDE Plasma. After spending over an hour trying to get the taskbar clock readable when the taskbar is on the side, I decided that it didn't appeal to me enough to be worth the effort. I figure it would be better to just build a desktop environment like LEGO instead, though almost certainly not easier.

Set your workspaces to two rows, and the pager will get small. Just fyi

Like you, I'm jumping back and forth between Hyprland and Plasma 6. They seem to coexist nicely. A lot of the KDE apps work well in Hyprland.

Same experience, I could barely use Plasma 5 for even 1-2h due to how buggy it was. Plasma 6 is unironically much more stable for me. There are still minor bugs (the microstutters Brodie Robertson mentioned in his video), but yeah aside from that it's been fine. Based on what I read, it seems people that extensively used Plasma 5 had more issues due to their old configs messing with stuff. I installed it using another DE so I was fine.

First, KDE Wayland and SDDM would eventually have an awful time together, hanging on a black screen after a while. This didn't get fixed in the final versions of 5.27. Second, and more egregious, the infamous "rm -rf /" can be arbitrarily hidden in global themes. KDE needs to pull themselves together.

I like KDE6, I had a buggy experience while updating (my whole system crashed) and then I had a few bugs for about a week after with kwallet until I updated. It's been good so far.

For me, the default tiling is great. I mostly only ever use tiling when programming or something where I am typing while looking at a reference/docs, so it's very convenient for me to just drag a window to the right and left edges for the split view. If I need docs, terminal and editor at the same time, I can drag to corner, but at that point I'd just rather alt-tab to switch between stuff because the windows are too small to be useful even on a 28" display.

Nuke and pave is my upgrade method on every single distro I've ever used, even ones like Linux Mint where, in most cases, the upgrade path is supposed to be quite stable. For me it's not worth the risk and potential frustration and I also get a clean slate and a refresher on how to set everything up so things can stay fresh in my mind.

KDE had absolutely won me, a long time GNOME user damn well with Plasma 6, but like on your hardware, I have issues aswell, notably with the audio server on Wayland, but on X11, it is very slow, I have a 4060 in my system and no iGPU (Ryzen 5000X processor). My MacBook Air still runs Ubuntu as the Ubuntu GNOME config goes so well with that computer. I really like Plasma (I actually never used to). I am using Nobara 39 on my machine, I also have experienced DE crashes too notably with kdenlive open. Huge love hate relationship with Plasma.

12:56 I had that issue on Fedora many time and it's, at least what was told to me on and open issue with Plasma, related to how Chromium based browers deal with those saved sessions, on Gnome it it handles one way, on Plasma another where they pass it to the kwallet, but in a "destructive" way where all saved sessions are purge to use the "new"/"diferent" method of storing those. When testing Plasma and Gnome on the same install I had that all the time and running (Vivaldi, Brave, Chromium etc) with --password-store=basic paramter would solved that. I used to install Plasma and, before login remove kwallet to avoid it. Chrome, specifically, Installs and keyring (or something like that) even if you're using just Gnome, which causes problems with all browsers already installed.

One thing for me, which I guess could be platform specific. I'm on Garuda Dr460nized KDE, and my last major update run pulled KDE6. Now, Quick Settings aka System Settings no longer has an active close button. Alt-F4 also does nothing useful. I have to fire up htop to kill the settings app. I'd post you a screenclip but I can't do that on YT, but yeah - minimize button good, restore button good, close button disabled.

Trying it now, with a fresh Neon install. 🙂

For the workspace switcher widget there are options I'm sure you already know that. Desktop Indicator , Compact Pager, One of those might be worth a try.

Plasma 6 on opensuse tumbleweed with wayland - no issues so far (only missing the backup app)

floating panel is also on 5.27, so even that is not new

Oh oh oh. Im a newbie to linux and kde. And i have experience two things u mentioned here. One i downloaded and installed some login manager and bam when i restart i get a black screen with just mouse pointer. Nothing to login. Chatgpt helped me to run in single mode and use startx to get back to default login manager tho. Secondly, the cookies getting deleted. Hahaha my silly ass thought its a security thing. Whenever i open librewolf no login is saved. I didnt get to fix this yet though. And kde customization for a newbie like me is like RICING. 😅 p.s i like kde connect and kde vaults. Loving KDE more than gnome 😊

It's possible when starting up, your computer is not presenting the full list of the monitors, maybe do to that single monitor starting late or taking forever to be added to the list that the portal pull from. Maybe by delaying the startup process that pulls the list of monitors for the portals that being (possibly XDG-desktop), this could be fixed. This is only a theory.

The rollout was a bit rough on Nobara. An otherwise normal update while already on KDE, but clearly something was pushed too early (whether that was on Nobara's end or KDE itself I don't know). I was using X before and as far as I know, still am. Some Issues I had after the initial update: Not everything was there/ready to use, like literally the settings panel had like 5 things in it, not everything was available to update to/a couple conflicting packages. The default widgets were just blank, I understand that there was an API change, but these are the defaults! I had frequent trouble with the mouse clicks going "through" windows to the desktop (starting a new window, then closing it seemed to "fix" it. This one still sometimes happens, though rarely now, I feel it might be tied to opening windows while running WINE?) I wasn't able to right click → open terminal here, it just literally wouldn't do anything. The terminal still worked, and I could start a regular one, either through the shortcut on the main bar, or right clicking on the desktop. I still have an issue with the system monitor, opening it then going to the list of applications (the one with the details pane) then clicking on any of them crashes it. Selecting/interacting with them from the initial summary page is fine. I don't what's causing it, and I've not used Linux/KDE enough to even know when it started/if it was always a thing, but when listening to audio at 2x speed, like on KZfaq or Twitch, the audio get a bit distort-y. This isn't an issue on the same hardware with Windows. Non-sped up audio seems fine, if half as quiet than windows is. As I'm still just trying out Linux, I really don't have a routine to compare against with this update, as far as I know, this is how every KDE update goes, or maybe it was the best, or worst update! All I can surmise is that I'd be much more frustrated if I was daily driving this setup instead of mostly just weekends and that this probably needed another 2-3 weeks before being released as the last 2-3 weeks of patching has demonstrated.

I agree with you Matt kde plasma is not as customizable as I would like either....

Powerful when needed, except when you need an actually useful workflow. The workspaces situation is disappointing.

looking thinner bro keep it up

It's still buggy. The pinned apps lose the logo and often do not start the app.

Does Dolphin icon still show as blue regardless of what you set your color scheme as? There was some theming issues a couple of weeks ago.

Would it work with an NVIDIA GTX 10 series GPU?

Show only current screen on pager configuration will get rid of all of the extras.

What theme are you using

Arch Linux plasma 6 has went smoothly except KDE connect for me.

I think we need to review Plasma 6 in the next 6 months or just before Christmas ;)

Well I am using Hyperland for a while now and I don't want anything else. Apart from a complete crash today and very few game crashes, it works fine for me. Development work is going great and sometimes I just end up ricing for hours.

Pretty much the Wayland situation can be summed as: unga-bunga protocol discussion unga, everyone OK and GNOME is: i want to be special and different daddy!

i want it to get a little better when it comes to system usage

I was going to whinge about KMail not working on Plasma 6 but then realized it was my VPN which was messing with the connection. Overall it's fine although changes from Plasma 5.27 not really significant enough for me to notice. If I wasn't on Arch and instead on a stable distro I wouldn't be in a massive rush to upgrade. There are some minor bugs already apparent (e.g. new panel settings doesn't work properly when you move panel bar to the top like default XFCE setup) but nothing major. I like panel bar at the top with: App Launcher Pagers (4 desktops) Window list System tray on right

I had KDE Neon installed for over 2.5 years on my work laptop and unfortunately couldn't resist and upgraded to Plasma 6. The upgrade was a not a happy one, especially for old installations of KDE. Besides some themes incompatible with plasma 6, my main gripe was that Intellij kept freezing on Xorg. I decided to re-install and switched to EndeavourOS plasma but Intellij was still freezing on Xorg , so I switched to Wayland. I'm surprised of how smooth it is. I have a few issue with it though: (Spotify app crashes plasma, Intellij not clickable in the area where a conky is displayd and Kazam not working). So overall, if you a have an old KDE install I'd wait a bit more.

the part with crashing of kwin and somehow DE-reset is bad and have had both. the kwin way to much

Tried KDE Neon on usb (didn't install it) and it wasn't as stable. Blurry font rendering and glitchy theme changing, system settings got stuck and couldn't open, so I had to end the process.

Another prominent *lack* of customization in KDE is gestures, making it less useful on laptops.

I pluged a USB toslink adapter into my steamdeck and the applications choked trying to do 5.1/ac3 encoding. Only stereo works reliably.

Listing all systemd services should be just systemctl --user status. (Assuming that the portal is a user service, which should be the case.)

Settings should be organized in a tree view, how hard can it be to understand for developers.

On arch for me it was good.

I'd honestly love to use plasma 6, but for me (on NixOS) I can't game with it. I have this weird bug where my mouse doesn't work in a lot of games. For some its easily fixable by dragging the game to another monitor and back, but for some its not. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I game a lot after work and when I do I really just want it to work if I boot up some random smaller game with friends that I haven't played in a while. That's why I went back to gnome for now until this is fixed. For my work stuff I really enjoyed plasma 6 much more than plasma 5.

Wayland is the future. But Wayland on Plasma 5 is still kinda buggy. But I'm on Debian and I don't want to bother with backports or whatever. So I'm just suffering through the bugs.

What really bothers me are how the Developers are in denial about long standing bugs and just keep adding features. Font manager is still as buggy as ever and can be made to crash instantly by clicking on Noto Color Emoticons. Also the font rendering with QT apps is sub-optimal.

open suse here, upgraded to kde 6 with a normal distro upgrade, not only did i get kicked out of plasma and into sddm dracut also failed to create the initial ramdisk for the new kernel that i was installing within the same upgrade, after i fixed the kernel and restarted the update kde has been very unstable with lots of gliching, and im considering installing open suse again.

What is that wallpaper Matt? Link, or how its called?

22:40 sounds like it should be a bug report, sounds like an upstream issue with IDID recognition or something

my second monitor used to be only half the screen at boot and id have to disable and reenable everytime, i reinstalled a clean kubuntu it was fixed lol and the changing of my cursor sticking to my theme over firefox was fixed...

kde plasma is always stable when it comes to bad UX

It only took me a few minutes to find the first bug after updating to KDE Plasma 6.😂

I haven't moved to Wayland yet either and don't plan to for a while until it is better it crashed on me doing a wallpaper had to reset it wouldn't come out of it.

Kde 6 is what made me finally switch away from gnome. I tried kde 5 on fedora 39 and i hated it. Kde 6 fixes so many problems i had with it, i am now very happy

Are you going to do a riced out plasma 6 video?

I saw the title and thought you were sending April fools early.

Plasma 6 broke my Tumbleweed and Hyprland. Rollbacks were tainted too. 5.27 was perfect. 6. Not yet.

Yes it is. ❤

I'm currently using it is good. I think the default shortcuts are kinda awful. I feel like there is still so much going on.

I like it for what it is. But, it installs so many different packages i dont really need. Im usually on a tiling WM, if i need a DE I'll use XFCE or Cinnamon.

Love it on Arch and MX Linux.

I can say the same thing. Rick sold and has led to the best Linux experience I have had in a long long time.

I love me some KDE Plasma.

When you had problems with plasma, did you file reports about them?

Do a collaboration with niccolo for going deep into customization of the panel!

EndeavourOS, KDE Plasma 6, Wayland. No Nvidia drivers, though. Smooth as silk.

am going to witch this after i drop my kids off at school but going by the KDE plasma 6 -is it good am going to say no it just sucks KDE was my 1st ever i tryed dint like it then and sadly as much as i like to i still dont like it

I've been on Plasma since 3.5 and never had the problems you have had. You must be too advanced for it. Stick with WMs and the rice fan boys.

Gnome - KDE Plasma - XFCE, all I ever need.

It's very buggy. Start an app, it shows up in the panel,close the app its still there. Panel doesn't update until you log out and log back in. Garbage.

I'm at a point in Distrohopping that I'm just settling on Ubuntu.

It's by far the best KDE Plasma, but it's still KDE Plasma.

Tbh what you are saying about possibly expecting something monumental when moving major versions.. Well tbh on Linux there is almost never a monumental change.. So much fuzz about and extra check box or panel here and there and they call something a big update... Everything in the Linux world moves incredibly slow which is totally logical because of the variety of different distros, opensource, etc... but yeh... On my last opensuse setup I did actually enjoy plasma 5.. I hate gnome so plasma 5 is the best alternative for me.... But so far plasma 6 looks exactly what I thought, a few minor changes which aren't even important to me.