- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
How do you make a great desktop into a fantastic desktop? Easy — chip away at the rough bits, polish the good stuff, and add awesomeness. After 29 years of development, KDE’s got the foundation nailed down. Plasma 6.5 is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone.
Ready to see what’s new? Let’s dive into Plasma 6.5!
Highlights:
- Automatic Theme Transitions: Configure when your theme will transition from light to dark and back.
- Caret Text Navigation: Zoom now swoops in to where you type
- KRunner Fuzzy Search: Even if you type it wrong, KRunner will find it!
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What a banger release! Last time they focused on bug hunting, this time its about features. This ping pong focused development is very nice.
- KRunner Fuzzy Search: Not earth shattering, but welcome. I hope there is a way to dynamically force to enable or disable it. Sometimes fuzzy search can be in the way (I know it from other fuzzy search tools). My recommendation is
~character to toggle the functionality:"~file"to enable fuzzy in example, if its disabled by default. I may even make a suggestion in the issue tracker, but I don’t know what options they integrated into it yet.
- KRunner Fuzzy Search: Not earth shattering, but welcome. I hope there is a way to dynamically force to enable or disable it. Sometimes fuzzy search can be in the way (I know it from other fuzzy search tools). My recommendation is
Every time I try KDE I get burned by some bugs. How is stability?
Baloo for example was some source of pain for me. And if I look at the bug tracker I do not get confidant. https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&field0-0-0=product&field0-0-1=component&field0-0-2=alias&field0-0-3=short_desc&field0-0-4=status_whiteboard&field0-0-5=content&order=changeddate+DESC%2Cbug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&query_format=advanced&type0-0-0=substring&type0-0-1=substring&type0-0-2=substring&type0-0-3=substring&type0-0-4=substring&type0-0-5=matches&value0-0-0=baloo&value0-0-1=baloo&value0-0-2=baloo&value0-0-3=baloo&value0-0-4=baloo&value0-0-5="baloo"
Works fine for me. ¯\_( ᵔ ~ ᵔ )_/¯
Same. I always try it out and run into some critical bug causing me to abandon it.
My Linux Mint install with Cinnamon “just works”, so I’ve been sticking with that and hoping Wayland support goes stable soon, because I hate X Server.
cool. ill update when i get the time.
Great, but when kbigscreen.
I need a decent Chromecast replacement
biKscreen
My only beef with KDE is just that there’s always been ‘too much’ of it. Like, every settings screen and right-click context menu just like, goes on for days.
There needs to be a prominent toggle switch between ‘Turbo Nerd Mode’ and ‘Babby’s First DE’.
Came to say what most have already: It works already as well / better than Gnome, doesn’t require superduper hardware, stable, why the feck did I wait until 2025 to try it? Not looking back.
Am I the only one who thinks it looks ugly? Don’t get me wrong, they are improving it in many ways and it’s going in the right direction, plus a ton of features and customizability, but when I look at Gnome I don’t doubt for a second where I want to be.
You are not the only one. Its a taste. I personally like the KDE look the most, its beautiful to me. No other desktop environment looks this good.
kde is pretty enough, it’s not exactly trendy but I feel they’re going the best they could do while keeping information density
Yep. Ugly, disjointed in appearance, etc. I set up Debian KDE for a family member moving from windows so it fits. I was impressed that KDE came far from what it was but it very much is like a bucket of bolts to me.
Gnome in contrast is very put together. Yes, has some quirks but appearance wise is very curated IMO.
I’m fairly new and happened to choose KDE for my own taste, but I would argue GNOME is not “fully” polished as per this post. The nits there may be small or mindless to GNOME diehards, but from a design standpoint, they seem pretty… rough.
Way too much for me to care. I admit gnome isn’t perfect but I’ll still argue it’s far more consistent than KDE.
A colleague always complains that KDE looks like Windows. She does also get jealous, though, when she sees me using poweruser features.
I guess KDE remembering your previous monitor layout after temporarily switching to built in only for laptops is still too big an ask. Related merge has work done but is indefinitely closed and shelves. What a shame.
is that on x11 or wayland? that works fine for me in wayland
Wayland, Super+P always just bring up every option except second screen above built in display. Had to write my own bash script to more flexibly handle this instead of the native manager.
End of 2025 and still missing a replacement for Khotkeys. Plasma is still great all in all, but after almost two decades on KDE I feel like I’ve outgrown it and tried to switch away a couple times now. Time to stop procrastinating and getting on with writing my own wlroots compositor.
Why don’t you make a replacement for Khotkeys instead?
Ultimately, as I said, I want to move away from KDE/Plasma. If I were to build a replacement for Khotkeys and go through the whole contribution process, possibly including some maintenance commitment and years of bikeshedding, I’d be more invested into KDE, not less.
I never used khotkeys, but would input-remapper do what you want? You can remap keys or execute macros on key presses. It supports X11 and Wayland.
Sadly no. I know this one and there is a couple of similar applications out there that all work pretty much the same, using a virtual uinput device to do low-level remapping of key to key. You can do macros or chords with these, but that’s not what I’m after, and in any case, I prefer to do remaps and macros like that first on my QMK keyboard directly if possible, then XKb second.
Khotkey on the other hand could (among other things) remap keys per window. For example you could say that for key presses sent to Firefox (which has no built-in way to redefine hotkeys), make Ctrl-W not close the window but do this thing instead, or use these keys to move between Ctrl-f search results. These remaps would then affect Firefox and only Firefox, while with apps like the one you linked, remaps would always affect the entire system.
Another feature was freely configurable mouse gestures that can work in any application and do different things in each application.
The reason we don’t have anything on wayland is that there is no generalized way for third party apps to intercept, modify, redirect or inject key events. Even global-hotkeys are still lacking in support and lackluster and complex in implementation. This is by design and there are good reasons for this, but it leaves the job of implementing this functionality (as so much on wayland) with the compositor, i.e. here Plasma, Kwin or some other module that’s tightly integrated with them.
Ahhh I see. Well damn because that functionality does sound pretty useful, sad that its currently broken with Wayland.
And Debian Sid is still stuck on 6.3.6 :(
Hopefully they figure out the qt update thing and get the new version packaged soon?
Unfortunately, KDE is quantity over quality. I like the look and feel for the most part, but out of all the mainstream DEs, I’d say it’s the buggiest. GNOME with too many extensions is absolutely less stable, but vanilla KDE is embarrassing for stability, even on Linux Approved hardware.
If you knew/remember the first days of KDE 5, it was the buggiest DE ever invented at that time. However nowadays I barely even see any bug in KDE, at least for my use cases. And I’m a WM guy who use KDE out of laziness.
I’ve experienced far fewer bugs on KDE 6 than Mint or Cinnamon, and I refuse to use GNOME. What else are you comparing against?
They are comparing against a mix of “trust me bro” and “i’ve heard that…”. The local classic
You’re making assumptions. I’ve used GNOME since 2008, with extensive use of KDE and Cinnamon too in later years. I’ve used other DEs such as XFCE for niche applications. KDE - for me - has always been buggy despite being the most feature rich. This is just my experience. You don’t have to trust me.
Edit: Currently daily driving COSMIC. It was a little rough in the Alpha stages but it’s now very stable for me.
Cinnamon I’ve found to be buggy too. Panel and wallpaper glitches, black screens on wakeup, to name a few.