For years I’ve been using KDE Plasma and was quite happy with it, honestly was never disappointed by an update… until Plasma 6.
I got the update a bit later compared to everyone else. Arch Linux pushed it to the testing repos on day 1, but I waited until it made its way to the stable repos on the 6th of March (a week after the upstream release, 2 days ago as of writing this).
So, what are my thoughts on it? Not good…
Migration shenanigans
Lots of my settings got changed in weird ways, and the panel also acted in a really weird way at first, ass if it was floating. If you clicked too close to the screen edge it would click the desktop instead of the panel. Toggling the floating thingy on and back off seemed to fix it, but it was still not a good first impression.
Bugs
The cursor is all messed up. I mentioned already how settings got changed, and the cursor was for some reason set to adwaita of all cursors. Setting the cursor manually to a different one also didn’t fix things, quite a lot of windows still get the adwaita cursor even after setting a different one (those same windows correctly get the system cursor set under Sway so I can only assume this is a bug on Plasma’s side), and to add to it, it also changes sizes all the time as it moves between windows. I don’t think the cursor size is set correctly either, an issue that was non-existent in Plasma 5.27.
Changing system colours also takes a lot longer to set: the fade animation that’s supposed to make theme changes smoother finishes before the new colour scheme is set, instead making it feel like the whole computer froze for a moment trying to set the theme.
Questionable changes
Probably the first thing I noticed was the KickOff button. I used a rectangular custom icon for it, so you can imagine my disappointment seeing the image scaled down to fit in a square now. There’s also a really weird padding to the left and right of the panel that as far as I can tell you can’t disable, you’re just stuck with it (as in, background extends all the way, the plasmoids don’t).
Sticking to the panel, lots of Plasmoids also replaced the old checkboxes with slidy toggles. Not only do toggles like this look horrible in general, but they’re also inconsistent with a lot of programs, even KDE’s own, which use checkboxes.
Next thing to notice: the Dolphin icon is now hard coded blue. This doesn’t look good, it just sticks out like a sore thumb whenever you use a theme with an accent colour different from Breeze’s default blue.
Oh, and the crash report dialogue…
It honestly looks like the examples they have in Qt tutorials.
The System Settings
Questionable Reordering
The settings got rearranged for Plasma 6, in a very head scratching way.
System Fonts got moved out of the style settings and into its own category, and in its place Night Light is now thrown together with style options.
Fonts, I can understand, maybe you want them together with the font management stuff which doesn’t really fit with style options, I don’t agree with it, but I can sort of understand it.
But Night Light? It has no business going in the style options. Its old place in display options made a lot more sense, but if you were hell bent on moving it, then accessibility would’ve made a lot more sense.
Another issue I have is with the order of the categories. Style options have been moved way down, meanwhile mouse and keyboard settings take the top spot. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I ever touch mouse or keyboard settings after I initially set up the system. Style options meanwhile? I change them far more often. Probably a lot more often than most people, but I can’t imagine those settings go unused by many, this is the DE favoured by people who tweak their system a lot, after all.
One fix to this would be the ability to reorder the sidebar, at the very least the categories, so users can just pin at the top the settings they actually use, and push the stuff they rarely, if ever, touch down to the bottom.
Oh, and another thing: allow us to hide settings pages that aren’t even relevant, I’m stuck with Thunderbolt settings near the top, pushing settings I actually want down off screen, and I don’t even have Thunderbolt hardware in my computer.
The colours page…
The colours page replaced the old radio buttons (which I think made perfect sense) with a drop down menu which just adds an extra click just to see the fact you can use the colour scheme’s default accent, or an accent picked from the desktop wallpaper. But of course, the default selection of accents is still always visible.
This just looks bad. If your goal was to make this part of the settings page more compact (which I don’t believe when the colour previews bellow are larger than before), then you could just place the colour scheme and wallpaper accents as their own buttons in the same row as the default selection of accents. Wouldn’t even look that bad, and it would look and function even better than the old radio buttons.
Bottom Line
This isn’t all that’s bothered me, but I think I’ve made by point: I’m really disappointed by Plasma 6. Of course, it’s not all bad, but the good is hardly worth mentioning, it’s small things you wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t they changed. But I’m hopeful the bad gets fixed or reverted. This is a team that has provided a solid desktop environment for years, I already know they can do better, now the only question is whether or not they will.
Oh, and PLEASE, for the love of God, get rid of those slidy toggles, they look terrible no matter how you paint them.