KDE Plasma 6.8 Released, Marks 30 Years of the KDE Project (phoronix.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project. KDE Plasma 6.8 ships many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, improvements for the Union theme engine, better remote desktop support, multi-GPU handling improvements, the new kscreenctl tool, server-side drop shadow support, multi-monitor improvements, and a lot of other polishing throughout. Especially from the Wayland angle there has been a lot of polishing and fine tuning for Plasma 6.8. Accompanying the release is a new film, The KDE Documentary, which "tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows." The documentary is available to stream for free on YouTube.
What's the best Linux distro that features KDE? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the best Linux distribution that features KDE? Kubuntu?
Something else?
Re:What's the best Linux distro that features KDE? (Score:5, Informative)
KDE Neon. Ubuntu LTS base + latest KDE. Maintained by the KDE project.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm, I downloaded and installed KDE neon and it turns out to be still based on Ubuntu 24.04. When it offered to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 it failed with hundreds of errors.
Re: (Score:2)
No idea about current installs. Their live CD worked fine for me and I use one PC I "upgraded" from Ubuntu to Neon, which worked quite well but is no offically supported way to install it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it was rather disappointing. I think they missed a few checkboxes on the KDE neon release.
Re: (Score:2)
Neon *is* a bit a testing ground for KDE developers, there is a reason why distributions ship software after testing and not after its release. On the other hand, it would have expected them not to have a broken standard installation.
Personally I like plain Debian well, but many people think it is too slow. Kubuntu works but does more customization. Maybe Suse is another option?
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the advice.
I think I'll move to Kubuntu since both personally and professionally I have moved to Ubuntu.
Re:What's the best Linux distro that features KDE? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: What's the best Linux distro that features KDE (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I've been using Fedora KDE and CachyOS. Fedora is 1 year support per release, and completely free. If you want some proprietary codec support you have to enable RPMFusion repo.
CachyOS is rolling, based on Arch, and helpfully installs drivers and codecs as needed. And if you have a modern CPU, compiles the repos with optimizations.
I haven't messed with Ubuntu since snaps became a big thing. Maybe it's just FUD.
Re: (Score:2)
A satisfied user of openSUSE.
Personally though, I would say, forget about "what distribution" and ask "what tasks do I need to carry out" and work backwards from there.
Re: (Score:2)
openSUSE Tumbleweed without question, though you may dislike the package manager
But they dropped X11 support (Score:2)
If you prefer or need to use X11 you could look at the fork of Sonic DE [sonicde.org]
By the way this is a hint that the reason to drop X11 support are more political than technical.
Re:But they dropped X11 support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But they dropped X11 support (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, they refactored much of kwin to support wayland which was really laggy and generally sucky before 6. With the release of 6 they basically did the absolute minimum to keep x11 working during the refactors and that resulted in a lot of lag/etc bugs in x11. And for what the benchmarks show a tiny latency advantage now with wayland, but that advantage evaporates for ~90% of the applications running which are still using toolkits that in turn require Xwayland. And at the same time completely messed up things like damage updates, and a few other things one would generally consider optimizations for power/efficiency which would be huge hits if we weren't all running on multighz machines with fat GPUs. Its especially noticeable on network displays for example. The entire wayland architecture it runs out is a giant mistake for anyone who isn't a single task display (ex old ipad type use cases).
So, lazy or politics take your pick.
But, myself and a few other people have independently thrown, ML bots at the problem, some to simply resurrect the existing X11 support, by not breaking it for 6.8, and others like myself who have looked at actually doing something closer to a performance/correctness implementation that should exceed the core wayland code by leveraging X's advantages along with DRI/EGL/vulcan. So, don't be surprised it there are forks by people who are more interested in a stable DE, rather than playing political games like removing the ability to independently control the title bar color from the GUI, or having too use global scaling... And unlike a lot of "reimplementation" plans this has much of the existing code to work with, so its more a proper cleanup with appropriate tests to assure the bots aren't making a larger mess.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, tell us more! What/where can we read more about your or other replacements?
Yes, nice. Still not interested (Score:5, Informative)
Fvwm really has everything I need. Also not moving to Weyland.
IMO, the most polished desktop environment (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I find Plasma to be overly cluttered myself. Desktops are a personal preference item.
That said I will be trying Fedora 45's version when that comes out.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I hate clutter too, but if you turn all that off what does KDB have left that makes it better than anything else?
Personally I use sway. Everything stays out of my way. No start menu to complain about. The status bar is simple text and can be configured to display whatever I like in whatever format.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I had been a kde user for many years and still like it as a general purpose desktop, but switching to a tiling WM (hyprland) has been a game-changer for me. Bit of an initial hurdle with key combinations but it feels so much more powerful and responsive to me. I actually look forward to starting it up and using it.
Pioneering Hyperbole (Score:2)
...pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows.
Unless, of course, you count /usrX11/bin/twm [wikipedia.org] as a desktop(*). twm predates KDE by a decade or so. IIRC, even XFCE was 1st released before KDE. And when KDE was first released, Qt used a proprietary license.
(*) And still occasionally useful when your config files are completely FUBAR.
Now I feel old! (Score:2)
Thirty years? KDE 1.x is where I went when I first moved from OS/2 to Linux. I stuck around off and on until the 2.x days.
I haven't touched it since Plasma, likely won't. Wayland aside, I like what System76 is doing with COSMIC, though I do still need to switch back to Xfce for somethings.
Re: Now I feel old! (Score:2)
I like xfce with the two panel layout a lot.
Reminds me of gnome 2 more than mint or cinnamon, and gnome 2 just felt right to me.
If it's anything like hte 6.7 release (Score:1)
it'll be riddled with bugs that totally break the desktop environment. Like the one in Discover from 6.7 that basically made it impossible to update your software via the GUI, shutting out anyone who isn't comfortable in the Terminal. While most Linux users are, if we ever want Linux to gain mass adoption, then this sort of bug can NEVER happen, otherwise any normie user will be forever stuck.
Re: (Score:2)
Like the one in Discover from 6.7 that basically made it impossible to update your software via the GUI
"Impossible" is a bit hyperbolic and it started before 6.7. But, Discover is dog shit and it is appalling that they still have not fixed its dog shit handling of system updates.
Re: If it's anything like hte 6.7 release (Score:1)
It was literally impossible. It would get stuck checking for updates. You had to revert to using the terminal, which is fine for all of us that are familiar with pkcon and dnf, but not fine for all the "normal" users. Any normal user would have gotten permanently stuck at that point.
Interesting (Score:2)
The announcement [kde.org] has a graphic showing screenshots of all 6 versions of KDE over the years.
It continues to be my opinion that KDE3 was and is superior in appearance to all of them. That includes KDE 6.
I don't know enough to say for sure. But I feel that the switch to Wayland only is going to cause problems running lots of existing software. This would be another instance of KDE intentionally breaking things that sets its progress back years, like they did with the move to KDE 4. Something I find infuriating
Re: (Score:2)
Though, you can configure KDE6 to get you the KDE3 experience.
thanks for 30 amazing years (Score:2)