 Hi everybody, I am back from KDE Academy and we actually talked about Plasma 6 quite a bit and originally I did not want to make a video about it but then Fronix came and gave this news that Plasma 5.27 is the last release before Plasma 6 and okay I can't have to talk about that so I mean let's just get into it. You might be aware that KDE relies on QT to actually draw anything on the screen. QT is the visual toolkit that actually does that and much more and then KDE actually has frameworks which are libraries that actually extends on the functionalities that QT offers. Now QT has released a new version, QT6 major version and many of the apps that use QT are in the process of going from QT5 to QT6. It is not a very big release with significant changes but you know it has some changes. Now there are two products inside of KDE frameworks and Plasma's whose currently release number actually relies on QT's release number which means that if they use QT5 they're going to be called frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 and if they use QT6 as far as we currently know they will be called frameworks 6 and Plasma 6. Now that might be changed actually there has been some discussion at Academy of not calling Plasma that relies on QT6 or frameworks 6 actually Plasma 6 but something else but as far as we know now Plasma 6 is the name that will probably be used as soon as Plasma actually relies on QT6 and frameworks 6. Now it has been some time since the release of QT6 and since then there has been a lot of work to actually port frameworks from using Plasma 5 to Plasma 6. This means that you know changes under the hood and also this is a great occasion to actually have API changes meaning that since we're talking about libraries you actually change the API you make changes that you cannot do in a minor release because you have the promise of stability. When you actually do a major release like frameworks 6 you can actually change them and it is the time where you collect all of the things that you wanted to clean up and you apply them. Now this process of bringing of building frameworks 6 is close to an ending and up until now all of this has been done on a separate branch like we're still developing plus frameworks 5 and we recently released I think 5.99 if you remember correctly and 5.100 is next. So it is a very fair question when are we actually start working on frameworks 6 as the main frameworks that shall be released and frameworks 5 becomes just the framework that you cherry pick backfixes too. This is the branching and it has been decided that if everything goes well it should be done after the release of Plasma 5.27 which is four months from now. Quick recap Plasma 5.26 is going to be released tomorrow and Plasma 5.27 four months from now. There is a Plasma release every four months meaning that in four months from now instead of Plasma 5 there will be actually sorry instead of frameworks 5 there will be actually frameworks 6 as the frameworks that is getting the new features and new developments and new changes which will actually be based on Qt6 instead of Qt5 with all of the API changes. There has been discussion on whether that is a good time to also branch out Plasma whether to call it Plasma 6 and because whether it's a good time for Plasma to actually start relying on frameworks 5 and the answer is yeah Plasma should also branch out on a version that actually relies on Qt6 and frameworks 6 after the release of 5.27. This does not mean that instead of a Plasma 5.28 we get Plasma 6 because it could very well be that we take more time to actually do Plasma 6 due to this transition rather than when normal release. If that happens if we do skip one release cycle we won't have any release when right now we were supposed to have 5.28 and then we will have Plasma 6 if that's what it's going to be called when we were supposed to have Plasma 5.29. Since we've got a release every four months and Plasma 5.29 is three releases from Plasma 5.26 which is tomorrow it means that roughly the expected time of Plasma 6 is one year from now. This could change who knows what's going to happen right. As an example if there's a very big functionality that needs to be that we want to have in Plasma 6 and maybe it requires just some more weeks or a month of effort it might be that we want to participate Plasma 6 by a month or maybe we do not need actually to skip any cycle and we can release Plasma 6 or whatever it's going to be called before or maybe it's not even called Plasma 6. All of this is what we currently have plans to do but if anything happens if things don't go as expected everything could change really. This is what really has to be emphasized when you talk about this if you go to the KD Twitter social networks and such there is no official announcement about these kind of things because there is nothing official yet. However there are various internal discussions about this there's a note in the case blog but also there's actually the meeting notes for which are which are public everything we do is public so there are public meeting notes about this kind of discussions. Now another very interesting question is what is going to happen for Plasma 6? Like what new features will we have in Plasma 6? Very fair question, very interesting, we'll get to that in a sec. Before that thanks to Internext for actually sponsoring the video. They offer secure slot storage which is not only secure but also open source. It is secure because it uses end-to-end ecriptions and modern zero-knowledge protocols to make sure that all of your files and folders are actually 100% private and secure and you can always check that because they actually have all of their code on their github so you can actually go there and read all of it. So why actually using cloud storage at all? Well it is great for keeping all of your personal files and photos in one place and it's a much safer option compared to storing it in your personal computer which can break down or can be easily hacked and obviously with cloud storage you can actually access all of your files from your phone, computer and all of the other devices that you have. So if you're looking for something that is ethical, open source, private and secure, they actually have three products which are drive, photos and send and whilst drive and photos actually allow you to synchronize your files and photos well throughout your devices, send actually allows you to send files that are up to five gigabytes big and of course send is also just as secure and private. They do have a web interface but because they are committed to actually supporting free and open source software they also have a desktop application that does not only work on Windows and Macintosh but also on Linux and you can just install it right away as a Debian package in this case. It is also present in the Arch Linux hour if you're more into that and finally as an app image file. So if you're interested they actually offer up to 10 gigabytes out of the box and if that's not enough they have many plans which you can actually get discounted using code NICO25 so NICCO25, my name and 25 and that actually gives you a 25% discount on all annual plans. So what can I say? Try it out. Okay Plasma 6 features. If indeed we skip a cycle and we have a eight months period before between sorry Plasma 5.27 and Plasma 6 or whatever it's called then that means that usually the features that are in two Plasma 5 versions will be condensed into one Plasma 6 versions. If you watch any like Plasma 5 version it has some new features because obviously in four months new features arises. There are developers working on stuff naturally and since we have double the time to work on Plasma 6 we should expect double the feature compared to a normal Plasma 5 release which is nice. Also double the backfixes for the same exact reason. Are there currently big features that we expect to have in Plasma 6 that we are currently working on? Not quite. There is one thing that is being semi actively worked upon that we actually decided more than one year ago that we would like in Plasma 6 that does not mean that it will be there in time for Plasma 6 or all of it will be in time for Plasma 6 and that is unified theming. What's that? Okay so currently we have Plasma themes. Plasma themes customize Plasma which is just Plasma. So like the kickoff menu bottom left or the panel or K-Runner this is Plasma this uses the Plasma theme. Then there are applications. Applications follow a different theme which is the queue style. The default queue style is Breeze and Breeze cannot quite be customized. There are some options but it's Breeze. You can install third party queue styles but you cannot do that just by entering system settings. You actually have to install or compile some other styles because they are actually written in C++ and we cannot adjust C++ styles through the KD store. As an example one very common theme is Kevantum which actually allows you to customize the application using SVGs. Very similar to what we are currently doing for Plasma. Plasma is customized by SVGs. Kevantum allows you to customize applications via SVGs. What we would like to have eventually is one theme that customizes both Plasma apps both Plasma and apps. So you have as an example current themes in the store that are implemented in SVGs like I don't know minus called painting as an example. I do have a theme on the store called painting and the idea is to allow those themes that are meant for Plasma to also work on applications so that one theme rules them all. This might require actually ditching SVGs because SVGs is not necessarily the best way to approach theming. We could do CSS as an example. There are also some ways to have a QML instead. This kind of thing like alternatives ways to styling. If so, we do want if I understood this correctly to retain at least support for the older SVG themes not to lose them all but it could be nice to initially start to have some support for different kind of themes that could be hopefully better like easier to implement these kind of things. So the Utopia here the Utopia something is to have I don't know a CS style as an example CSS style that customizes both Plasma and also apps that would be the idea. Will that be in Plasma 6? I highly doubt it because it's super complex to actually implement naturally but there could be the beginning of some steps in that direction. Right now we are not too super duper happy about the theming system. It's fragmented SVGs are in the best thing in the world. There's work in that sense and Plasma 6 is a nice release to actually have as a target. Okay so what else does this mean that Plasma 6 won't have any other features? Of course not because we're currently always working on new things in features and bug fixes and we just can't quite know yet what we will work on. Everybody has different ideas and different schedules and stuff so it is uncertain what we will do in five six months for now. We kind of have an idea of what Plasma 5.27 should be and it's always a bit uncertain but one year from now is a long time so who knows. There is and this is certainly through the intention of making Plasma 6 not a big release with big changes like it's really a big release but it should be focused on stability and continuity compared to Plasma 5. There has been in the past some transitions from an older major version to a new one that has been significant and maybe too much bugs or instability with them. Plasma 6 should not be that. It seems to be something that improves stability, improves performance, improves it just works. So if somebody comes with a super big feature that could bring a lot of instability we could decide to prefer actually having that in a follow-up version of Plasma like 6.1, 6.2 who knows rather than the first release which would prefer to have it like stable. Of course that doesn't mean that we won't have new features at all. There are some things that we want to have like the better theming as I said but as an example a lot of people usually ask would there be a new style a new look a new thing no no no no who knows but no no I think I covered everything. I really want to thank my patrons which I have not actually shown on-screen for for like three videos not because of intention from my side but because I'm using this different recording system because it would be a bit boring to actually sit there on the green screen and actually show a blank desktop for like 10 minutes and just me talking there's nothing to show there's no Plasma 6 there's no announcement I just I can just talk so no need for the green screen but this means that I can't quite edit in the patterns sorry about that I really appreciate what you're doing for me and I have some very exciting hopefully videos coming up so stay tuned for those see ya