 Looks like it's Plasma 6 time! The very earliest mention of Plasma 6 that I could find on the KDE Design Room comes from the 8th of February 2018. Back then I was 16 and barely involved with the project at all. Folks were discussing what later became one of the most important topics about the 6 release. Should we go with a new fancy theme or is Breeze fine as it is? After all, Breeze is mature and attractive and users do hate it when designers go and change the whole visual design of something. If we do tweak our design language for Plasma 6, it should be in a really subtle evolution. Again, this is 6 years ago when we were still using Plasma 5.12, which looked in my humble opinion pretty bad. But what can I say, I also looked like shit in 2018. Just 8 days later, on the 16th of February, there's another message by Nikofey about theming stuff. Back then we used to have different themes for the show, Plasma theme and for application, Q-Styles. Spoiler alert, we still have the same issue. On top of that, KD applications built with Korygami had to use a Q-Style in a rather weird way that easily did not respect the theme in some parts of the UI. Ideally, we would have a single unified theme that would define the look of everything from applications to the show. This is certainly a tough task to address, but again, this is 6 years ago. Well, you might ask why you were people also worried about Plasma 6 so far back. Have we been working on it for 6 years or why did we wait so much before publishing it? Why did we decide to drop Plasma 6 at all? Well, historically the Plasma major version is the same as the major version of Qt, the toolkit that KD uses for the entire UI and even more. As an example, Qt 5 was released in 2012 and Plasma 5 was really a couple of years later. Or again, Qt 4 was released in 2005 and KD 4 followed in 2008. Not that I would know about that since I was 8 years old, but you know, I was still playing with Lego, I guess. So finally, why were we discussing Plasma 6 6 years ago? Well, because Qt kindly told us that they were publishing Qt 6 very soon and we all knew what that meant. I do have the coolest short ever, but the camera is too low. Let me fix that. Enter Academy. This is the yearly conference organized by KD, while all contributors and fans all around the world would come together and have fun and develop stuff. It's a super friendly environment and I always have a lot of fun in it. Academy 2019 was quite important for me for a couple of reasons. And yes, we're just getting to Plasma 6, but I'm not in any hurry anyway. Firstly, KD had decided to make a public call for proposals on big goals to work on. I had decided to submit my own goal about improving consistency. They would announce the winner goals at the opening day of Academy. Issue is, I was 18. I didn't have any money to actually travel the world to actually, you know, attend conferences, which was a bummer. Until, miraculously, Academy was announced to be just in 2019 a couple of hours of train away from my city. That was pure luck, but I wouldn't have been able to attend otherwise. Even better, the consistency goal actually won. I was selected to be the leader of that goal, and that provided to be a great onboarding tool to actually get involved with development and the wider community. Maybe I wouldn't be here if all of that hadn't happened. Another important talk that was given during Academy 2019 was towards Qt 6 by Lars Knoll. He announced that Qt 6 was coming towards the end of 2020, which meant that we really had to start organizing for Plasma 6. And I guess that back then we kind of expected Plasma 6 to be released in 2022 or something. It felt really close. So what did he announce in Qt 6? Well, firstly, the idea was to keep the porting efforts minimal and avoid behavioral changes if possible. There's a lot of API to simplify old classes to be removed and stuff to be moved around and so on. But there were also some significant changes announced. Firstly, they decided to implement strong typing in Qt 6. If you're out of the loop, Qt 6 is the markup language that we use for most of the UI of Plasma and KDApps, and it uses an embedded JavaScript interpreter to actually run any code. This means that we don't actually get any kind of type safety and code built in Qt 6 might be slower compared to its C++ counterpart. And also we have to deal with JavaScript, which is terrifying. So yes, strong typing in Qt 6, making JavaScript optional, and when only using a subset of features, even allow to transpile Qt 6 to C++ to make sure it's as efficient as possible. That would require a rewriting of a bunch of stuff on our side, but it would bring significant speed and RAM improvements. By the way, in 2019 I was starting to try to understand these topics and I found what I now realize is one really dumb question from me. Regarding Plasma 6, should we expect a significant decrease in RAM usage or increase in speed thanks to Qt 6? To which Niko replied with maybe, but also LT Henry replied with why should that happen, which is much more appropriate reply. On top of this new QML compiling, Qt also teased a better styling system because they kind of had the same issues that we had. So I feel like this were going to be the biggest topics when we were looking forward to Qt 6. Of course, there's a ton of other other small things as well from bug fixes that we really needed, by the way, such as a better text kernel to changes that we had to adapt to. So we just started working and by we, I mean not me, I didn't do anything. You know, one of the main products of Qt is a set of frameworks conveniently called the KDE Frameworks, which are used by all KDE apps and shells and even many external applications. If you want to port KDE to Qt 6, that's where you should start. Thus, at Academy 2019, work started on the KDE Framework 6 goal or KF6 in short. There's not much porting work to be done yet, Qt 6 isn't even close to being released, but actually this is a great occasion for frameworks to be reorganized as well. We usually promise backwards compability throughout updates, meaning that we cannot change the PI to reorganize it, except on major versions. So this is a great occasion to move things around and remove some deprecated stuff on our side of things. Towards the end of Academy, the KF6 team decided to meet again a couple of months later, still more than one year earlier than the Qt 6 release to thoughtfully discuss those changes, even before any of the porting work began. Thus, the very first KF6 sprint happened in Berlin, from the 22nd to the 24th of November. It was kindly hosted in Ambition offices, KDE offices aren't actually big enough to host more than a couple of people, so each time we hold a sprint we also need to find a bigger company that can offer their spaces for us. Funnily enough, the maintainer of the frameworks, David Faur, that's not how you pronounce it, wasn't actually able to attend the sprint, so he joined the call through a laptop, something that seemed to be quite original for a sprint in late 2019. Yeah, one main topic was dependencies. Each framework might depend on other frameworks, and there's actually different tires of frameworks, some of which have more dependencies, some of which less, I'm simplifying things horribly. Of course, you then end up with some projects, just KIO having dependency trees looking like this, which is not great. Nicofei proposed a reorganization that if successful would instead make it look like this, which is better. Obviously, this was five years ago, and everything was merely an intention with little actual work to back it up, yet. The sprint revolved around a fancy physical canvan board with stickers, each featuring a different KDE framework. Developers worked in groups, assisted by the computer-looking David Faur. Towards the end, a digital canvan board was also made to track the development even after the event. There's one KDE framework that I most often work with, and it's the Plasma framework. It provides saving and loading of layouts, API for widgets and containments, the Plasma theme, and a library to read SVG files. And also a thing called data engines, which allow QML to read some specific data about the system and even run commands like on the terminal. It's a big bunch of stuff. As part of the KF6 serial organization, the idea was to drop data engines entirely, because they're mostly updated, to split the SVG part into its own library, called KSVG, and then rename the whole thing from Plasma framework to libplasma. I realized that this might not sound very exciting to you, but as a Plasma developer, these things had quite an impact on my workflow, which raises the question, as the development of KF6 started in late 2019, early 2020, was I helping out? Not at all. In fact, over the Plasma side of things, I think we all felt that the Qt6 transition was quite far away in time, so we were just, you know, having fun without even thinking about it. It's getting a bit cold, so let me grab something. In 2019, Nate Graham created a new project called the Breeze Theme Evolution. It listed a bunch of stuff that we could do to make sure that Breeze looked, you know, better. We're talking about things like unified highlight-style borderless view, better-looking pop-ups, fixing small margins, and so on. Pretty soon, very talented designers such as Mano contributed with mock-ups of how we wanted this Breeze redesign to look like, and most of these things were all about design consistency too, so I was quite involved with some of these tasks. As an example, one of my very first contributions to Breeze was adding a new component, plasmoid heading, which hopefully makes the applets look nicer. It also made them stylistically more consistent with applications. Another contribution I made back then was a complete redesign of PlasmaShadows, something I like to bring up because, sure, they're just shadows, you probably just changed a few values, right? No, I have a 20-minute video all about how complex shadows are. Other developers managed to do more consistent contributions. They managed to implement the header area of applications, which made them actually look good, instead of having this weird, dark title bar. This was a pretty big task, and we were all excited for it. I believe it was a collaboration between Noha and Marco. We also managed to remove the window borders, which, by the way, were really bad in any application that would have a different background color than white, so thanks, Nate. Then the size of the icons in the panels was really messed up. Task manager items were as small as the system tree, there was very little margin around any item, and the highlight behind items didn't actually use all the available space. Now, all of that is fixed, with icons having appropriate sizes, margin, and highlights. If you're not sold on how important this Breeze redesign turned out to be, please just look at this screenshot of the brightness applet in 2019. Look at it. Really. It stirs back. So in 2020, Andy wrote this message. It seems that we have a good idea of the changes that we want to make for Breeze for Plasma 6. What would be the next step in the process? Long story short, we implemented all of those changes before even starting to think about Plasma 6. Because of that, the idea of publishing it with another redesign was really never discussed. We had just spent years improving Breeze all around anyway. No way we would scratch that way. Anyway, now it's late 2020, and there's almost a new Breeze theme. Let's maybe check up on the development of KF6 and wear this? I wasn't joking, like I'm freezing. Well, Qt6 still hasn't been published, and yet work is ongoing. Most of the work is actually acting upon those organizational changes. No branching had been done yet, meaning that there was no such thing as KF6 code yet. It was mostly preparing the code base, even those of applications, to be ready for the changes. Porting a way from functions that we knew we were going to duplicate, and maybe start killing some of them. There were lots of developers helping out, such as Nicolas Fella, which I mentioned a couple of times already. David Edmondson, Volker Krause, Andrea Cort, Lundware, I'm trying, and so on. Then finally, on the 8th of December of 2020, Qt6 was released. And it was a bit underwhelming, I think. Some things were expected, such as thin changes that would help out KD, turned out to not be really of any use in our specific Qt's case. And the idea of a compiling KML code, a pretty big deal, wasn't even in the 6.0 release. They said that they would put it in a later version. In March 2021, another KF6 print was held. This time, due to external factors, it was held digitally, with all participants joining virtually. Around that time, they also decided to digitally meet every week to go through the open tasks together and act on that. Again, I might bore you with all the boring details before actually getting to the cool part, but allow me to get a bit technical to fully show you how much work goes into something like Plasma 6. Porting KD frameworks from Qt5 to Qt6 is not actually the biggest deal the reorganizational part is. Nonetheless, it required a lot of changes to even start thinking about it. Firstly, a new framework releases started requiring the very latest Qt5 version, 5.15, which had already deprecated most features that were then removed in Qt6. This would help minimize the gap between Qt5 and Qt6. But Qt6 also had higher requirements for stuff like compilers. It required C++17 and CMake 3.16. So the team decided to have those exact requirements for new framework versions, even though they were still using Qt5. Porting work before any of that actual porting work began. Even after two years of KF6 work, no branching had been done yet, so there was still no KF6 specific code. Everything was still being done on the master frameworks, little steps getting ready before having to split the development. Well, that's a bit of a lie. You can still do a Qt6 porting even if you don't branch, because you can adapt your code to be able to compile both for Qt5 and Qt6 at the same time. It's a tough task, and that means having lots of. If Qt version is bigger than 5 in the code, but it works. The team agreed to discuss the timeline of branching later that year at the Kitty Academy in 2021. In that discussion, they decided to not branch anytime soon. Sure, it eventually has stopped, but not yet. And thus, in late 2021, the initial experiments of actual porting to Qt6 began. Obviously, there were many issues to address. Firstly, some Qt modules that were previously deprecated got removed in Qt6. There was often a better replacement, but sometimes lacking features. Some other modules weren't simply ready. By the time 6.0 was released, so Qt didn't ship them, and we instead had to wait for a follow-up release to get them. Qt6 is also a bit more strict, allowing less implicit conversions. Finally, there were some signature and missing includes issues that, to be fully honest, I didn't understand. I'm not that good of a developer. So the big question is, where are we now in terms of Qt6 porting? I would have loved to tell you that I'm running this presentation on a plasma built against Qt6, but that's not true. First of all, because I'm not actually using my laptop for his presentation, and second of all, we have managed to really run a full plasma against Qt6 yet. After months and months of porting work by the summer of 2022, the KF6 team managed to port 25% of all KD repositories to use Qt6. Given that 75% was still not ported, it was pretty clear that we wouldn't be finishing the porting soon. And again, we don't mean me. But Qt is not developing Qt5 anymore. Are we just going to use an outdated version of Qt for years? Let's get back to the main view. Test. One extra issue is that the very last version of Qt5.15 is, yes, an LKS version. So it's still got regular updates throughout the years. However, Qt is still a commercial entity. And even though we have agreements with them to release everything to the open source world, they still can, according to those agreements, decide to delay those releases by up to one year. This meant that Qt would publish a new backpicks version of 5.15 to paying customers first, then wait one year, and only then actually make that version the open source to KDE for use. That was mildly annoying, and a few months later, KDE decided to handle the whole thing themselves. They're never going to take care of us, so we have to do it ourselves. So to say. KDE announced the Qt5 patch collection. It's not a fork of 5.15, but it's a new version of the Qt5.15 version of the Qt5.15. So we're going to have to wait a few months for the Qt5.15 version of the Qt5.15 version of the Qt5.15 version of the Qt5.15. It's not a fork of 5.15, but rather it's a set of patches that open source developers can apply on top of 5.15 to fix the various security issues, crashes or bugs. These patches included all the backfixing work that was being done in Qt6 and that could be backported into 5.15. Every time a new release of 5.15 would become open source, one year later compared to commercial users, the patch set would be rebased on top of that. This way we could still get our projects to use more stable and maintained Qt versions without having to wait an entire year for backfixes. Yes, it's been 4 years since the beginning of the parting work and there's still nothing running actually Qt6, not even like the Plasma desktop, let alone actually starting the work on new features and such. Development in this kind of thing is massively complex and I wouldn't be able to do it for sure. In 2022, Academy was held in Barcelona. This was my first time attending in place in another country for the full length of the event, so I was pretty excited. It has been an amazing experience where I officially concluded my task as the consistency goalkeeper and we selected new goals. Also, Nate Graham was elected to be part of the KDEV, the non-profit organization that legally represents KDE. Those times were exciting and promised many new developments for the community. And of course, KDE Plasma 6 finally felt really close. One of the nicer events within Academy was a day trip on top of a mountain near Barcelona and I believe I spent most of the work discussing what I thought we had to achieve with the new major releases, the new features that we had to implement and so on. It was very exciting. Most importantly, we finally had an idea of when the release was actually going to happen. The KDEV 6 team met yet again and discussed the topic of branching. They decided to publish KDE framework 5.101 in December and then halt any development of new features in KF5. After a couple of months, they would branch out KF5 and continue development of KF6 on the main branch. This would mean that the very last KDE Plasma version would be the one immediately after framework 5.101 which was KDE Plasma 5.27 planned in early 2023. We had also decided to work on KDE Plasma 6 for at least double the time we usually spent on our release and as a result, we roughly expected Plasma 6 to be published in late 2023. Remember that we still did not have even just a Plasma session running Qt6 yet but we were confident in being able to introduce some cool features to excite people between branching and the release. After all, it's double the time compared to any other Plasma release. And thus, it happened. KDE frameworks got branched on the 21st of January 2023 and a few weeks later, Plasma 5.27 reached the hard feature freeze meaning that the newly proposed features would not be added to 5.27 but rather to the next version aka Plasma 6. I don't know how to align stuff like just just it is what it is. So we finally got to the part where you wish the video had started. One year ago, with any new Plasma feature having to be added to Plasma 6, we also started discussing exactly what we were expecting out of the release. We had general ideas since years ago. We knew that we wanted to have a mostly gradual improvements without too many big redesigns. We did not want to switch to a brand new theme. We wanted to make 6 as stable and reliable as possible. We knew that but now we had to actually define feature by feature what it meant. We decided to slowly create a list of Plasma 6 change proposals to discuss in our GitLab instance. Some of these were somewhat uninteresting and technical. As an example, you might not care about the proposal to remove the icons only view in system settings or to remove window widgets, the feature that allowed to spawn a desktop widget in its own window. Nate proposed to switch from single click to double click to open folders. Someone, oh wait, that's me, proposed to switch from normal panels to floating panels by default. I also proposed to tint the window color schemes based on the accent color and to get the accent color automatically from the wallpaper. I also proposed to consider embedding the application menu bars directly within the bridge title bars. Natalie proposed to use accent colors for the window headers and Nate also proposed to ditch our current switcher for the thumbnail one. A big topic was the release schedule. Plasma 5 used three updates every year schedule which had some significant issues. It meant always being out of sync with the release of any distribution, not having enough QA and promo time on each release and having very short beta periods. Nate thus proposed that for Plasma 6 we instead switch to two releases every year instead of three. This sparked a super long discussion. However, all of this was still at a discussion stage of things. Implementing stuff was on another level entirely. Out of the box, Qt Build System was set to still build everything with Qt 5, not Qt 6. Setting up a Qt 6 environment required some extra time and skills. It initially wasn't super well-documented. I remember trying it out in early 2023 and managing it only after hours and almost accidentally destroying my operating system. Since you have two have super up-to-date libraries that weren't available in some distribution repositories, I had made some repo mess. This is where I would like to remind you that me, myself in 2023, I was trying to develop some new things and fix bugs on my free time doing YouTube videos, doing an Erasmus experience while studying for my bachelor's. Honestly, I tried my best, but I'm not even that good of a developer, so I couldn't really be bothered with setting up a reliable Plasma 6 environment to work with on all of my devices. I did manage to get one on my desktop, but not one on my laptop. And yes, this is an important plot point. You will see. Finally, there was an event where we all managed to get together and agree on the outcome of the proposals mentioned earlier and also do some development altogether. Of course. From the 5th to the 10th of May 2023, a KD Plasma Sprint was held in Augsburg, Germany. This time, it was held in the offices of Tuxedo, which by the way are super mega cool. Amongst many other, I was there. And you might have guessed, though, I couldn't bring my desktop computer with me, but only my laptop. This meant that I had no Plasma 6 development environment with me and I was still living in old Qt 5 times. By now, the 6th one was actually okay-ish with lots of significant bugs, but not too bad either. I love how the blog post from Marc about the Sprint starts with. First of all, everybody got up to speed with a full git build of a Plasma 6 session so that everybody could participate in development and discussion from the same level. And then there was me being completely unable to actually set up one. I mentioned agreeing on the proposals from earlier. We finally decided to indeed go with two clicks by default, plotting panels, an accent codered, tinted header bar by default, a new default task switcher with a completely new look, and most importantly, we learned by default. Then we all each did something different. Nate helped out a lot with collaboration between each of us and handled a bit of our organizations. Marco worked on the lib Plasma and KSVG work that I mentioned earlier. And yes, Marco worked on the lib Plasma and KSVG work because I'm a professional YouTuber. Niko Uwez that you pronounce it. Volker and Ismail worked on Notification API and a new portal. David and Niko worked on global shortcut stuff. Noha worked on segmented patterns and so on. There's so much important stuff that I could be talking about here. I decided to take quite a bit of time to build a major feature that would get all of you folks excited. Hopefully. I made a complete redesign of the overview effect which had very pretty transitions and blur and everything and also merged together the previous overview and desktop grid in the same effect so that you can switch between the two of them within the same effect in a single gesture. The UI is very freely inspired by GNOME but with more blur. This was a quite complex task but I'm quite proud of it. I managed to complete almost all of it with a few bugs remaining around drag and drop in the grid mode. Also, as I mentioned, I did not have a working Plasma 6 setup. This meant that all of my work was actually done on the Qt 5 branch and of course I told Nate and all other developers that I would complete everything in just a few weeks and there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Of course, that was a complete lie. I got back to Sweden after the sprint and I suddenly realized that it was in the middle of exams and I had to travel around to attend some conferences and stuff and my Erasmus was almost over so I had to move back to Italy and blah blah blah. Also, porting the the overview to Qt 6 was much more complex than I initially expected so I didn't do it. I just didn't do it. Until something really cool happened. In the original script now I explained to you what that cool thing is but I decided to add a section here so before we get to that I need to mention that someone else working a very cool stuff at the sprint was, in my opinion, Xaver. Is that how you pronounce it? Xaver? Xaver? I don't know. I'm gonna go Xaver. Basically HDR displays are able to support a larger amount of colors compared to standard sRGB with thousands of needs instead of just like 80. You need to be careful though as using the normal RGB colors on an HDR display would end up oversaturating colors and you know you need to do some color management to make sure that you convert between the color spaces correct. Then you will need HDR applications to support a wider color space. Linux never really had any great HDR support or any support at all. In early 2023, a bit before the plasma sprint, Red Hat decided to organize an HDR sprint without getting too much into the details because I don't understand them at all. A new wayline protocol was required and window managers such as Kiwi needed to make color conversion that made sure that SDR content, everything not HDR, would still look correct on an HDR device. By pure chance, Kiwi had an OLED display with him at the sprint. Xaver thus decided to start the HDR work with it and he managed to make VLC display HDR content with everything else still being correctly displayed as SDR. It was just a test, not actually reading the proper brightness of the video file, but still it was a start. During 2023, Xaver continued development. In KD Plasma 6, you can now enable HDR for a certain monitor directly in the settings with the option for brightness and color intensity. This merely sends the required data to the display to enable HDR mode, though you still need to do all the color space and HDR handling on the software side of things. With help from Valve and System76, a Weland protocol has been developed that's used by Vulkan. The 2023 edition of KD Academy happened in Thessaloniki, Greece. The bad thing about Thessaloniki is that it's hot, like really, really hamberingly hot. The good things, however, are beautiful city and the sea. The fact that this was the very first academy that I attended with my girlfriend and of course being able to meet all the cool KD people. First of all, it was pretty clear by now, summer 2023, that Plasma 6 would not come later this year. There was a further discussion on the release date, but it was eventually decided to be towards the end of February, with the exact day still being decided. This provided quite some time to do some extra bug fixing and maybe even get some extra features in. In the previous few months of work, development hadn't stopped at all. Yes, I actually wrote I held half a talk to talk about all the cool new features that Plasma 6 would get. I talked about my unfinished overview, I was very confident I would finish it in time, but another contributor had also completely redesigned the panel settings with new cool previews that showed you what each button would do. I talked about floating panels, especially because I managed to improve them so that they would not take any extra space when they defloat. Then there were new the applets getting new pretty switches instead of checkboxes and there were header areas. I mentioned the new redesigned task switcher and I even teased floating dialogues, a feature that would optionally allow users to detach the dialogues from their panel. I talked about a completely new icon theme for folders and place icons done by Ken Vermette and a new cursor theme that had been developed by Mano and a completely new sound theme that would replace the oxygen sounds. Finally I talked about how the windows would get tinted header areas based on the accent colors. Back then I was certain that all of these features would make it to Plasma 6 and that we'd manage to make a release with that many big redesigns. I was a bit naive as many of those things did not make it to the final release, more on that later. Now as a disclaimer, I got very little development during the 2023 Academy, especially because I wanted to visit the city a bit with my girlfriend. I was also quite burned out from the previous months and attending the various discussions in a language that's not my mother tongue somehow was constantly giving me headaches that year. Not a very productive academy for me, you can go ahead and check the report of all other developers that were there and were actually productive. You'll find a lot of cool discussions and developments that I did not take part of. I try to do my best to reconstruct the missing pieces based on those articles but this story is necessarily going to be biased based on my experience. Anyhow, there's one thing that I remember this academy for, a major plot point for me. I got offered to join the team at Blue Systems to work on Plasma and other products. After years of working mostly my free time and trying to sustain it through this YouTube channel, that offer meant a lot. So a couple of months later, because you know, legal stuff takes time, I was part of the team sponsored by Valve and from now on, my contributions to Plasma 6 are much more regular and significant. Firstly, yes, I finally managed to finish off the new overview, both porting it to Qt6 and fixing the few bugs that still had. I'm just happy to say that, yes, the new overview is indeed part of today's Plasma 6 release. I also helped out another contributor implementing a new hiding mode for the panel called cold dodge windows. If you select this, the panel will only hide if it touches a window, otherwise it will always be visible. I also made a new complete design of panel settings, yes, one had already been done but I wanted to improve the layout further. Now all the options are in a single floating dialogue next to the panel, still featuring the same previews that were previously introduced. Who wrote this? I messed up the script so bad. Of course other contributors managed to push in some cold, I can't read either. I can't, I'm blind. Of course other contributors managed to push in some other cold changes. As an example, Carl managed to continue the breeze redesign work by removing the outlines around all views and instead switching to a single pixel separator in all applications. This is a major task that we were dreaming of since the beginning of the redesign goal, so it's really exciting to have it for Plasma 6. Nate also managed a complete reorganization of system settings. This is work that had been ongoing since more than one year ago, with all the developers pitching in the ideas to improve their organization. Hopefully all settings should be a bit more simple to find now. Many developers, just Vlad, David Edmundson and Marco, managed to make my new overview actually usable on any hardware. I made it pretty, but I also made it really slow. Luckily they fixed my performance mess. Thanks. Vlad also managed to bring back the cube effect that had been previously removed for technical reasons. I know a lot of you love that effect, so... Yay! Lots of work was also done on the key runner side of things. Not only there's lots of new kind of results, such as being able to convert between time zones, but it's also much faster now and you're able to manually set the order you'd like to see the results in. Now that Plasma 6 was getting ready, one extremely important last thing was missing. Shortly before the Plasma sprint in early 2023, I had asked the Kiddy AV to actually hire an artist for the wallpaper. Sadly they were not able to satisfy my request, so I knew that we had to organize a wallpaper contest. There's always a bit of an issue with those kind of contests. We have to find an hardware maker that will give us something to use as a prize. We could ask the Kiddy AV to buy some cool laptop, but well, first of all it would be cheaper to just contract an artist, but it also opens up a kind of warmth, such as, well, what laptop are we buying? If it's like something a Daleks PS, then all the Linux hardware manufacturers would rightfully be disappointed, but we can't also randomly pick a Linux laptop and leave everybody else even more disappointed either. So we just ask everybody to give us a free laptop. I knew this was going to take time, so I started asking around in 2022. I didn't find any, so I tried again during Academy of 2023. Finally, frameworks replied, seeing that they would be happy with donating one of their laptops for us. So we had a prize. And then of course there's organizing the competition. This means endless debates on how exactly the rules should be written, what prompts should be given to the artists, whether we should allow photographs or not, whether we should ask for a certain style, and so on. This was particularly time-consuming this year for some reason, but we still managed to announce everything in time. We received an insane amount of entries with some extremely high-quality works. Eventually we decided for Scarlet Tree, which I think is a great wallpaper to start a new generation of Plasma. Of course, Plasma Desktop is far from the only Plasma after there, another project that had to port everything from 5 to 6 and implement a bunch of new cool features is Plasma Mobile. The core developer here is Daven Lin, who talked about all the recent progress in a blog post from LEED 2023. The port itself for the mobile shell was quite simple. However, all the mobile applications also had to be ported, and many of those currently lack maintainers. Many of them are at risk of not being ready by the time 6 is released, so Daven was asking for help. The biggest development of the shell for Plasma Mobile 6, though, is a complete rewrite of the Folio home screen. This used to be the default, being the most powerful, allowing for drug-and-drop positioning of applications and widgets, but it was also buggy, and the team decided to replace it with Alsion, which only showed a list of installed applications. Starting in October 2023, Daven started the refactoring work for Folio. This meant that the new home screen can be now simply used again, and it will ship as the default one for Plasma Mobile 6. It not only supports custom positions for applications and widgets, but also folder of applications, an app drawer to the bottom, the ability to invoke a K-run research through a swipe gesture, different pages of applications, a customizable amount of rows and columns, and even customizable page transitions. Even better, you can export and import your home screen configuration file. Everything is extremely customizable, and screenshots look great. I'm really excited for this measure, Daven is also working on a docked mode, which will allow you to use Plasma Mobile with keyboard and mouse plugged in. When activated, Windows will go back to being floating and having normal title bars. This should be quite useful in two-in-one tablets, where you can actually attach a keyboard. Sadly, not everything managed to be included in the final version. Firstly, the icon redesign by Ken Vermette. I actually spent quite some time bringing it up to date and consistent, and I added all the icons that were missing from the original proposal by Ken. However, during the review stage, it was clear that many of those icons were inconsistent and that more design time was required. Thus, the work was temporarily paused. Another thing that was not implemented is the tinted header area. The issue is that the code for this kind of thing is very fragile, and even though I tried, I was not able to make a simple patchwork. I just asked for feedback, but I was not able to find help in time for the feature phrase. I also made a patch for the floating dialogs. It's actually a really simple change, but I only got around to implementing it after the feature phrase, and since it was technically a new feature, it was pushed forward for at least Plasma 5.1. I'm sorry for all of this, but I'm certain that it will all come in the next version of Plasma 6. After all, we just had to keep something to do after the release. It couldn't be perfect. You might also notice the lack of coverage of work ongoing around the new QML compiling stuff. The Qt Quick compiler was announced in early 2022. I believe it still was in progress for some time, and then Niko experimented with it just a few months ago. I'm not sure if it's something that could help us, but it will certainly require quite some work to adapt to it, so maybe it's something for the future? I certainly don't know, you should ask Niko. Finally, there's no new theming system either. It was pretty clear from the start that this would require quite some work, and it was unlikely to be ready in time by this release. We also haven't yet decided on which standard we should use for themes, as we would like to move away from SVGs. There's some very early proof of concepts for better theming system, but they will need further discussion, and now I can turn the lights back on. Finally. After the feature freeze, there isn't much to talk about, at least that I was able to follow. Actually, I had at least 50 people ask for yes, I'm gonna. It was mostly doing bug fixing, bug fixing, bug fixing on the development side and writing the announcements on the promotional side. I could bore you with the details of all the most important bug fixes I've seen, but this video is really long already. I will mention, however, that there's so much more to all of this. As an example, Plasma 6 indeed switched to Wayland by default, and this was only possible thanks to the stability and bug fixes achieved by the Wayland theme in the last years. On top of that, all applications also had to be ported to Qt 6, not just Plasma. For the first time in years, we decided to release everything on the same day. The new frameworks, new Plasma, and new applications. I wanted to only talk about the development that I was able to see and understand Plasma, but if you go through the full announcement, you'll see that there's tons of new features throughout application space too. I tried to showcase the development process that lasted years and years as a collective effort of different people, but it's much larger than I managed to express, and there's thousands of developers who I should have mentioned. And of course, there's designers and promo people and project managing and so on. So many people worked on the new core project that Plasma 6 is. This video only talks about what I was able to remember and reconstruct based on other developers' blog posts. Finally, all of this takes effort, time, and money. A lot of porting work was done by Nicholas Fowler, who's currently on Qt's patch at Paycheck. I think I didn't double check. If we want to continue paying the guy, we need money. But even if we want to organize sprints or allow all developers to come to KDE Academy, money is needed for all of that, and money is client. Because of that, one of the recent projects of the promotional group has been the Support Plasma 6 campaign, with the goal of increasing the number of supporting members. We started out at like 50, and now we have 12 over 850, which means 80 000 extra euros every month. Year, every year. I wish it was every month. Which is great, but we still need more. We still need more to make sure that we can operate with all the current contractors and still cover traveling expenses to sprints or to academy for those developers who can't afford it, such as me a couple of years ago. Thus, I would like to ask you to go on, or just last year, not a couple of years ago. Thus, I would like you to go on the webpage and become a supporting member too. It comes with a couple of benefits, such as getting your name in the big list of people. If you email me as a bit of an extra, with proof of KDE membership, I will send you a 100% discount for my project, so you will be able to join for free and read the full scripts for these videos days, or even weeks in advance. Finally. Finally. Finally. You know, these videos are becoming harder to make. Just yesterday I was watching my old videos and they're like bad, really bad. I was just hitting record and rambling randomly. Nowadays I spend like weeks researching every video and there's like scripts that are like thousands of words long and I'm out of focus. This one is already seven and a half thousand words long. How? And then I have to use all this fancier recording equipment, the lighting setup, the editor. I have got to pay the guy. Editing videos has become so much harder now that they are all like an hour long. I'm barely doing one video each month now. So please, now that I somehow managed to make one, I would love if you could like push the like button, subscribe, share the video, whatever helps their algorithm to keep the numbers rolling until I managed to make the next one, which is gonna be December. You can also donate to keep everything afloat. I have people, Patreon, LiberPay and even Kofi. Again, I publish the scripts of these videos days in advance. The video is over. Go ahead, download Plasma 6, have fun, send me emails about how cool everything is. I don't know. The project I was looking forward since years ago is finally being published and it's as cool as I always hoped it would be. I really, really hope that you will like it as well. Thanks everybody. Oh no, I now got enough of, I think. No?