 So I have been very critical of KD Plasma in the past. In fact, I've called it buggy garbage I've talked about how it's always buggy for me. It's always causing me problems and while I really want to like it I can never use it for very long Because it's always pretty buggy for me now. I have a certain situation on my hardware where for whatever reason Plasma has never particularly cared for this hardware. I don't know what's going on with it. Sometimes it's monitor stuff Sometimes it's just general crashiness of Kaywin. I've had a lot of problems with Plasma over the years So when I heard that they were moving to Plasma 6, I was both excited and cautious, right? Because I didn't have too high expectations for it because Plasma is this huge thing with a lot of moving features And a lot of moving parts and I just kind of expected it to be kind of the same business as usual if you will so I have been using Plasma 6 now for a month and I've been using it for about I used it for about two and a half weeks full-time on this machine in front of me And then I use that my laptop for another two months or so or not too much two weeks If I said months there I meant weeks two weeks and then two weeks. It's been about a month. I have to say Mildly surprised Mildly because there's still some things that I have to talk about but for the most part This is the most stable KD Plasma experiences. I've ever had which is highly entertaining for reasons what that I'll bring up later So let's just talk about that later But today we're gonna talk about Plasma 6 and my experiences with it So let's go ahead and jump in but before we do if you leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it really help the channel So let's go ahead and take a look at Plasma 6 on this main PC that I actually use if I Actually can go to the right scene here. So this is what my Plasma 6 looks like It's not too far away from what the default looks like I have changed it around a few times But recently I reset everything to look like the default just so it could look like the default for this video I've been it's still using my old color scheme So I haven't done any of that stuff and you guys might notice some grub box stuff Creeping in terms of theming because I switched to hyperland after this and got to go to grub box finally And so there's gonna be some mixing and matching here. So just ignore that. That's not a Plasma thing That's just a consequence of me having many things installed on my system. So whatever. Let's go ahead and talk about Plasma 6 So first off, let's talk about the good stuff. So when you think about Software moving from one version to another you think that you're going to experience something big exciting and Overall, just you know monumental Plasma 6 is not that so when I heard they're going from 5 to 6 usually when you see a version But remember you expect there to be a lot of stuff here. Well, there's not a lot of stuff that's new here There's a few new things that are really good But there's not a ton of stuff whereas if you if you've used Plasma before you're gonna come to this and think oh my god This is something completely new. That's not the case. It's still very much Plasma at its core, which is good I'm not going to go over every single feature that was added There are many other videos from other Linux youtubers who have done that So you guys can go check those out if you want to see all the features for me personally I'm just going to talk about some of the features that I like some of the things that you know I really didn't care for and then talk about my overall experience. So First off, let's talk about the elephant in the room the floating panel A lot of people for whatever reason really did not like that they chose a floating panel by default Some people argued that they were getting away from it looking like windows for Weird reasons. Some people, you know, just didn't care for this particular aesthetic. Personally, I didn't care I like the floating panel just fine, but it's also astonishingly easy to change it You just, you know, right click on it click edit mode and then you can just disable it like that And you know, that's fine. You know, it's very very easy and overall, you know, it's just a very Minor change to me. It works just like a regular panel. There's just some padding around it now I will talk more about the panels later because I have some Qualms about it, but we'll talk again about that a little bit later So that's the biggest visual change I would say out of the box And if you're thinking well, that's not much visual change at all, you're right It's not a big visual change And that's kind of the overarching theme of this update. It's not a big change It's basically 5.28 is the way that I describe it They just have done a lot of work underneath which does qualify for the brand new six moniker, right? So they've moved everything over to QT six They've moved a lot of stuff over and done a lot of work on Wayland Which we'll talk more about here in a minute most of the stuff that is in this update Is under the hood and you're not going to notice it or at least you probably won't notice it So in terms of visual stuff, the the panel is probably the biggest one The second one is also related to the panel In that when you go to enter enter mode, you get this pop up here It's more tedious for me. I would say in some cases, but it's also Better than what was there in some ways. Let me explain So before when you wanted to set the position, you just drag The bar or the panel right if you wanted to if you wanted the panel over here If you wanted the panel over here, I prefer that instead of having to Set position and then click an arrow It just seems less it seems more manual to me instead of interactive So the alignment and the width and stuff that used to be in a menu over here along the side And I don't particularly care one way or another. I think it's nice that they put it all here in one spot But this panel here is all new I will say that plasma continues to put the ad widgets thing literally all over the place So you can't miss the thing. So if you want to add widgets to your desktop It's here if you're in regular not edit modes here It's up here if you click on the bar, it's here It's so many different places And I suppose that's good because it means that you can have access to widgets wherever you want It just seems like it's a little bit over excessive, but that's they've always done that So that's not anything new another thing that I like and dislike We're going to kind of meld like and dislike here for just a second is that they have completely Ordered All of the stuff in the menu or in the settings. Excuse me. Everything here is in a different place So I hate that it's in a different place because I was used to having to scroll all the way down To get to displays or to search right if I wanted to get to my display settings Without you know clicking over here and I was in the settings panel I would go scroll all the way down. That was where displays was same thing with audio and multimedia And a whole bunch of other stuff used to be here at the bottom Now it makes more sense to have all of the stuff for your hardware Your input and output the stuff that you're probably going to mess around with that the first time you use the settings Probably the most important stuff for settings at the top before at the top was global theming That was what was at the top and while I personally like theming the vast majority of people Don't spend their time theming the first time they open up a plasma They want to get their displays running They want to get their game controllers and their network and all that stuff all running And now all that stuff is right here at the top, which is Great, but if you're if you're a longtime plasma user and you have muscle memory for where the stuff used to be It can be a little jarring because a lot of the stuff that were that used to be down further on the list Is now at the top and you kind of have to go searching for stuff and stuff has moved A lot of stuff has moved some stuff is still in the same place. Some of it has been relabeled And all that's fine But it with the one thing that I will say about the the settings panel now Is that it does take some time if you've used plasma before to kind of get to know where everything's at And you really do want to take advantage of that searching capability because you're going to need it I know I did all the time So let's talk about the underlying stuff because really yeah, there are a few other minor Visual changes here that I could talk about but we're honestly None of that stuff is really all that important. It's basically what you expect from kd plasma But the biggest stuff that they've changed is underneath, right? And I don't really care about qt6 I know it enables a lot of the stuff I'm going to talk about But technologically, I'm not that interested in it. What's big here is the whaling capability So I'm a long time Skeptic when it comes to whaling. I've recently only I've only recently started to switch myself over to whaling and you know, that's A me problem for the most part. We all know that Matt's a little weird He he he he he tends to Not Transition to things the way other people do. It's a little, you know, it's just I'm a special little smoke Snowflake in that in that regard But I have talked time blue in the face about my resistance to whaling my transition over to whaling all that stuff But so I don't really need to to Go through any of that stuff here again But I will say this is that when it comes to desktop environments Up until now gnom has been the best implementation of whaling that I've experienced And when I say best that's not really saying on that much because I have a lot of complaints about the way gnom handles Scaling and all that stuff plasma has been better at scaling and stuff for quite a while now But because previously the whaling experience on kde was fairly buggy even on amd systems I couldn't really recommend it now It's been fantastic. It's been really really good across the board with multiple monitors With a whole bunch of weird funky kwind scripts that I've installed half of which don't work at all You know, I've been just messing around and tinkering like I normally do and I haven't managed to break it, right? I have seen a couple a couple crashes from the whaling session and Previously on a whaling session when it crashed It just shut everything down took you back to stdm if you could even get back to stdm And you basically had to log back in This time it just restarted itself like everything all my windows stayed exactly in the same place the bar came back It was great. It was the best Fail on a kde system. I've ever seen it was really really spectacular because he on xorg when kwin crashes You're screwed like half the time you're screwed And you know either you're gonna have to do a hard reboot or if if you're lucky Well, you can get to an a tty or something and on the whaling session previously again Like I said, you had a lot of times you ended up back at the display manager here. It was a fantastic graceful fail I can't even remember what caused the failure. It was it was something to do with maximizing windows or something I don't even remember. It's been a while And that was when kd6 first came out. So I haven't experienced it in quite a bit either So a fantastic fail I know it seems weird to be that impressed with it But I just the fact that it just kind of rebooted and I could continue not even rebooted Just just the fact that it kind of restarted itself Into the previous state and it just you know You could just carry on with what I could just carry on with what I was doing is fantastic It was really good. So I have had this is the best whaling experience I've had in a desktop environment ever bar none Like it's not even close and that kind of transitions into The stability of plasma six because this is another big one and It's the most ironic part because other people have had so many problems So if you've watched brody if you've watched nick from the linux experiment I think he's talked about it several other linux youtubers have talked about how plasma six is Not as stable as they want it to be. So there's been this whole global themes erasing Home directories and all that stuff. I haven't actually even installed any Global themes. So because I've just been dealing with color schemes lately So I haven't really experienced that but Everybody else that you talk to or at least most people that you talk to Find that plasma six is still just as buggy as plasma five was it has quite a few flaws I've been the complete opposite. This has been the most stable plasma experience that I've ever experienced And that's insane I mean, it's been such a good experience out of the box things, you know, other than those few crashes Which again just managed to come right back up and let me keep going Everything else has been fantastic. The monitors go to sleep the computer goes into hibernation Just I get supposed to bluetooth works, which I always have a problem with bluetooth on plasma for some reason Usually I have problems with the Password wallet thing that katie has haven't had any of those issues. It hasn't deleted all of my Cookies from my browser sessions like it normally does usually because I do a lot of I've talked about this before I do a lot of switching between plasma and window managers I'd like to switch between them and usually I can come into plasma And the baldy or whatever browser that I'm using is still logged into everything It works just fine Then I log back into whatever window manager I want to go back to and everything's been deleted I don't know if I can blame plasma for that but that's always been the experience didn't happen this time It's been really really good It's also for whatever reason usually because of the differences in pulpit because this obviously uses katie pulpit And in my hyperland install I use canone pulpit mixing and matching those things probably not the best idea But this time it worked fantastically well I haven't had any issues like I normally do so the stability of katie plasma 6 for me personally has been excellent on both this computer and on my laptop now normally I don't have nearly as many problems on my laptop because most of the problems that I usually experience are because I have multiple monitors But on both computers it has just been phenomenally stable. It's actually been really really good And I'm so very impressed with it now. I don't know if I'm just lucky Maybe my karma has finally caught up And I've experienced enough pain over the years with plasma that I'm just able to reap the rewards of of that life experience but I don't know. Maybe it's just me but for me personally, this has been a very very stable experience and that's using the latest up-to-date katie stuff so To install it on plaza to install it on open suza before it was released for open suza I had to install several other repositories and all that stuff is very bleeding edge so I get the latest version of literally everything and That means every time I update there's like 300 katie dependencies that I have to update Eventually I'm gonna have to change that because I really don't want to have to put up with that every time I update every four days But you guys get the idea I'm living on the bleeding edge of plasma land and or at least as bleeding edge as open suza can get And it has been just rock steady. It's been so good So overall you guys have been hearing me glow about plasma six for the last 10 minutes or so And it's a fantastic update. It's it's one of their best updates ever But in traditional matte fashion, I can't go through an entire video without saying some negative things So I will hear some things that I didn't really care for So my first and honestly biggest complaint is going to sound like a really stupid one But I don't think katie plasma is customizable enough for me And I know when I say that I'm gonna hear a lot of people in the comments thinking well matt What's going on with you? How are you this insane? Plasma is obviously the most customizable thing in the world or at least in terms of desktop environments How could it not be customizable enough for you? Well in this one area It really hasn't been as customizable as I'd like it to be and that is when it comes to the panel I am very used to bars that I can customize Literally every part of I've been using hyperland that I use waybar with that and it's customizable via css Which means I can literally do anything I want with it as long as I know the css to do it That's awesome. Now. Obviously. I'm not expecting That level of customization on a panel at least outside of xfc, which you can in fact customize via css But on plasma. Hey, I'm not sure if that's possible I didn't even really look into it But when it comes to customizing the panel in plasma There's so much more that I want to do that. I just can't do one of them is rounded corners Now someone in the comment section is going to link or try to link to me a couple github pages Or github projects that allow me to round the corners even on wayland But I don't want to have to go searching for them, right? I and I had a hard time getting those installed and actually up and running I didn't manage it at one point, but it was not a stable experience. So I just kind of uninstalled them So a lot of the problems that I have with customizability is the fact that A lot of the kwin scripts that I used to use to customize the panel don't work on wayland at all Some of them just don't work on plasma six. So eventually I think that that stuff will iron it out, but In terms of like rounded corners the workspace switcher. Let me see if I can actually add this thing Oh, it's called pager. That's right. It's called the pager This is what the pager looks like and it's absolutely effing huge, right? It's so So big it's this thing here. Now you can make it a little smaller Just by controlling what it's actually showing you But it's huge like if I want to if I want the if I want to know what workspace I'm on I just want the number or the ability to just have the number now you can put the numbers here So if you if I edit configure the pager I can put the the desktop number there and it will actually show me the number, but it doesn't get any smaller, right? And I wanted to be smaller first off and I don't I mean There's just so many things there that I want now I went searching through the widgets for a different pager as far as I know. There's not one It's just small little things like that that I want to do but can't there are several of them It does just bother me like that and you know, it's fine But it was those little Little bitty things that I wanted to customize that really bugged me now Again, that's the stupidest effing complaint you guys probably have ever heard. I understand But it was the little things that made me realize that plasma wasn't really for me. So I Just they kind of added up over time And that was the first one that I really kind of Noticed another one is that the the tiling aspect of of kde is not any better I wouldn't my biggest hope for plasma 6 my biggest hope outside of better wailin compatibility, which we got Was better tiling functionality. We didn't get that at all We still have this nonsense that where you hit hit shift T I think it's shift T. Maybe it's control T It's control T and you get this nonsense and then and then if you have a Terminal open or something like that and you want to Get that into the appropriate place you press shift and it'll tile in that place, right? So you can choose the the layout and then you have to put the thing in the You have to put your clients in the appropriate position Manually then it's not like if I open up another one here It doesn't actually go into the spot. That's I want to tile now I know that polonium exists for this reason I've always had so many problems with polonium. I didn't even bother trying it this time So maybe maybe it's gotten better. Maybe maybe not. I don't know. Maybe I'll try to get eventually but As of right now, I haven't and the the built-in tiling is just why did you guys even bother? That's not good. Okay, and it hasn't been good since it came out in 526 Okay, or I think that was when it came out. It just wasn't good then it wasn't good in 527 It hasn't gotten any better. Okay. Now. I understand there are other things that they were worrying about getting things the cute six and Getting all the stuff updated for Wayland. Those are things much more important But hopefully now that they got Wayland up running fairly well Hopefully now they'll start working on a better tiling mechanism because this right here is just it's a waste of space Most people who use it use it alongside polonium and that makes it a little bit useful But most people just don't use it either. They don't know. It's there or they know It's there try it and realize that it's not good I've made a whole video about the kd plasma tiling before I'll point you guys to that if you want to hear me Ran about it for like 20 minutes, but overall that was my biggest wish for plasma 6 and it did not come true So the last thing that I want to talk about is Wayland itself So I've already talked about how good this wayland experience has been But that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Okay, so I don't I don't want to go so far as to say that it's perfect because it's not The portal situation on everything is literally broken. Okay guys I don't care if you're using hyperland if you're using sway You're using gnom or you're using kde doesn't matter what you're using the plasma the portal situation just isn't As stable as you need it to be now most people Not going to bother them because all they use the portal for is getting a picker a file picker to come up Those things work. They've nailed that. Good job guys For me the thing that I need to work is the portal to actually allow me to select a monitor to screen capture specifically i'm talking about an obs And this is not a specific kde problem It's also has a I also have a problem with it in hyperland I have a problem with it in q tile wayland Where for whatever reason the portal just for whatever reason will not see One of my main monitors this one right here the scepter tech ink scepter m32 thing For whatever reason I won't see it Without me having to restart the portal for whatever reason in order for it to see just that monitor It'll see the other two just fine, but it won't see that monitor without me restarting the portal And doesn't matter which portal it is The kde portal has the exact same problem as the hyperland portal same as the wl roots portal You get the idea So now again, this is a special problem for people who use Have multiple monitors and weird configurations and who do a lot of video recording Most people aren't going to have this experience probably but for me This was my biggest pain point and has been my biggest pain point on wayland No matter what wayland i'm using so plasma did not fix that for me In fact, it was worse because I haven't been able to figure out what the portal name is Since plasma 6 came out. I've been searching for it The package name is xdg xdg dash desktop dash portal dash kde 6 But the service name is not that it's also not just the kde version So I don't know what it's called I know that there's a way to go searching through the system d services that are running I haven't managed to do that yet. I'll get there eventually But my point is is that this last time logging back into plasma I actually had to restart the computer in order to get the portal to actually restart Which is not what you want to do so from a wayland perspective That's the only complaint that I really have Which is honestly Not a bad thing because I've had so many problems over the course of the last two years with wayland The fact that that just little one is still all that's really left for me is pretty impressive. So Overall plasma 6 is Very good. It's very good. But I would caution anyone who hasn't upgraded yet If you haven't upgraded yet lower your expectations just a tad because it's not a big update And when I say it's not a big update I mean in terms of actual features and UI changes Mostly it looks basically the same mostly function basically the same and that's okay There's nothing wrong with that Now when I say from a user perspective from a UI perspective There are other places where it has been a big change and this is where we need to talk a little bit So when they upgraded to everything to plasma 6 and the qt 6 that means they changed literally every package Every package every single one of them. And if you know anything about plasma, you know, especially if you're using something like Debian or open suzer where things are packaged very Individually and things aren't like grouped together. You'll know that that's a lot of packages. I'll go a lot of packages I'm talking about Over a thousand packages at least it was for me. Now some people have a more minimal install And they'll find that number to be a little bit lower But the idea remains it was a lot of packages And the upgrade process for people who switched early was not a good one Now this is not the fault of plasma nor is it the fault of open suzer It's my fault for wanting to try it early I wanted to try it before open suzer has had it in its main repo So my experience upgrading was not a good one And I've heard from other people who have tried to upgrade it upgrade to it Now that it is in the open suzer repositories and their their Experience has also not been a very good one A lot of times actually upgrading to plasma 6 while you're in plasma 5 will cause the entire update to stop you get kicked out up to the sddm A display manager and you have to actually do the update over again in some other Winner manager or desktop environment So that was the experience for a lot of people even after Plasma was in the open suzer repositories now. I don't know what the experience was on other distros it could have been better I don't know the reason why all that was the case is because in the case of open suzer every Plasma 5 package if you already had plasma installed had to be deleted Had to be completely yoinked in order for you to install the plasma 6 version because every single one of those Was a conflicting package even if there was no change other than just the name The old one had to completely go and the new one had to be installed That's usually not a big deal with other programs because they're usually quite small You know that maybe they have 20 or 30 packages on the high side When you're talking about a thousand packages or 600 packages or whatever that can be a big issue where he So the upgraded process on open suzer was not a good one before it was in the repositories I've heard that it hasn't been a fantastic one after it's been in the repositories So what I would recommend if you're going to use plasma 6 is to do one of either two things One if you're going to upgrade in place Upgrade from an alternative desktop environment. So either you know XFC Or a window manager of some kind just something that is not plasma 5 I'd highly recommend that just in case chances are you'll probably be fine But just in case or probably the better one is just nuke and pave and install this thing fresh I think that you that you would have a better experience I know that I would have had a better experience If I were going to stick with plasma to just go ahead and do a fresh install with plasma 6 on the iso It would have been a much better experience because that upgrade process was not an easy one But overall plasma 6 really did surprise me because of the stability of it It wasn't because there were a ton of features But because it has been so very stable for me It has been a pleasant experience which is again something that was very surprising for me. So Overall plasma 6 Good job guys. I'm really impressed. I know that other people haven't had as a good experience But for me you get the good old matt thumbs up So that's it for this video if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from about your experience with plasma 6 if you've had it Or if you plan on upgrading comments in the comment section below If you you want to follow me on matt said on our odyssey those links to be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast You can also head on over to the store which is available at shop.thelinxcast.org There you'll find hats, t-shirts, hoodies, all sorts of stuff All the proceeds for that go directly to making more linux content for you guys So head on over there shop.thelinxcast.org to check that out Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very very much for your support. I truly honestly do appreciate with like I said Just thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. I hope you have a wonderful week