 KDE just had a really big release, Plasma 6 is finally out and I'm kind of curious. So today what I'm going to do is I'm going to spin up a virtual machine of KDE Neon and just give a quick overview of what Plasma 6 is all about because honestly I really liked Plasma 5 even though you know I don't run it as a daily driver even I tend to like tiling window managers. But Plasma 5 was really nice, it was light on resources, it was quite attractive and I'm hoping Plasma 6 still delivers that same sweet goodness that Plasma 5 offered but maybe you know a few minor improvements. So one of the first things I noticed when I logged in by default it defaults to Plasma on Wayland. That's the default desktop session when you go to log in. Now X11 is still there so you can log in to Plasma using X11 if you need to but with Plasma 6 they're really defaulting to Wayland now. So let's talk about first impression and for me there are two things aesthetically that jump out immediately with Plasma 6 and I am quite taken with the wallpaper and the panel that is now a floating panel right so those are new things right the wallpapers are always great with every release of KDE Plasma but this wallpaper here I've got to say is absolutely gorgeous I love it I may have to rip off this wallpaper even though I'm not gonna use Plasma as my desktop environment. I may use that wallpaper and the floating panel here at the bottom is really nice too. Now it's nice aesthetically one of the things I don't like with floating panels is you know you've got some wasted space because you've got this extra padding around a floating panel but sometimes desktop environments and window managers when they have a floating panel they will have it auto hide maybe when you you know maximize a window so I open the dolphin file manager if I make it full screen it doesn't auto hide it but you see what it did that is a very neat effect ah when you bump up against the panel it actually becomes a full screen 100% width panel like a normal panel so that solves the wasted space problem so it's only wasted space it's not really wasted space when nothing's going on but as soon as you get some windows that would take up that space the panel you know very smartly becomes that 100% wide panel I love that effect I don't think I've ever seen that before with any other desktop environment or window manager but it makes a lot of sense one thing I noticed is out of the box there is only one workspace available for us here so let me click on the settings manager here the system settings and believe they call their workspaces virtual desktop so if I do a search for virtual there it is virtual desktops yeah they only have one desktop and for me I like having more than one workspace I'm gonna add I'm gonna add three for a total of four and let's do rows let's do two rows and let's go ahead and hit apply that way I have this grid of four workspaces and I believe the default key bindings for KDE as far as switching workspaces is control and then f1 f2 f3 so let's try control f2 yeah that takes me to workspace to control f3 would take me to workspace 3 control and f1 take me back to workspace one those key bindings not crazy about those key bindings are a little convoluted but of course you can always change any of the default key bindings to whatever fits your needs now that I've got a couple of windows open let's check out the alt tab feature which is the tab switcher so if I do alt tab and hold alt and then tab me I can cycle through the open windows but that's not a whole lot of windows open let's add a few more windows so let's go ahead and go into development let's go ahead and launch the Kate text editor let's go into multimedia let's launch VLC let's launch a few things how about the system monitor and now let's try alt tab and now we get this grid view instead of everything being one line once you have enough windows open it breaks them into rows which is a nice feature and as you can see as I hold alt and then tab I can cycle through all of the open windows let me go ahead and close out all of these extra windows that really didn't want to play with I'll leave Dolphin open and one interesting key binding for those of you that are not familiar with plasma is you know they have this really neat zoom key binding now inside Dolphin you can do control plus control minus to zoom in and out on the icons but on the desktop I switch over here to the desktop itself and I do a super plus you know I can zoom in on the desktop super minus would zoom me back out so that is a really neat feature the fact that you can zoom in and out the entire desktop if you will because you know that kind of eliminates some of the needs for things like magnifying glasses you know those magnifying tools sometimes that you want to zoom in on a specific area of your desktop so that is a really nice touch now one of the biggest changes with plasma six you know one of the things that you will immediately notice is different is now let me click on the desktop directory here no nothing happened why did nothing happen is because now I have to double click to get into the desktop directory right so double click is now the default instead of single click so before everything was a single click out of the box on KDE plasma and honestly almost every Linux distribution changed that because anybody coming from any other operating system whether it be Windows or Mac or any of the BSD operating systems any other GNU slash Linux distribution that doesn't use KDE plasma everything defaults to double clicking to open a file or to get into a folder right so single click out of the box was one of those things that people complained about for decades I mean this really should have been the default 20 years ago and people had constantly been saying hey you need to make double click the default because as far as for new users to make things as user friendly as possible it needs to be double click out of the box and finally they've made the switch and I'm glad now for those of you that love single click you can of course revert back to single click their settings that you know you can get into to make single click the default again but I think most people were going to use double click anyway so I welcome that change one of the things I really have to say as I love the breeze theme now the breeze plasma theme has always been good but this modern iteration of it and this latest iteration of it looks really good Kate here looks really nice and make Kate full screen Kate of course is your plain text editor or you can really think of it as an IDE these days because it has so many features built in for example there's a get logo here so I guess it has get integration now that's very cool but you can see the plasma theme is very nice you can see it's very modern there's a lot less noise with it as well before and some of the previous versions of this breeze theme it had a lot more blue there are a lot more in set blue lines blue dividers and things and now it's a little less busy right now it's just this grayish bluish grayish color and for the most part it's very clean very plain very minimal I like that they've also played around with a little bit of the spacing things are spaced out a little more used to be that some of these elements were a little too close to the edge of the windows for for my liking now you know this is much more sleek I would say much more modern looking now although I do like the standard default breeze theme I do prefer dark theme so let's see if I can switch this to breeze dark let's go ahead and see what the dark theme looks like let's go ahead select that and hit apply and we get a new wallpaper same wallpaper it's darker colors I like that so that is very nice so it dynamically changes the wallpaper to a more dark wallpaper when you change from breeze to breeze dark you just from aesthetics just from everything just looking good and also just performance I mean all the everything is peppy and I'm in a virtual machine I didn't give this virtual machine you know crazy amounts of resources I'm only using two threads in my CPU I'm only using six gigs of RAM and this is very clean the animations you know happen instantly you can see especially this bar when it when I make something full screen the bar immediately slides it's got a slight delay which is supposed to have a slight delay for the animation effect and I'm very impressed with how they did that panel now let's check out system resource usage now Katie neon as far as the distribution that I'm using right now it doesn't ship a whole lot of things out of the box is very much just a plain a boon to 2204 LTS distribution with Katie plasma on top of it but they don't really ship with a lot of programs and extra you know services and things running in the background so this will be a good test of as far as RAM usage CPU usage so if I do control alt T to bring up the terminal because I'm a boon to and most of them to base distributions they have that key binding control alt T brings up the terminal which is console me make console full screen and I'll zoom in and let's run H top H top is not found but being that it is an a boon to base distribution we could do a sudo apt install H top give it my super secure password and now that H top is installed let's go ahead and check out system resource usage now actually memory is a little high says it's using one gigs of the six gigs of memory using a bit of CPU I wonder if I log out and log back in let's do this on a cold dude and see if things change a little bit so I logged out and logged back in just to make sure there were no background process running that would suck up a lot of RAM usage for one thing discover was checking for automatic updates so I killed the discover software center from checking for those updates because that will drastically change the readings from each top especially for RAM usage so me zoom in here and now let's run H top and you can see now we're only using 793 megs of the six gigs of RAM so about 800 megs which is pretty normal I want to say plasma 5 I was typically getting readings around the 600 to 700 megabyte range so yeah it's very similar maybe a tad high but you know I've got a lot going on and this is of course a virtual machine this is not physical hardware let's go ahead and kill each top now of course with the big release of plasma six a lot of the KDE suite of applications also saw some work done some improvements some bug fixes I can't show you much of that because this is such a minimal distribution there's really nothing installed here it's just the bare bones KDE desktop with just a couple of applications but things like for example Kate and live I know got some work done on it one last thing I want to check I always have to check the wallpaper so let's go ahead and right click on the desktop let's configure desktop and wallpaper and check out any new wallpapers that are available here so let me go ahead and make this a little bigger so a lot of these are the standard plasma wallpapers that I've seen in past releases but I was looking for the new ones here it is scarlet tree so you have a light version and a dark version depending on whether you're using breeze light or breeze dark you also have this mountain version I don't know if that was from a previous version of plasma but there is the dark version of the mountain wallpaper so that is kind of cool this one here Patek I don't know that one have I seen this wallpaper before I'm not sure if I've seen that one before or not but I quite like that wallpaper that might be the one I go with let's go ahead and apply yeah one thing I do like the dark wallpaper but I think this wallpaper is is dark it would actually contrast better against a light theme typically when you're using a dark theme you want a light wallpaper and when you're using a light theme you want a dark wallpaper this is dark on dark so I'm not crazy about that I've probably switched to a light theme if I really wanted to use the wallpaper but overall yeah that's a sexy desktop just so you know this few minutes that I've spent and you know this is my very first time checking out plasma six here on camera and I got to say I am pretty impressed as far as the looks aesthetic wise I think it is one of the most gorgeous desktops obviously that we have available on Linux and that's saying something because I think the modern versions of GNOME look very good I think the deep and desktop environment is absolutely fantastic is stunningly beautiful I mean we've got a lot of really good desktop environments on Linux but plasma six is if we were doing a beauty contest it might take first prize for those of you that want to check out plasma six if you're on a rolling release distribution chances are plasma six is already available for you to go ahead and install and then check out for those of you that are on a stable release distribution Ubuntu LTS for example so many of you guys are running Ubuntu or Kubuntu maybe you're running the last LTS there are backport PPAs available that you can add to get the latest plasma six on Ubuntu now before I go I need to think a few special people I need to think the producers of this episode gave James Matt Paul Steve West Arkotic Armor Dragon commander angry Darloff George Lee may you met those Nate Irion Paul piece hearts from the door of realities for less red profit role and so last three 10 run tools devil or war 10 to an Ubuntu and Willie these guys they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys this quick first impression of plasma six would not have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I depend on you guys if you like my work you want to support me subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace guys