 Ok, so last week the KD Plasma Sprint happened in the Tuxedo headquarters and that was a great occasion to sit together and decide what we want Plasma 6 to look like. And one thing that we discussed a lot about is defaults, because if there's a release where we can change lots of defaults is this one. So we took a lot of decisions and let's start right away. So number one, Floating Panel. We decided to try out the floating panel by default. And when I say try out it's because we're not all 100% sold on the idea so we want to give it a shot before the release and if all goes well we keep the change. I've seen lots of comments regarding this change and I do want to address a lot of criticism because we don't do stuff randomly. Firstly, fit slow. If you just throw the mouse pointer at the border of the screen you should always be able to click and interact with the panel. We cannot drop this feature for the floating panel, which is why I spent a lot of time actually making sure that floating panels still intercept all mouse events that happen near the floating panel. This preserves accessibility completely. Secondly, it's ugly when a window touches it. Now, it has to defloat when a window touches it. Otherwise, no way the floating panel would ever be used as a default. However, currently, actually let me tell you a fun story about this. When I proposed the feature of the first time there was some developers who were skeptical and then I showed the fact that it defloats and everybody was like, oh, well, that is fine. So it's pretty important. As I was saying, however, currently, the defloat makes the panel much thicker compared to the usual, which is not something most users like, which is why I spent months, months making sure that in Plasma 6, the panel will defloat with no extra margin whatsoever. So yes, please keep in mind that these kind of changes are not done just like that, but there's actually a lot of Q&A that goes behind it and make sure that complaints from users are actually addressed before making it a default. Double click by default. And yes, it is official. We will switch to double click by default. Now, we have to talk about this change. The thing is almost everyone in that room, if not everyone, really thought that single click is a better option compared to double click. And probably most of us will change that option as soon as we start using Plasma 6 from double click to single click again. However, we have to recognize that sometimes what's best for us developers is not best for everyone. And single click by default has a giant issue. Most of the big distribution used in Q&A Plasma actually change the default such that double click is the default. And distributions are really close to the users. So if all the major ones start patching that default away, it means that we as Q&A developers might be a little bit out of touch with a significant portion of the user base. The change is obviously also due to the fact that basically any other desktop platform still uses double click to open folders. And I still firmly believe that this will change in the future. And even Windows and Macintosh will one day convert to single click. But till then, we have to keep in mind that lots of users are switching from these platforms to Q&A Plasma and they are seemingly annoyed by having a single click by default. Of course, we users of Plasma can still tweak the setting to our liking and it's front and center in the main page of system settings. Personally, I will do that as I firmly believe that single click is so much better. And I also think that we will eventually all get back to using it. Wayland by default. We also decided as a community to do a strong push to have Plasma 6 use Wayland by default. Note that distributions can still change that default if they deem it rabbit. And users can also still use X11 just like now. But we would like to formally say from now on that default is Wayland. During the spring, there has been a war on reducing the number of showstoppers for the switch to Wayland. And some of the things that were previously considered showstoppers are now considered annoyances rather than showstoppers. Especially considering that it's not like X11 hasn't any issue either. So you're just trading a set of issues for another set of issues, a different one. Now, many of the issues that are holding off Wayland for Plasma are in progress with a clear path toward the solution. So hopefully everything is going to be really in time for the release. Accent colored title bars by default. This is another task that's currently being discussed a lot. So don't take anything as certain and already set in stone, not at all. But we do want to experiment with slightly tinting the header area using the accent color. It will look something like this, which is actually just a mockup. So again, nothing is set in stone. Currently, you have some options that are similar to this one. But not exactly this one. You can slightly tint the entire window, not just the header area using the accent color. Or you can just straight up use the accent color for the header, which is a bit too strong to have that as a default for obvious reasons. Personally, I had also proposed to directly tint the whole window using accent color and also to turn on pick accent color from the wallpaper automatically by default. Meaning that whenever you change the wallpaper, the best color will be picked and your windows will only slightly blend in the overall look of the system. Much to my sadness, both ideas were actually shut down by other developers. Still, I'd really like to see some more colors at least in the header area and I think that's going to look real good. This is, however, not just eye candy, as it has a major accessibility goal. Only the active window header area will be tinted, which should make it easier for users to recognize which one is the currently active application. New default task switcher. Historically, Plasma has always used this task switcher, which looks good, but has some issues. After some discussion, we decided that we actually prefer the task switcher called big icons, which simply puts the big icons of your apps in the center of the screen. This, however, still has issues. You don't have thumbnails, making it much harder to actually tell apart different windows of the same applications. After some discussion, then we decided to create a whole new task switcher using thumbnail grid as a base, but adding a big icon on top of the thumbnails too. This makes it super easy to tell apart any kind of window and it's, in my honest opinion, also much prettier compared to the status quo, at least. As part of this work, we also deleted a bunch of infrequently used task switchers in the kdplasma-addon'tskit repo that were simply worse versions of other ones. And finally, we made our breeze global theme no longer have an opinion on what they want the task switcher to be. So if you want a non-default one, you can safely switch global themes without having it reset your task switcher all the time. Please note that the above paragraph is a direct quote of Nate Graham's blog post because I was just too lazy to write my own. Moving on, a scrolling on desktop to change the virtual desktop. So basically, this is the feature where you scroll on the desktop, like on a touchpad or a mouse wheel, and you'll switch to a different one. This feature is not particularly loved and instead users are really prone to using it accidentally. Even worse, there are mouse devices like mine that simulate inertia scrolling by providing scroll events even when you're done scrolling, meaning that if you move the mouse on the desktop even seconds after scrolling, you'll still end up in the wrong desktop. This feature is quite sensitive, that is, even a very small scroll amount on a touchpad or such will send you at light speed through desktops, making you end up in some random desktop. And even worse, yet again, sometimes you start scrolling and then end up in a desktop where there is a maximized window and that window will block any further scroll event, basically leaving you stuck there. For all of these reasons, we decided to turn off the feature by default. If you liked the feature, don't worry, you will still be able to use it, it's just disabled by default, so you will have to tick a box before being able to enjoy it. I'm not sure how you would be able to enjoy it, but I don't do kink shaming here. Clicking on the scroll bar. Okay, so I don't really care about this one, but hey, it has been discussed. Basically, wherever there is a scroll bar, clicking on a random spot currently has the behavior of moving the scroll bar slightly towards that position. We instead decided to change the default into. When you click somewhere, that scroll bar moves to that position instantly. I'm not sure how important of a change this one is, but I mean, who actually clicks on scroll bars anymore? Come on, the new overview. Well, I've just done an entire video about it, but if you missed it, KDPasme 6 will have a whole new overview effect with different gestures and a completely redesigned look. In fact, I consider the new overview basically a very good copy of GNOME's overview effect, and I can say that because I've implemented it myself and I know what I used as an inspiration. Plasma's overview does some things differently, though. Firstly, it does not show applications or the application grid like to launch them as we prefer to leave launching applications to the panel or to the application launcher. Secondly, we allow a vertical set of desktops, which will be shown on the left instead of on the top. And we also allow a grid of desktops. To support all of these use cases, the overview has two different views. One where you mostly see the current desktop and the desktop bar and another that's more like a desktop grid. It's really easy to switch between them, so hopefully the new effect will cover use cases of most people. By the way, if I'm working on KDPasme, it's only really thanks to all of you supporting me and I really need your help to reach my donation goal every month, which pays off the editor of these videos, the equipment I'm using to record and blame me, it's expensive, and of course the food and time. So if you have some spare change, I'd absolutely love if you could throw it at me. I do offer a sort of podcast and a private blog post for patrons, sometimes when I'm not too busy. We also decided for the Plasma 6 release to release updates less frequently. However, that's not going to happen immediately, as probably the first versions of 6 will need to be updated quickly to iron out any possible issue. But as soon as we feel it has stabilized, a stable, stabilized enough, we'll stop doing thrill releases a year and we'll only do two. This has many, many benefits. It aligns us better to the schedule of distributions, meaning that you'll always get the latest Plasma version in your preferred distro instead of having to wait months because we release Plasma just a few days after the distribution freeze. It gives us more time to test out the latest version. There will be a longer beta period to make sure that all the bugs in each release are fixed and it also gives the promotion team a bit of more time to actually prepare for the next release. We can only start working on announcements as soon as we know what's going to be in the next release and usually that's barely a month before the release. With a longer beta period, we'll be able to provide better announcements by knowing what to work on with more time to spare. The wallpaper setting speech, we decided that we would ideally really like to have a wallpaper setting in system settings instead of just by right-clicking the desktop. And I know lots of users are asking for this, but you have to remember that it's actually super complex to implement because you can set wallpapers for each monitor for each activity. And in fact, the core Plasma dev, Marco decided to check out Windows 11 during the KD Plasma sprint to see how they were handling the wallpaper settings. Finally enough, Windows 11 decided to bug out and make all icons in the taskbar disappear whilst we were testing it. So yeah, KD Plasma is buggy. Windows 11 is stable, yeah, sure, sure. Now it's not completely clear how this system settings page would look, but there has been some work and on it and it's something we'd probably like to implement it in six. So don't be surprised if it appears, you know. These are the biggest changes, but of course there's so much more. In fact, there was a good six to seven months before the release, meaning that we have all the time in the world to start implementing lots of things. Development has just started, but I gotta say six sounds like a super exciting release already, doesn't it? Thanks everybody and see you in a few days.