KDE Plasma 6 to Ship with Floating Panel by Default, Double-Click for Opening Files

Wayland will also be enabled by default for KDE Plasma 6, as well as the accent-color-tinted header area.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
KDE Plasma 6

The KDE Project and TUXEDO Computers held a Plasma 6 sprint event in Germany last weekend to hack on the next major release of the popular Linux desktop environment.

Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about KDE Plasma 6, a massive update to the Plasma desktop environment that will bring numerous new features and improvements. During the Plasma 6 sprint event, the devs managed to plan and make some interesting changes for the upcoming Plasma release.

These changes are related to the way you will be interacting with the Plasma 6 desktop. For example, Plasma 6 will default to double-click for opening files rather than a single click, and the Floating Panel introduced in Plasma 5.25 will be enabled by default as well.

“It’s the fact that Microsoft has blatantly copied us in Windows 11, and as a result, people are starting to see Plasma as a cheap clone of Windows again,” said developer Nate Graham on his blog about enabling Floating Panel by default in the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment.

Another interesting change in Plasma 6 is that it will use Wayland by default. This will probably upset some NVIDIA GPU users out there, especially gamers, but rest assured that the KDE devs are working on addressing all the Wayland/NVIDIA issues before Plasma 6 hits the streets in stable version.

“The true showstoppers are down to five, plus a couple of NVIDIA issues that need further investigation. Many of these issues are in progress with a clear path towards resolution, so I do expect us to be able to achieve the goal,” added KDE developer Nate Graham.

Other defaults for KDE Plasma 6 include a new default Task Switcher, no more scrolling on the desktop to switch virtual desktops, clicking in the scrollbar track jumps the scrollbar to that location, a wallpaper page in System Settings, unified desktop plugins, and better handling keyboard backlighting.

For the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment, the devs will also adopt a slower-paced release schedule so that it will be easier for Linux distributions to update to newer Plasma versions, and for KDE developers to have more time to polish the Plasma desktop environment. As such, starting with Plasma 6 there will be only two releases per year.

When will Plasma 6 be released? That I don’t know and neither the KDE devs. We can only hope that it will be released this year, but until then we have the latest KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS release to enjoy on our GNU/Linux distributions, which will be supported for a couple of years.

Image credits: Nate Graham

Last updated 12 months ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com