KDE Plasma 6.6: a massive update !

Hey everyone and KD Plasma 6.6 is now out or it will be very shortly or it's already out depending on when you're watching this. It is an absolutely gigantic release in terms of the number of changes in there. So many widget desktop changes window manager changes way support changes app changes. It's a massive one. And so this is probably going to be a little bit longer than usual, especially since we started with our sponsor, Proton Mail. You probably all have heard about Proton. They're your all-in-one endtoend and zero access encrypted solution to replace the likes of Google, for example. They offer you, of course, a fantastic email solution in the form of Proton Mail. It is the one I use for my own personal email. It's just secure. It protects you from fishing. It has all the privacy option you want to remove trackers and and email read counters, all of that stuff. It's a fantastic solution and you're secure in knowing that no one can actually read the contents of your email except of course for you. And on top of that, if you create an account for free for Proton Mail, you also get access to some online storage space. You get access to a VPN, to a password manager, uh, and also to some form of Google Doc Suite. Now they have a Google Docs alternative and a Google Sheets alternative. It is just jam-packed with features and it's a solution I rely upon every day. Proton has been a sponsor for the channel for I think 2 years now. They're really fantastic and as always the link is down in the description. So the first thing that Plasma 6.6 changes is the new plasma login manager. Now it looks exactly like SDDDM because it is currently based on SDDDM. It is systemd only which might be an issue for some but of course it is just a login manager. You can still use SDDDM or any other login manager if you use a Discord that don't have systemd or if you use BSD for example. Currently, there's nothing special in there, but what they want to bring is better multimonitor support, high DPI and HDR support, keyboard layout switching straight from the login manager, better support for screen readers, including managing how the audio volume is set up. It also wants to support virtual keyboards, better support for Korean, Japanese, Chinese input methods as well, remote desktop straight from the start, and better plasma integration. Basically, the goal is to replace the not well integrated SDDDM with something that can actually take advantage of some KD technologies and make sure that the login experience by default for KD is good for everyone, which currently it's not. Not really. For the default logging in case it works, but for a lot of other use cases, it's not that great. So, that's the replacement. Dros will decide what they want to ship instead. Now, while we're on the topic of logging in, uh you also have now a little option. If you click on the logout button and you elect to reboot your computer, it will now tell you on which OS the computer will reboot if you have multiple ones, which can be useful for, for example, dual boots to know where you're going to end up if you just let the reboot cycle operate by itself. So, let's get started with the desktop related stuff, especially the look and feel. So first, if you tweak your theme, application style, plasma style, window decorations, whatever else, you now have the option in the global theme options here to save your current theme. You can take a screenshot of your desktop to use as a preview image and you can save it as your own theme. It will then keep all those settings and let you potentially even share that theme in the get new stuff page if you want to try and upload that there. But at least you can save all your configurations and find them back so you can experiment and go back to what you liked previously. Uh if something goes wrong, which is good. Another visual option you have is the ability to draw every line for panels, for separators, for window borders in a big bolder manner. You just have a contrast setting. If you go to the options in a color scheme, at least in the default breeze color scheme, you can improve or increase the contrast of stuff. So if you go to the default 20%, this is how things look. But if you go to a 70% contrast, then you have all those lines heavily marked, which makes things a bit more legible. Another visual changes is if you display those menu bars inside of your windows, you will now have a rounded highlight around them. you already had it in the uh global menu, but apparently this wasn't in the main menu bar, so that's been added. If you decide to enable the blur effect, which will blur the background of semi-transparent windows, so if you do enable transparency on certain windows or menus uh in the options of breeze, you will have a blur. The blur is now better suited for dark mode and it also lets you change the saturation of the colors behind that blur. You can have something more vibrant or something more tuned down and muted. You decide how you want to configure that. Another thing that the KD team changed is the smoothness of animations on displays that have a higher than 60 Hz refresh rate. This is not the case here. I'm recording this in a VM on KD Neon. Uh but if you have a 120 or 90 Hz refresh rate or higher than that, animations should now be much smoother. The Breeze GDK theme also received some improvements. Uh they removed some of the gradients that were still uh in some buttons and some elements because Breeze did away with those gradients a while back. And they also improved how toolbarss look and feel. They should have a little bit more padding. They should be better aligned. So this GDK theme should make applications that you run inside of KD that are made with GTK. It should makes them feel a little bit better. Now, wherever there's a map being displayed in KD, for example, in the time zone settings, uh that map should be less blurry. The zones that you can select uh should now properly overlay the actual map itself, which is a bit better. And you can now zoom in or out and move the map around. It's just a better implementation of a map whenever there's one. And finally, KD also implemented support for Intel's sharpness feature, meaning that if you have the hardware for it, uh, which is Intel hardware, relatively recent, I think it's Lunar Lake, uh, and newer, uh, and if you also run the Linux kernel 6.19, which has the drivers to support that, then you can apply a scaling filter or a sharpness filter that will make sure that upscaled content or blurry content looks a bit sharper. This is not going to help everyone, but that's yet one more option that you have on KD. Now, still on the plasma desktop, but for more technical under the hood stuff. First, the RAM consumption of KD has been reduced by around 100 megabytes. Apparently, they're now unloading unnecessary or unneeded wallpapers when you don't want to access them. Uh, and so this reduces the RAM being used. Here I am running on a 16 gig virtual RAM virtual machine. Uh, so you use about 10% with just preloading, but of course that's not the actual RAM that KD needs to run. On devices that have ambient light sensors, KD is now able to automatically use them to change the brightness, which will definitely help. So, it matches uh everything that surrounds you. If you're in a very brightly lit environment, it's going to crank up the brightness. If you're in a low light situation, it's going to drop it down. That's pretty cool. KD also implemented the global reduced motion setting. Uh if you decide to actually disable animations by putting the animation speed to instant, uh then all the applications that use that setting that have access to that setting, it is in the XDG desktop portals will just remove all the animations that they have inside the app. So obviously this setting disables all animations for the KD desktop. But now on top of that, applications that follow that setting will be able to disable it as well. Finally, if you rightclick a title bar, you now have an option to completely hide one window from a screencast. So if you start recording your screen or streaming your screen, no one will see it. You have the same option from the right-click menu of the task manager. And you can also create a window rule if you want to make sure that those windows never appear on your screencast even when you close them or re uh reopen them afterwards. Now, in terms of the window manager, which is called KWIN, it now will set the correct scaling factor for your screen when you connect it to external TVs or external monitors with a big resolution, which is good cuz usually when you connected it to, for example, a 4K TV, you just did not get any scaling. You couldn't even see your pointer. It was horrendous. They also really improved screen mirroring when you plug in your your computer to an external display. Uh there's been a lot of work to make sure that resolutions are now properly restored when you go back to unplugging a monitor or replplugging one that you already connected to uh when you're disconnecting, reconnecting stuff. And you also have a tool called KCreen doctor which now lets you create custom modes for your monitor. So if things aren't detected properly, you're on an immutable system or you're on Wayland, you can now create a custom mode that you can go back to uh so your proper settings are restored when you need them. There are also plenty of improvements to Wayand and X Wayan support, notably dragging and dropping stuff from an XWAN app to a Whan native app and vice versa. You can now create window rules to force a title bar on native Whan applications. There's also support for emulating X resize and rotate, meaning certain applications that need those features and are running on X wayand will work properly. Now you also have more work related to the color pipeline. So you should have better color accuracy, better HDR support. Notably for applications running with wine apps made for Windows, they don't support HDR in exactly the same way. And now they will look right on KD as well. So, a bunch of changes, but we're not done cuz all the widgets that you can add to your KD desktop also received a bunch of improvements. On the desktop itself, you can alt plus doubleclick on an element. So, you open its properties just like in Dolphin, so that's a bit more cohesive. The network widget will let you connect to a specific Wi-Fi network using a QR code if you want. In the power management widget, uh if an app selects on the power management widget, if an application is blocking something on your computer, for example, sleep or screen locking, it will tell you exactly what it is blocking, meaning is it blocking just sleep or screen locking. If you use the window list outlet, it lets you open windows just by hovering on top of them. And you can also only show windows from your current desktop, current activity, current screen, or minimized. And you can have any combination of those. So you can really tailor what you actually want to see in that thing. If you have a ton of windows in your task manager and you open one that isn't currently visible, for example, using Alt Tab, this task manager will automatically switch uh and scroll to the right window to make sure that you actually see it in the taskbar. as well. In the emoji selector, you now have a skin tone option, meaning that you can pick your preferred skin tone for emojis using hands or people's faces, so you don't have to scroll past all the options and variants that you don't want to see. If you don't like the timeout indicator that appears in popups on plasma, you can also disable that indicator. It's the little blue bar that slowly goes away. If it stresses you out to see it, you can disable it. Now, all the little widgets that have some overlay information, uh, this overlay information has now been improved. It looks a little bit better than it used to in previous versions. It's also a little bit more legible. So, nice improvement here. A few widgets also had their settings pages merged into more cohesive options. For example, the system tray widgets options uh, and the timer widget options have been merged into one single page, so it's more legible and easier to use. The default menu no longer flickers when you start searching. Previously, the results just jiggled a little bit. If you have many favorites, you can now scroll that list. If you pin that menu to a panel on the right side, the sub menus will open to the left instead of to the right to avoid hiding the stuff that you've shown. A lot of stuff like that. It's just huge. And I can't really detail all of the changes cuz there are just so many. Other improvements to Plasma include a new portals dialogue. Uh meaning that you now have a nice little window that lets you choose to share your screens or a virtual screen or a specific region of your screen and the windows instead of having multiple tabs. You just have everything there and you now have an option to restore that choice on future sessions which will be absolutely invaluable to make sure that if an application is still there, it's still going to share that every time. For example, for myself, recording this with OBS will be a lot better. You also now have a search and filter field, so you can start looking or filtering at specific windows, meaning it's going to be easier to find what you're looking for. If you have tons and tons of windows open and you want to share one. And on top of that, applications that use portals to access a document or to save documents to a specific folder, they will now block your logging out process. Meaning when you log out, if an application has unsafe changes to a document, well, you'll be asked to save them. The application won't just close losing all your changes, which is much better. So, this is a massive change to the Plasma desktop as a whole, but we're not done. We still have all the default applications and the settings that also received a bunch of changes. It's a lot of small stuff. I left out a bunch of changes to other less used maybe widgets that you can add. And also, this doesn't cover all the hundreds and hundreds of bug fixes that they made. It's a huge release. Let's move on to the apps. If you have multiple GPUs in your computer, you can now monitor temperature for each of them, which is pretty cool. You also now have the option to set the priority of every process you want. So you can set the scheduleuler, set the priority for IO and for CPU, which is really good because you can now define exactly how you want your computer to run certain things. If you want to play video games and you want to make sure that everything is high performance as can be, you can do that. If you're doing some video editing and you want that to take precedence, you can do that as well. It's fantastic. Configuring the columns you want to see in the processes view is a little bit easier now. They have a bunch of columns that you can have, but you can see all the disabled ones and all the enabled ones and the enabled ones can just be dragged and dropped together. Pretty nice. Also, if you enabled the command column in the processes, you can now search using those commands. So, if you want to filter what's been running through user bin, you can now do that and filter every command that's been run through that path, which is pretty cool. Now, as for the screen recording or screenshot tool, uh, which is called spectacle, it now supposedly does OCR, meaning you can select something when you're doing a screenshot, and it should give you the option to select text. I couldn't find where it was. I tried taking screenshots of various places. I tried editing the screenshots. Nowhere did it give me that option on KD Neon, so I would expect maybe Neon doesn't have the required libraries under there to make it work. just could not find a way to do it. Uh it just doesn't offer me the option just like their recording. But here's a recording that they made of it that shows that it can work. Probably a DRO thing. Spectacle now remembers the window size that you set for it the last time you used it. And if you're on X11, it will also remember the window position. Hopefully at some point this will come to Wayland. But yeah, fingers crossed that's kind of annoying to not have window positions being saved. Now on discover the package manager, it will now show you the number of updates with a fancier orange badge instead of just a number in parenthesis next to the updates text. So that's a little bit more visible. And on top of that, if your DRO uses a packaging system that uses package kit, you can now install and remove actual fonts that were that are in your repo through discover itself, which is kind of useful. You don't have to use a font manager, download stuff, export them somewhere. you can just install them from a nice little font list that might be in the repos. Pretty useful. So, of course, the other default apps for KD like Dolphin, Ocular, Gwen View, all of that stuff, those are handled in the KD gear compilation and some of their changes are handled in the KD frameworks. So, those might have received a bunch of changes. Generally, I do cover the most important ones uh in the regular weekly news videos on the channel. So, subscribe if you want to see that. They're not really part of the plasma desktop. itself. They're part of the KD gear compilation that is tacked onto plasma by almost every DRO that ships plasma. Now, we also have some interesting settings changes. So, let's talk about those. So, first the slow keys option is now enabled on Whan or at least it is accessible on Whan, which wasn't the case. That's a win for accessibility. In terms of the color blindness filters, you now have a new grayscale uh filter in the zoom and magnifier options. You now have a new option called centered strict, which means the pointer will always be at the center of the screen and it's the rest of the display moving around it. So, you're actually scrolling the backdrop behind the mouse pointer, which might make it more uh simple, I guess, to select various elements because you have to point in a general direction. Maybe it's easier to see. Of course, you have certain pages that more closely follow the KD human interface guidelines. Certain pages will now hide themselves automatically if you don't have the required hardware. These include the touchscreen gestures pages uh but also the thunderbolt uh pages. If you don't have any devices that support those, they will be unavailable unless of course you click the show inapplicable pages option. And you also have other changes to KRDP, the KD library for remote desktop. It no longer requires systemd. You have better BSD support in the system monitoring infrastructure. So KD is actually more compatible with BSD. Now KRunner has a more consistent button scheme. So the pin button is on the right with the settings button, but the help button is on the left. Super small change, but it's more cohesive with other applications on KDE. You also have better printer support. If you have a waste receptacle on your printer, KD can now detect that and notify you when it's filling up. So that's it for Plasma 6.6. It's a whole lot of quality of life updates with a few major ones. Uh Kwin received a lot of improvements. Uh fewer RAM consumption is good. Better HDR is good as well. Better color management is good. The capacity to save your own global themes is nice. But it's mostly just quality of life and a big transition towards the Waylandon release of KD Plasma which which will be 6.8 probably in early 2027. Meaning they have to fix all those little usability issues and that's what they're doing. This is a lot of really good changes. So hopefully your DRO will give you access to 6.6 soon. So you get all those changes. As usual, moving to a full release on the day of its release might create some bugs and issues. You'll have to see for yourself. Uh but personally, I'm looking forward to using Plasma 6.6. It is still my favorite desktop. I think it is the best desktop you can get on Linux right now in terms of number of options and simplicity as well because they really worked on simplifying those options. I really love Plasma right now. They are doing an amazing job and hopefully we see that trend continue in 6.7 and of course 6.8. In the meantime, thank you all for watching the video and I'll leave you in the capable hands of our sponsor Tuxedo Computers. You all know about them by now. They make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux pre-installed. All of their stuff has plenty of options to change the hardware inside, to have your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop, to have a plenty of keyboard layouts, and of course, they have a big variety of form factors and sizes from the more affordable laptops all the way to workstations, gaming laptops, and the like. I only use their devices these days. Everything you see or hear from me, every gaming uh session I do is done on one of their computers. I really, really enjoy them. The link is down in the description. So, thank you all for watching. You know where all the YouTube buttons are, why you should click them, leave a comment, all of that stuff. Plenty of links to support the channel in the description as well. Thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one. Bye.

Try out Proton Mail, the secure email that protects your privacy: https://proton.me/mail/TheLinuxEXP Grab a brand new laptop or desktop running Linux: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en# 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to: - a Daily Linux News show - a weekly patroncast for more thoughts - your name in the credits YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheLinuxEXP/join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment Or, you can donate whatever you want: https://paypal.me/thelinuxexp Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/TheLinuxExperiment/ 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: https://the-linux-experiment.creator-spring.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:29 Sponsor: Proton Mail 01:33 Plasma Login Manager 03:13 Desktop: Look & Feel 06:48 Under The Hood 08:36 Window Manager & Wayland 10:25 Widgets & other desktop changes 14:15 System Monitor 15:21 Spectacle 16:17 Discover 17:28 Settings 20:23 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers #linuxdesktop #linuxdistro #kdeplasma