Icons on the desktop!
The minimize button!
Visible Panels and docks!
Just kidding, don’t have a heart attack. 🙂 Well actually there are some things… just not those! The full list can be found at https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6#Removals, and it’s public; we’re not hiding anything! Today I wanted today provide a bit of context and explain the why, since it may not be obvious how it makes sense to remove things. So let’s go through the list:
KHotkeys
This was an earlier implementation of a global shortcut system that eventually grew niche though much-loved features such as mouse gestures. Unfortunately those features did not work on Wayland, many other features were critically buggy, the configuration and data storage formats were non-standard and fragile, and the code in general was in an advanced state of bit-rotting after having been abandoned for many years. We already have global shortcuts working using the newer KGlobalAccel system, and we’d already hidden the KHotkeys config UI from System Settings on Wayland in Plasma 5. So we made the decision to double down on KGlobalAccel and just finally delete KHotkeys once and for all for Plasma 6, rather than awkwardly ship two parallel global shortcut systems, which was always very odd and really not justifiable at all. Mouse gestures can eventually be added to KGlobalAccel if someone takes an interest in doing so. No one’s opposed to it!
The “Windowed Widgets” KRunner runner
In Plasma 5, various widgets appear in search results, and activating them will make the widget appear on the desktop in windowed form. This was one of those “Becuase we can!” features that showed off some cool technology, but feedback indicated that it was confusing some users into believing that widgets were actually small apps, and they were using widgets as apps instead of using KDE’s more powerful apps, or even finding an app that met their needs better. Widgets are deliberately very small and limited and we didn’t want people to get the wrong impression about KDE apps. So we decided to remove the feature in Plasma 6.
The Wayland Force Font DPI and global “Icon size” settings
It’s been my experience that in general, users are very confused about how to adapt the UI to a particular screen’s resolution, or change the size of user interface elements on their systems to suit their preferences. This makes sense because there are no fewer than seven ways to do it, each with its own subtle pitfalls and drawbacks:
- Per-screen resolution setting in System Settings > Display and Monitor
- Global or per-screen scaling slider in System Settings > Display and Monitor
- Force Font DPI spinbox in System Settings > Appearance > Fonts
- Adjustable font size in System Settings > Appearance > Fonts (because lots–but not all–UI controls resize themselves in proportion to the font size)
- Adjustable icon sizes for many icons in many KDE apps in System Settings > Appearance > Icons
- Adjustable icon sizes in many individual KDE apps (e.g. Dolphin and Gwenview main view, Places Panel sidebar, etc)
- Whole-app scaling systems in various apps (e.g. scaling slider in Telegram, whole UI responsive to Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus in electron apps)
This is a major problem because such a DIY experience ensures that users will find and use random scaling settings that don’t interact well, introduce weird visual issues into their systems that cause other issues, look for and implement workarounds that can have even more bad effects, and so on. It’s just a mess. Speaking as KDE’s most prolific bug triager, this is something I see over and over and over again; I even have a canned response for it. It’s a real problem.
So for Plasma 6, we’re removing methods #3 (On Wayland) and #5 (everywhere) to simplify this situation and help people use supported and better-functioning ways to scale their systems.
A bunch of low-quality Task Switchers
While working on the now-completed project to ship with a better default Alt+Tab Task Switcher, we found that the “Grid”, “Informative”, “Small Icons”, “Text Only”, and “Thumbnails” Task Switchers were largely worse versions of other Task Switchers. So for Plasma 6, we have removed them, to steer people towards better options. Anyone who really loved any of these can feel free to put them up on https://store.kde.org.
The Air Plasma style
This old Plasma style lived in the plasma-framework repo for a long time, but was abandoned and bit-rotting. It also didn’t really make sense to ship a non-default theme this way, when we already have the Get New [thing] system to let people find and download their own cool new stuff from https://store.kde.org. So we made the decision to remove it. As with the Task Switchers, anyone who loved it is encouraged to maintain it and stick it on https://store.kde.org.
Per-Activity power settings
These very niche and infrequently-used settings were mostly broken, but the infrastructure to support them increased the code complexity of a fragile part of the system. In the interest of improving Plasma 6’s stability and removing known-broken settings, we have removed them rather than putting in the substantial effort needed to fix them.
System Settings Icons view
This view has been superseded by the Sidebar view and abandoned code-wise for years. It’s missed important features such as the “Highlight changed settings” feature that the Sidebar view got years ago. Nevertheless, it was kept around because for a time it offered better keyboard navigability compared to Sidebar view. However following an accessibility push, this is no longer the case, so it doesn’t offer any real advantages anymore and we plan to delete it for Plasma 6. Offering multiple visualization options for something like a Settings app was always kind of weird anyway.
Icons in Plasma Styles
In Plasma 5, the icons shown in various parts of Plasma widgets (but not apps) can come from one of two places: the active icon theme, or the active Plasma style. How do you the user know which icons come from which place? You can’t, not easily. What can you do if you apply a Plasma style and it includes weird icons that make your Plasma widgets look visually inconsistent with the rest of your system–but only partially? Nothing!
Needless to say, this is not ideal.
The original purpose of the feature was to allow Plasma styles to ship monochrome System Tray icons even when the rest of the system is using a colorful icon theme, which even at the time was a questionable goal and amounted to the system visually fighting with itself and its users’ icon theme choices. Later it gradually increased in scope so that lots of other random icons were added to Plasma styles and overrode icon theme icons–but never all of them, only some of them. Some Plasma styles included very comprehensive sets of icons, others included none, and some included a random incomplete assortment of them. All in all it was very strange and very random-seeming.
For Plasma 6, we’re removing this questionable feature, and icons in Plasma widgets will always come from the systemwide icon theme. Much simpler, much more user-comprehensible, much better visual results 99% of the time.
If you’re a theme creator who’s worried about this change, just put the icons that are currently in your Plasma style into that style’s companion icon theme instead.
Unsplash Picture of the Day
This one is quite sad, as no one wanted to remove it. Alas, we had to because Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma’s usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models. With a heavy heart, we removed it. So the next time anyone asks you what AI can do for humanity, now you have a concrete answer: prevent Plasma 6 from shipping an Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin. Thanks, AI!
The bottom line
You may have noticed some recurring themes: “doesn’t work well, not well integrated with anything else, unnecessarily duplicative, buggy, confusing, abandoned, obsolete.” And you wouldn’t be wrong! These removals have been carefully chosen because they don’t showcase the best of Plasma, and instead act as hidden minefields or make the system feel buggier. They represent common pain points for new users, sources of confusion and user support questions. Except for the Unsplash PotD thing; I’m still feeling salty about that. The robot apocalypse happened, and they took our pretty pictures!
“i don’t care, i still hate you for removing stuff”
I’m sorry you feel that way! But sometimes old things that don’t work very well have to be removed to make room and free up resources for new things that will work better. You’ll just have to trust us these are the right decisions—or at least, that they’ll be reverted if they turned out to be the wrong decisions. Or I guess you can go fork Plasma 5 and tell the internet how KDE is going down the tubes 🙂
…But hopefully not, because I think these removals really will improve the Plasma experience, and open up some space for making it even better in the future. Plasma has had a long, storied, and somewhat messy history, with ports to this toolkit and then that toolkit, with complexity and flexibility that didn’t end up used and caused bugs, with potentially cool features that didn’t pan out. By removing some of the old cruft from Plasma 6, we have an opportunity to build on the best of what we already had and make it even better, to finally converge the product from what has sometimes been a jumbled collection of tech-demo features into a cohesive whole. From DIY do DI-Whoa!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
> Widgets are deliberately very small and limited and we didn’t want people to get the wrong impression about KDE apps. So we decided to remove the feature in Plasma 6.
Quick question, is there alternate recommended tools for quick color picking? I use the widget ‘app’ in search for color picker, as it’s a very convenient quick “I just need to get the hex code for this color,” tool. Is emoji selector also part of that removed shortcuts as well? I use it from search too, because I haven’t learned if there’s a proper shortcut for it.
> However following an accessibility push, this is no longer the case, so it doesn’t offer any real advantages anymore and we plan to delete it for Plasma 6.
Thank you for the accessibility push. Keyboard navigation can be very convenient even as someone with no issues interacting with normal mice.
> Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma’s usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models.
Sad 😢
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A lot of KDE developers put a Color Picker widget in their panel for that purpose. Or you can even just put it on the desktop, and then you can access it with a quick Meta+D to show the desktop or a custom keyboard shortcut to trigger it.
Emoji Selector hasn’t been touched, and in fact you can launch it with Meta+period. A list of apps with default global shortcuts to launch them can be found at System Settings > “Shortcuts” page > “Applications” section in the sidebar list
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I sometimes need a color picker, but not often, so I just run kcolorchooser – it’s bigger, but gets the job done.
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I hope there will still be some graphical way to assign custom keyboard shortcuts? For example, I want to use F11 to make any app (not just browsers) fullscreen, and that can be done via custom keyboard shortcuts in system settings (but I am not sure if this is the part of the settings being removed).
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Yes, there is still a way to assign custom global keyboard shortcuts, via the KGlobalAccel system mentioned in the post. What you want to do can easily be done via the “Shortcuts” page in System Settings. Just go in there and search for “fullscreen” and you’ll see the KWin action you can set a global shortcut for.
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Turns out I was using the “Shortcuts” page in the system settings, so my use case is not changing 🙂
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> Mouse gestures can eventually be added to KGlobalAccel if someone takes an interest in doing so.
We have also the EasyStroke app, maybe it’s code can be a candidate to integrate into KGlobalAccel?
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And even a new app https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions
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Unfortunately both are X11 apps. I haven’t tested but I’m assuming they won’t work on Wayland because of “security”. Also both are GTK apps and the newer one is written in rust – porting them to run inside kwin (which is what you’d need to do to get mouse gestures in Wayland) is probably somewhere on the difficulty scale between “herculean” and “impossible”. 😮💨
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I always loved the gesture feature of KDE despite it’s quite clunky to configure. I wonder the usage rate of this feature among the KDE users, I was feeling like not a lot of people are interested because it looks quite abandonned.
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jersou’s mouse-actions app works great on KDE Wayland, with one small bug (‘stolen’ gesture button, issue #8 on his github) which has a fix he is in the process of implementing. Fear not, we will have mouse gestures on Wayland, thanks to jersou.
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So, KGlobalAccel will be able to replace all KHotkeys functions, or just partially?
Currently the only alternative in wayland that I have found is espanso, but it is buggy
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KGlobalAccel replaces KHotkeys’ global keyboard shortcut features. It does not have the mouse gesture feature or window state change activation trigger features.
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Removals are always sad, but I understand that it needs to be done. I have a friend that is still salty about the removal of the “wallpaper per virtual desktop” feature and for a while ran Trinity (I got the reference 😅).
Specifically regarding the activities custom power profiles – I’m a heavy activity user and I never understood why that feature existed. There are other things that I want to change between activities but never that – the most I would need is sleep inhibiting and there are simpler ways to go about that. If there was a generic “actions on activity change” feature, that would have been very useful as it would allow you to do everything that “per activity power profile” does and so much more (I use per-activity default applications – which seems obviously useful to me and I’d love to have better support for that).
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> I never understood why that feature existed
I think it is/was used mostly as a workaround for things like deterring your laptop to go to sleep when presenting and things like that.
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Haha, I’m still salty about the removal of miler columns in dolphin, and that was like 10 years ago I think.
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Aki – for that there’s the inhibit checkbox in the power and battery widget.
Currently there’s an issue (bug or incomplete feature? You decide), reported as KDE bug 470913, that if you put a power and battery widget on the desktop, in every activity, and then check the inhibit (“manually block sleep”) checkbox in one of the activities – powerdevil will inhibit sleep regardless of which activity you are currently on, even though only on one activity is the checkbox checked. The point of the report is that the checkbox should be synchronized to all instances of the widget, but another way to look at it is that powerdevil should inhibit only when in the activity where the checkbox is checked…
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You’re removing the thumbnail task switcher?! The very best of the task switchers?! Oh woe is me!
More seriously, I don’t think I’ll have the time to maintain it so I hope that someone who does loves it as much as me.
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@MyNameIsRichard & @Daanturo :
it is my understanding that this will-be the new Default “Alt-Tab” switcher [in KDE Plasma 6] (see timestamp 6:44 in Nicco’s YouTube-video) –> https://youtu.be/hPqhfAKTJ6k
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> we found that the “Grid”, “Informative”, “Small Icons”, “Text Only”, and “Thumbnails” Task Switchers were largely worse versions of other Task Switchers
I would be sad to see “Grid” gone as I am using it. It’s closest-looking one is “Thumbnail Grid” but personally I find the former easier to look at, since it displays bigger previews.
But the number of current choices is indeed overwhelming.
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What an amazing job you all do at KDE!
Watching Plasma 6 being cooked through the oven glass is part of the savouring.
Looking forward to the “DING! Grub’s up!”
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…sometimes old things that don’t work very well have to be removed to make room and free up resources…
I’ve seen Logan’s Run. It’s Ok, I understand.
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My birds… my birds…
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Imho it seems almost changes seems very reasonable and good decisions, I fear the remove of the grid desktop effect, that I use a lot as is the only way to present all the virtual desktops in a good size to easily and quickly arrange the apps. But I will check the available alt tab alternatives in Plasma 6 before settle my opinion. Thanks for your work
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The Desktop Grid effect isn’t going anywhere; what got removed is the Grid Alt+Tab Task Switcher (not the same thing).
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“The Desktop Grid effect isn’t going anywhere; what got removed is the Grid Alt+Tab Task Switcher (not the same thing).”
Ah ok, sorry for the confusion. (I had to reply my own message, because without login here, or maybe other problem, I couldn’t reply the replies 😀
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That’s intentional; I only have one level of nesting for comments. Otherwise the nesting becomes super confusing and the comments are impossible to read on a phone.
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Nice 🙂
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This is not nearly enough. There are so many other biggy things like the search indexer, Kontact suite, settings database resetting and more that need to be rewritten or scrapped. Good step but needs more drastic refreshing
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Good news: none of those things live in Plasma, so we already removed them from Plasma 6! 😀
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I actually like Informative switcher and I have good reasons for that. It is extremely convenient for people who are mostly reading text and want to maintain that kind of focus when switching windows.
First, since we are writing in rows, it is more compact to list different “rows of options” vertically so that we can see more options in a smaller area. The benefit of informative in comparison with Thumb Grid view is that it allows you to maintain a similar kind of focus like reading.
Also, informative can list as many window as possible on a small area makes it less anxious to search for a window. This is in comparison with Breeze as well as Thumbnail Grid where in the same area you can only place less options. Also breeze requires you to move your focus on the left side of the screen but it can generally only provide you with 3-4 windows. Thumbnail gives you more options but you have to left the area you are focusing and place your attention on larger area of the screen to pick which window you are interested.
I really tried out most of the task switcher built-in on the plasma and I think informative is a optimal for some of the people who
1. who mainly do text based works
2. want to maintain their flow across windows
3. want to find the window as fast as possible based on title.
Also that you can use informative in combination with a vim-style shortcut (in my case meta+j and meta+k) is a huge plus for it.
Therefore, I would sincerely ask developer of KDE to not remove informative switcher, there might be a large portion of people who are silently using informative with satisfaction.
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Thanks for the explanation. Anyone who feels similarly is welcome to take the Plasma 5.27 version of Informative (available at https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/tree/Plasma/5.27/windowswitchers/informative) and continue to use it locally or put it up on store.kde.org so anyone can use it. Again, we have this “Get new stuff” system which lets us avoid having to ship everything and the kitchen sink. Just because we’re not shipping it ourselves, doesn’t mean that it has to be dead forever. 🙂
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Since I liked Informative a lot, I created Modern Informative, an improved version (according to my standards and tastes):
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Will the new default thumbnail launcher be available to download for users on KDE plasma 5? Or is it exclusively for plasma 6?
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It’s a Plasma 6 only change. Of course the files have already been committed and are available publicly for anyone to use themselves. You can find them at https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/tree/master/src/tabbox/switchers/thumbnail_grid.
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I’ll be very sad once air is gone. It is to this day my go-to plasma theme. (Imho) it looks way better than breeze and I hope someone who knows their way around inkscape will pick it up.
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i second that.
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Glad to see some of these go, sad to see some of the others …but ultimately happy to see some cleanup in order to move forward.
There is just one concern I have, albeit not a major one. So I’m not as much complaining here, but more logging how I intend to cope with the change for reference to anyone else with a similar workflow.
I do rely on the Per-Activity Power Settings, specifically I have two Activities (out of a good dozen) where I apply different settings:
• Presenting – during presentations I want the screen and the laptop to stay on unless I explicitly tell it not to – but I can live with the checkbox in the Battery widget and the External Screen settings
• Gaming – when I play games, I want to have the most power – but I see that this is not possible to set up any more(?) anyway
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The icons view in system settings will be missed a lot, given that the sidebar is still broken for longer labels (translations) and the view is, compared to icon view, horrible on smaller resolutions and forces you to use the search or scroll around. This is a major step backwards both in usability and efficiency. What a sad day 😦
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The title made me a bit worried, but all this sounds like good work that will free up time and energy to work on other more important things. As for icons in plasma styles I would consider this change a great feature – finally I can easily have my beautiful Oxygen icons in any plasma theme instead of the flat ones usually included without having to manually copy a small self-made subset of icons to each new plasma theme I install. 😀
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“don’t have a heart attack”
Oh I didn’t, cause I trust KDE to leave me the option to turn them on again without plugins 🙂
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Hi Nate,
just adding my two cents to the discussion regarding the removal of adjusting font sizes in appearance/fonts.
This is THE feature i love on plasma, because all other scaling methods do – as you indicated – scale only some but not all UI elements.
Yes, and that’s exactly what i want: scaling by percentage increases stuff like titlebars which i don’t care about too prominently.
Nearly all apps do behave properly whith ‘my’ font scaling, i also do appreciate having waay more space on 4K screen. The things i like are big (enough), the rest is small.
Scaling proportionally is like having a screen with a less-than-4K resolution, because all is the same (adopted) size. Just like windows does…. who the f.. wants this?
I agree on maybe hiding it in UI, but leave the functionality available.
Any thoughts on this?
I would really love to hear about the scaling stuff, maybe i’m using it wrong, but this is the best tradeoff for nearly all apps AND using the amount of pixels i paid for (without having them lower the resolution because, you know, retina display and the like is cool. No, it’s not!)
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^ 100 % The Scaling features for the font I need to even use my 4k screens. would I want to have a 4k display and have they system treat it like a smaller display. This is a must have feature for plasma otherwise Just like the previous person I need the workspace size and adjusting the font DPI to match the panel is the best way for me to have Readable Fonts and maintain all the space in pixels that i use for my work. How in Plasma 6 will I change the font and icons sizes on Wayland ? Will this become another reason to not care about using wayland ?
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In Plasma 6, changing the font size will still change the size of UI elements. That’s not going away.
What’s going away (on Wayland only) is the “Force Font DPI” setting, which is something else layered on top of it, that is confusing people. Arthur and Chris’s responses are an indication of this confusion. 🙂
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> who the f.. wants this?
Me. And I can’t understand why you think scaling should remove padding in applications. x)
Let’s take Firefox, on my FHD screen I have 14 px above and below each website icon in the tab ribbon. That’s 2.6% of my screen height wasted by this padding. Should I blame KDE devs for that? No, it’s obviously a choice from Firefox designers, they wanted it for whatever ux/ui design/look and feel reason.
On my 1440p laptop I can expect more or less the same ratio, and this is understandable. Why should KDE provide tools to tinker third part app design choices? And, the killing question, why only when using a HDPI screen? After all, we’ve seen there’s plenty of room available in FHD too.
Imho, relying on a weird side effect is a terrible idea. The more DPI you have, the more padding you can remove, does it really looks like a feature? I totally understand that you like the way it works, but it really reminds me this xkcd strip: https://xkcd.com/1172/ 🙂
Firefox has some hidden options to compact things a little bit by the way, for me that’s the way to follow.
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maybe as info for Chris:
This is all working fine in plasma on wayland (i’m using 5.27.6). X has some problems nowadays with this approach (not xwayland, though).
So it’s fine today. Why thinking of removing this in the future?
(yes, #4 is not (yet?) on the ‘remove everywhere’ list. But still, @Nate, don’t touch it, please.)
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I use the wayland session on several machines but can not on others due to things like barrier not work correctly with wayland (and im hoping it get a fix) . Removal of the forcing of font DPI would be reason I would not be able to use the wayland session on another machine (some currently using it). The Font DPI Selection is the most important part of the scaling puzzle and unless this is being replaced by poling the monitor for its dpi and using that (since that is the number i have to force in that box) . I will have to find another way to set it since scaling the screen does not work for me. I also DO NOT want to change font sizes that is tedious when i can just set the DPI and then all my legacy apps are now readable.
Tldr: If the DPI box is being replaced will the dpi now be set the real DPI of my screen ?
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it would be nice (as several others have also commented): to keep the ‘grid’ switcher style. as indeed also personally use / much prefer that one. the more general point about using the worse switcher styles (too many worse ones) is quite agreeable… i just simply and for the life of me never put ‘grid’ into that category. it’s just far too good for that.
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Have you thought about having a post-mortem on these features? An examination of how you got to the situation where you had to remove features, and how could you avoid getting into the same situations in the future. For example, why was KGlobalAccel created instead of KHotkeys being improved? (As a developer, I suspect it would be because developers love to start from scratch rather than fix code, and this is in my opinion an anti-pattern.)
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I’m hit by 3 of those removals, top of the list being mouse gestures, but I can understand where the decisions are coming from and concur with the reasoning even if it doesn’t make it any less difficult to accept, sad stuff… But also, I’m sure that it will lead to a more cohesive Plasma experience that, directly or indirectly, everyone will benefit from.
Keep up the good work, and thank you for being the aces you guys always are when it comes to transparency and straight forwardness.
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Is there any calendar scheduled?
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See https://pointieststick.com/2023/06/18/on-the-road-to-plasma-6/
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Cleaning house. Streamlining. Always a good thing to get rid of old cruft no matter what sentimental value they may have. This is not your old teddybear or your dogs blanket, this is the computerworld. If you hate change, use Linux Mint or go digging for some old Plasma 4 distro. Oh and no one is forcing anyone to use Plasma 6. This is not Windows after all… Good times ahead for Plasma! I would personally have thrown away a hundred times more stuff 🙂
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How about you remove the totally useless space-wasting Floating Panel feature instead of making it default?
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Lol that’s a default feature now? Never noticed it cause I’m using latte dock.
This is what happens when a desktop doesn’t know what it wants to be, so it just piles on random stuff because it seems cool.
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What is this Floating Panel?
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I’m disappointed that you’re removing the option for font DPI scaling on Wayland. Display scaling is a downgrade in significant ways:
– Fractional scaling results in Qt applications being unable to render offscreen textures matching the physical size of a QWidget (for the same cause as https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/pull/3926, and Qt lacks a devicePixelContentBoxSize method to query widget sizes in physical pixels) unless apps force a rounding mode.
– Fractional scaling results in blurry text hinted to virtual rather than physical pixels (I hear it’s fixed in Qt 6? haven’t tested).
– On Wayland with both fractional and integer scaling, you can’t even resize windows to physical-pixel precision but only virtual pixels (unless eventually a new fixed-point window size protocol is merged).
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Great article, nice humour as well. I’m glad to see that I’ve never used any of the features being removed, and it’s always good to clean up duplicate or buggy things.
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Nooooooooooo!
Pls leave font size adjustment for various elements, it’s the only uninvasive way to make things look better on a laptop’s Full HD screen esp when combined with bigger external screen. Until there’s a proper non-blurry scaling like in macOS implemented, the font adjustment must be in place for everyone imho.
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Font size adjustment isn’t going anywhere. What we’re removing is the “Force Font DPI” setting, which is different.
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I really, really, really hope the removal of “Per-Activity power settings” is a sign that Screen Energy Savings will finally work and not kick the screen back on after 5 seconds. That’s been the only pain point for me over the past several months of using KDE since moving to Linux.
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@Nate If I am understanding what your saying its that the Force Dpi settings (on wayland) is now replaced by just adjusting every font type to a new size?
I don’t see how this is better then allowing me to just set the DPI, IMHO setting the DPI correctly for the screen is something we should be doing automatically then the issues of scale vanish for every application no matter the toolkit. Yes you still have an issue about small icons but that is because font DPI is what is being changed ideally we could set the screen DPI and all items are then rendered at the correct scale, until then Icons could have their base sizes automatically adjusted based on the % between base dpi (96) and the screen its on. TLDR: Scaling might work for some but it does not work for everyone.
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Fundamentally, using the Font DPI setting as it’s implemented today isn’t acceptable in 2023 because it’s a global setting rather than a per-screen setting, and it’s irresponsible to pretend that the mixed-DPI multi-monitor use case doesn’t exist, as we’ve been pretending for years with X11 due to its poor support for this.
In theory it would be possible to re-engineer the way scaling works to have everything scale with each monitor’s physical DPI (including icons), but that’s not the way Qt implemented scaling, and we have to live with that if we don’t want to build our own entirely parallel system and then port our hundreds of apps to use it.
It’s also questionable whether this is something we want, because different device types have different ideal physical DPI targets. Desktop monitors were designed around a target of 96 DPI, but if you scale things on your laptopto 96 DPI, everything looks huge and you can hardly fit anything on the screen. Why does it feel this way? Because you’re using the screen closer to your face than a desktop monitor, and it’s smaller too, so you subconsciously expect everything to be smaller so you can fit more on the screen. The situation is even more extreme with mobile devices like phones and handheld gaming consoles. So we would need different target DPIs per device class.
And once you’ve sketched out a system that assigns differents target DPI to different device classes, and automatically scales each screen according to its physical DPI and device class… then you’ve basically arrived at what we have today on Wayland with Qt scaling. 🙂
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I don’t know if it’s possible… But I would love Keramik (from KDE 3) get back to Plasma… Even if at store.kde.org
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As an nvidia user with terrible wayland support seeing gesture go away while I use them daily (on a minute to minute basis tbh…) is a bit upsetting…
I finally found how to toggle it on/off with scripts for gaming to avoid interferences, something I probably won’t be able to do without killing an external app from now on..
I guess feature parity is important but broking workflow and limiting accessibility features (gesture with trackball is much less straining than constant kb shortcuts) is a downer.
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All makes perfect sense to me, very sad to hear about the Unsplash situation but what can you do 😦
Never been this excited for a non video game software release before! Plasma 6 is gonna be awesome.
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All of your points are reasonable, even if we don’t agree with them, and your willingness to switch course if it doesn’t work is what ensures I’ll be using KDE for a long time. Wish I could say the same about that other DE…
The random icon source for Plasma has always been a nuisance, though, glad it’s getting fixed.
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> If you’re a theme creator who’s worried about this change, just put the icons that are currently in your Plasma style into that style’s companion icon theme instead.
This is the worst possible way to fix a *very minor* problem.
No, my theme has never had a “companion icon theme”, because that’s outside the scope of a Plasma theme and is, in fact, completely orthogonal to it.
You might as well say that the desktop wallpaper must come from the application color scheme to ensure optimal consistency and that wallpaper creators just need to create color schemes in order to distribute their wallpapers. Nonsense.
Application icons and Plasma icons should be allowed to differ. They are for different parts of the UI, with possibly strikingly different visual language and aesthetics. Icons that work for applications don’t necessarily work for the surrounding shell and vice versa, and forcing a single uniform theme for both is bad and unnecessary. Just because Breeze uses identical icons in both applications and plasmashell doesn’t mean it’s not a good feature.
Icons used by Plasma represent maybe 1% of a real application icon theme. It would make no sense, and it would just mean distributing an extremely incomplete theme that would have to fallback on something else for the remaining 99% of icons, which would rarely fit with what users actually want, and it would be full of inconsistencies whenever the same icons like arrows are used both in Plasma and in applications. Users of my theme will get a bastardized version of it with mismatching Breeze icons that were never designed for it and clash badly with it, or they will have to install a separate icon theme manually and then muck around its config file to make it inherit from whatever application icon theme they would normally use for everything-but-plasma if it isn’t the one I arbitrarily picked as a fallback. Nobody will bother with that.
With this change, Plasma 6 themes are effectively limited to providing alternate panel backgrounds with a set text color but with mandatory Breeze icons because nothing else is practical. This is _not_ an improvement.
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Your points aren’t invalid, but what you’re missing is just how difficult it was using the Plasma 5 system to actually achieve the goal of Plasma using 100% different icons from the rest of the system. This goal was only achieved if the theme developer followed Plasma development very closely and added needed icons to their Plasma theme any time we changed anything upstream to reference any new icons (to completely ignore the issue caused by 3rd-party widgets that reference still more icons whick might not be in the plasma theme). In my experience, the overwhelming majority of Plasma themes didn’t achieve this, and instead presented the user with a jumble of mismatching icons–some being from the Plasma theme, and some being from the system theme–and it just looked terrible and broken.
To a certain extent you could say we’re punishing theme developers who did everything right just because not every theme developer was as contentious, and that wouldn’t be strictly speaking incorrect. But another way of interpreting the situation would be that we designed a feature that demanded so much of theme developers that almost none of them managed to implement support for it in a way that actually worked, so the feature ended up looking broken 99% of the time.
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I think it is great that the custom icons in Plasma themes are going away in favor of system icons. I used to try to maintain a set of Oxygen icons for Plasma [https://store.kde.org/p/1120624], which was basically adapted from the Oxygen SVGs (but rendered worse than the prerendered Oxygen PNGs because of limitations in Qt’s SVG implementation), but had to give up because more and more new icons got added to the Plasma themes. I have stopped using it myself because of the issues, but some users have it working in Plasma 5. But it will be great to just get the icons from the systemwide icon theme out of the box again, without this kind of workarounds.
I am more worried about the 2 removed size customization options, though I might actually not be affected personally:
* If the DPI will not be forceable anymore, what will it be set to? A fixed value (I guess 96)? Or something display-dependent? (For what it’s worth, I currently use X11, have the checkbox to force DPI turned off, and X11 reports 96dpi as the DPI, and that happens to be almost exactly the physical DPI of this 17″ 1280×1024 LCD anyway. So as it stands, this is not going to affect me for several reasons.)
* The removed ability to customize the icon sizes worried me particularly. IMHO, this is more than just a scaling workaround. E.g., some people will want smaller toolbar icons (and they will also disable the text labels, as I do) to be able to fit more icons in the toolbar, others will prefer larger ones because they are more visible and easier to hit with the mouse. But then again, checking my settings, I have almost all the sizes at their defaults anyway. Only the panel icons are down from 48 to 32, but I am not sure where that size is used at all, since the Plasma panel is arbitrarily resizable (mine is just 24 px tall) and the icons are zoomed to match. All the other icon sizes I have set up seem to match the defaults anyway.
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>>So for Plasma 6, we’re removing methods #3 (On Wayland) and #4 (everywhere) to
This was what I got in email so I went ahead to post my previous comment. Thanks god now I see it was just a typo 🙂
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Any chance in the future to change the breeze window decoration buttons for something more normal?, at the end, I think most of the users get new window decoration themes as the breeze is ugly and outdated.
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My laptop’s screen has a ridiculously high resolution, so I use really aggressive global scaling. This does not affect the size of text in the user interface, so I also force the DPI up. Has the behavior of global scaling changed since Plasma 5.24.7 (I’m on Ubuntu LTS) so that also setting the DPI isn’t needed, or am I eventually (possibly very eventually) going to have to futz with all of my font sizes?
It’s possible that I’ve got legacy cruft from somewhere hanging on, as I’m pretty tenacious when it comes to migrating personal data and settings, but I didn’t find any obvious preferences… And, wait, something just occurred to me…
I’ve got a basically-stock account that’s handy in case using a non-standard login shell crashes plasma. Again. But it also lets me experiment with these changes in a clean environment.
Starting from 100% scale, things look awful in a way I don’t fully comprehend. Confirm that force DPI is off.
Apply the scaling. Restart. Log in. Everything looks fine, but I note that force DPI was turned on, to a factor consistent with my main account, without my direct intervention.
Revert all changes, restart, and be somehow more confused about all of this than when I started.
Is the takeaway that having the scale and the force DPI factor in lockstep is “correct”, and whenever I end up doing the migrations and upgrades that will cause this to matter, “manually force DPI” will be replaced with “silently force DPI to match the scaling factor”? Because if so, I don’t mind, but if not, man, that’s going to look gross.
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>Icons on the desktop!
>The minimize button!
>Visible Panels and docks!
ahahah Good one!!!
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> So the next time anyone asks you what AI can do for humanity, now you have a
> concrete answer: prevent Plasma 6 from shipping an Unsplash Picture of the Day
This is kind of unfair, because bots and scrappers had existed long before AI bloom. The problem has very little to do with an AI per se.
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Of course they existed before the AI boom. But the AI boom has turned what used to be a nonexistent, small, or obscure problem into a big and public problem. It’s like how git forges only started restricting free CI time once crypto miners abused it in a dramatic fashion.
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I think removing the option to remove the ability to change the icon theme is a stupid idea and will limit customization, goodbye having custom icon themes in Plasma I guess now I guess e will be forced to use default themes instead of being able to change them….
What crap, what is this gnome shell?
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Actually I expect that this change will make it easier to customize. In Plasma 6, everything on your system will respect your chosen systemwide icon theme (which remains customizable), instead of random parts of Plasma not respecting it, which in practice is what generally happens in Plasma 5.
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“Actually I expect that this change will make it easier to customize.”
How? What do we do now if we want to change the icons, wiggle our nose and use the dark arts?
Or do it the gnome shell way and have to install 80 extensions to get the functionality back?
“which remains customizable” again how do we change the icon theme in plasma 6, download 100 different system themes so we can get the combo we want?
Also what if that theme has no icon set, what then still forced to use the breeze icon theme rather if we want to or not?
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I think you’ve misunderstood the change. The systemwide icon theme remains customizable in exactly the way it already is. The only thing that’s changing is that Plasma’s UI components will now also display icons from the systemwide icon theme, rather than displaying some (random-seeming) icons from the Plasma theme instead.
Please be more polite in future comments. Further rude comments will be deleted and result in a ban.
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Glad to see KDE is finally taking out the garbage. Still waiting for the removal of activities and per-monitor wallpaper/plasmoids, useless desktop effects, overly complex color schemes, and a bunch of individual settings that either don’t make sense in isolation or don’t make sense at all.
KDE should try to do a prototype for a desktop as if were designing it from scratch then see where it takes you. I think given the spirit of KDE, you’d end up with something similar to Unity desktop but somewhat more flexible – which wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.
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WordPress seems to have swallowed my comment, so sorry if I’m repeating myself, but just to show that I’m not just spamming your blog, I’ll summarise what I wrote originally:
Please stop removing features (such as arrows on scrollbars, icon views in Settings, and taskbars that don’t vomit icons across half of the screen, or more) from the formerly “endlessly customisable” KDE, before it ends up being indistinguishable from other, considerably subpar desktop experiences *cough* GNOME *cough*
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Looks like I will miss the “timer” windowed widget that served me well from time to time. I don’t use it frequently enough to warrant adding it as a widget, so I relied on the windowed widget instead.
Furthermore, I will miss the force font DPI option as it allowed me to have fonts appear at the right size on my laptop’s display (which requires fractional scaling). The default of 96 doesn’t cut it and 144 makes fonts appear at the right size. I can understand moving this option to be per-display though. Perhaps KDE Plasma’s Wayland implementation doesn’t require changing the font DPI, unlike my current X11 Plasma install? I should try it out.
Also, even if I never used it, I will still miss the Air Plasma theme which looked pretty nice. Hopefully someone will revive it in the future if there’s any user interests!
All in all, I do understand the changes and deprecations that have been done, as they allow to focus on the maintenance of more important features and permit simplifying code paths. Thank you for all of your contributions! 🙂
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I’m happy to hear of the removal of icons from Plasma Themes. It’s always annoyed me to have my icon theme selection overridden by the plasma theme. It’s really frustrating to find a plasma theme that you love, except for a grossly mismatched or ugly icon choice.
Bravo!
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For me, if you eliminate one $%”(~# time those dialog windows that don’t truncate the lines when there is a long path and “treat” us with little windows that occupy the whole screen width or sometimes even more (several times reported, never solved), I’ll consider it one of the biggest advances of KDE so far this century. 😁
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Hello Nate,
I installed files to keep KDE4 Knemo network monitor working in Plasma 5 for a long time.
It was the simplest popup network speed graph I was able to find.
Finally, it didn’t work and I looked for something else.
There just isn’t a simple network speed graph.
But then I found out about Windowed Widgets.
Run this in a terminal.
plasmawindowed –statusnotifier org.kde.plasma.systemmonitor.net
Fantastic! I add a “Keep Above” button to my window button layout.
So it’s drag-able, re-sizable and can easily be made to stay on top. It’s a simple bash script that runs at startup and it lives in the system tray. Click the tray icon once to open, once to close.
This may not matter to many but if you have primitive internet that isn’t real fast, it’s nice to be able to watch huge updates from across the room.
I read where you said you’re going to keep the binary “plasmawindowed” and move it to plasma-sdk.
If I understand it right, you’re just removing the ability to launch windowed widgets from Krunner? But my windowed widget will still run?
Is that correct?
I think many are misunderstanding what’s being changed.
For others, the list of installed widgets you can run in a window is in:
/usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/
Use the whole title like I did…
org.kde.plasma.systemmonitor.net
By the way. I’ve been running Wayland with a Intel ARC card and 4K monitor for about week.
So far no show stoppers for me. OS is Tumbleweed.
And finally, a note of thanks to all of the developers who make KDE the best!
I’m not here to bash other desktops but I’ve tried other popular desktops.
KDE is by far the best, most customizable and in turn, the most powerful desktop ever.
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The Windowed Widgets runner itself has been removed. However you can still run widgets in windows intentionally using `plasmawindowed`, which lives in the plasma-sdk repo/package.
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I am using plasma 6 in Nixos and the dispay scale factor is still blurry, Please return the force font dpi setting. Some of us still need it. Or make the display setting work..
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