A month has passed since the last Plasma 6 status update, so it’s time for another one!
First, what you’ve all been waiting for: a release date! We’ve decided that Plasma 6 will be released in early February of 2024. We don’t have a specific day targeted yet, but it’ll be in that timeframe. I’m feeling quite confident that the release will be in excellent shape by then! It’s already in good shape right now. 5 months should provide enough of a runway for a solid final release.
What’s done
Over the last month, a few remaining porting tasks were completed:
- Replace
PlasmaCore.SortFilterModelwithKItemModels.KSortFilterProxyModel. Less code duplication, yay! - Replace
Kirigami.AvatarwithKirigamiAddons.AvatarandKirigamiAddons.AvatarButton, which are easier to use and better-behaved. - Introduce an opt-in dedicated sidebar column UX for System Settings KCMs, and port various bespoke stuff to use it.
- DataEngines have been made into thin wrappers around other functionality and moved into a new package called
Plasma5Support, so porting away from them isn’t so urgent anymore and won’t block the release.
This work was done by Marco Martin, Arjen Hiemstra, Carl Schwan, Nicolas Fella, and me: Nate Graham. All this porting work is leveling off as the major work has now been completed, making room for features and bugfixes. This means we are solidly in stage 4 of the roadmap (features and planned changes) and nibbling on stage 5 (QA and convergence).
In the feature department, major work included:
- Custom ordering for KRunner search results
- Printers KCM rewritten in QML
- Double-click by default
- Tap-to-click by default
- Icons throughout Plasma itself now exclusively come from the systemwide icon theme
- Support for automatic bug reporting in DrKonqi and improved reporting flow in general
- Autostart KCM shows details about entries
- Distros can now customize the first page in Welcome Center
This work was done by Alexander Lohnau, Mike Noe, Harald Sitter, Nicolas Fella, Thenujan Sandramohan, Xaver Hugl, and me, Nate Graham.
In terms of bugs, it’s been an all-hands-on-deck affair, with everyone helping out. As a result our list of open Plasma 6 issues is down to 75 today, after having risen three weeks ago to an all-time high of 87. The number has been falling since then, which is a great sign–bugginess has peaked and we’re starting to converge! And not all of these are major, high profile issues, either; as of this writing, there are only 15 of those. These are the true showstoppers that must be fixed before we can release Plasma 6. As for the rest, we’ll be trying our best to get as many of those done too to ensure that quality on release day is as high as possible!
What’s next
There are a lot of items remaining in the “Work that’s been decided on but not implemented yet” section on the Plasma 6 wiki page–both started but not yet finished, and also not yet started. It’s time to get cracking on that stuff! If you want your features to be included in Plasma 6.0, we have about 2 months to do it before the soft feature freeze.
Beyond that, it will be a matter of bugfixing, bugfixing, and more bugfixing!
How to Help
Basically the same as last time: if you’re a developer, live on Plasma 6, work on your features, and fix bugs! If you’re a user, test out Plasma 6 and report issues! And if this makes you feel excited in your nether regions, reach for your wallet instead and make a donation to KDE e.V. so we can continue to fund that which needs to be funded!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Do you know what the plans are for the next Kubuntu LTS version, or other key distros with similar concerns? Ship the last version of 5.x?
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I’m not aware of the Kubuntu folks plans, as I’m not involved with the project. I’d recommend asking them.
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Nate, you are listed as the Kubuntu Product Manager:
https://kubuntu.org/the-kubuntu-team/
This is not correct then?
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Indeed, that’s been wrong for like 5 years.
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Ok, I got that fixed and was able to talk to a Kubuntu fellow. It looks like Plasma 6 will most likely not be included in Kubuntu 24.04, and in this case, it will probably end up in 24.10.
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Thanks for asking – I hope there will be maybe a backport PPA in 24.04 for Plasma 6.
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Really positive on the whole, but regarding “Work that’s been decided on but not implemented yet,” I really dislike the removal of the option to turn off Plasma tooltips, if I understand correctly, this will mean I have to see a tooltip every time my mouse hovers over a plasma element? I can see a lot of people not liking this and I see no reason to kill this functionality.
The ‘broken promise’ can be fixed by a simple change of text which states it applies to Plasma only and not applications.
The justification for removal is misguided in my opinion.
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The setting in question only affects Plasma tooltips drawn by the ToolTipArea component, not even all tooltips in Plasma. This is super technical and nerdy and does not do what people in general expect it to do. Even if we changed it to affect all tooltips (either in Plasma, or everywhere) this would allow you to break apps because many apps are designed the the expectation that tooltips are visible. It’s just not a good idea overall.
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There was some discussion early on in plasma 6 development about the future of the theming system and possibly migrating away from an SVG based theme engine. Where did that end up?
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The short version is that everyone wants it, but we don’t have the engineering resources to have it done for Plasma 6.0. My guess is that it will show up before 6.5 though.
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What would be the alternative to SVG? I’m just interested.
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CSS; see https://phabricator.kde.org/T13467.
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Do you plan to fix all Plasma Wayland showstoppers by then?
I mean those which can be fixed on Plasma and Qt side, as Fedora plans to release with Wayland by default.
Or will some of those points, like session restore come later in 6.x?
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That is currently the plan, yeah.
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Fedora Linux defaults to Wayland for KDE Plasma since version 34 (2 years ago).
I mean, you are technically correct, they plan any further releases with KDE Plasma to default to Wayland, as they did for every release for 2 years now.
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You are of course right Marcel, I had [1] in my mind, which Neal Gompa – from Fedora – drives forward:
login-sessions: Make Plasma Wayland the default
[1] https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2188
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I have to again praise the addition of automated bug reports. This removes such an enormous pain point/roadblock. I have been able to break things in Neon unstable and keep moving thanks to this feature. KDE will improve measurably more efficiently thanks to this.
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Will Plasma 6 use QtKeychain instead of KWallet for system secrets storage (e.g. WiFi Passwords and network shares access credentials) ? That way any password manager implementing the Freedesktop Secret Service standard could be used (KWallet included).
Thank you
Leo
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