KDE Plasma 6 on openSUSE Tumbleweed

In the wide, wide world of desktop Linux, there is a lot of buzz and excitement over the release of Plasma 6 and for good reason, it is a fantastic upgrade from 5.27. The world of Plasma isn’t perfect but when put into perspective, this is getting real close. I was rather concerned about this new version. KDE 3 to KDE Plasma 4 was painful, Plasma 4 to Plasma 5 had some bumps that were incredibly irritating so based on this, I was quite concerned about the move to Plasma 6.

Bottom Line Up Front: Plasma 6 is a hop, a skip and one giant leap in the right direction. Something about it feels like it is more streamlined and positioned for the streamlined desktop of the future. Although I am one to wince a bit at the prospect of “change,” the KDE Community does perform changes right. The refinements made to Plasma feels like a a lot of thought was put into some serious refinement of how the desktop, the settings and options are presented to the user. Overall, there was only one disappointment in the upgrade, everything else is absolutely, most certainly a tremendous improvement.

Upgrade Process

Like every other time I do a distribution upgrade, the process was simple. In terminal:

sudo zypper dup

And the process will take place like every other distribution upgrade that happens. There was, however, one little upset in the process. The way packages are installed and removed, I had the unfortunate surprise of the desktop closing out and terminating the process. All the packages downloaded, no problem, but the installation was killed. I did try to log back into Plasma and continue the process but I would again get booted out back to the login screen. The workaround for this is to do the upgrade in either the terminal alone or IceWM, the minimal desktop environment available in openSUSE.

There maybe other ways around this like getting the process started in Tmux or something but I didn’t test that. I may yet and if so, I will update this post accordingly.

I have upgraded three machines so far with the latest and greatest Plasma 6:

• Framework 13
• ThinkPad P16s
• Fujitsu Lifebook T725

These machines are running quite happily with Plasma 6, look and feel great.

Issues

There are three issues I have with Plasma 6. They are all minor but are none the less issues that should be made aware. I am also going to start with the negatives because the positives are far more exciting than any regressions introduced with this version change.

Upgrade Cannot be Done within Plasma

I have performed this upgrade first on the 14th of March 2024, and the other two on the 15th of March. Perhaps this might be smoothed out as other updates roll down but this is not a huge issue, it is rather quite minor. It could also be that these updates were done in a Wayland instead of X11. Wayland does have some minor issues yet in recovering from crashes.

Overall, this is an easy work around, just install from the terminal only or another DE like IceWM. I was able to do this on Wifi using IceWM which makes me grateful that it is an option available to you from the display manager.

Incompatible Widgets

Admittedly, I don’t run many widgets on my desktop but I did search for a long time for the best system monitor that tells me what is going on in the lower-right corner of my desktop. I like to see the CPU, RAM and SWAP activity of my system, not that SWAP is used much anymore but I like to see when it is actually used. I really liked to be able to hover over and see my CPU load as well. It’s just really a nice thing to have.

This here was the only real disappointment with Plasma 6. I figured something like this might happen and I’m sure that the author will likely make updates to this widget so that it can be used again but until then, I will be eagerly waiting and wanting for the most glorious widget to grace my Plasma Desktop, once again.

Application Menu Icon

Annoyingly, the menu icon does not follow the Plasma Style preference of the icon and unless manually chosen, the graphic being used is the Plasma Logo. Nothing against the Plasma Logo but the openSUSE button icon just happens to bring the highest level of satisfaction with using the Desktop.

Once I fix it, I am content yet again on the appearance. Really, all the appearances of Plasma 6 look great which is a great segue for…

Plasma 6 Highlights

There is a lot to like with Plasma 6. Unlike most articles, I wanted to knock the issues with it out of the way first. So… bad news first, I guess? It’s a short list for sure.

General Look and Feel

The general appearance of Plasma 6 has a kind of crispness to it. I only like to use dark themes on my machines because it is much easier on my eyes but on some applications, windows could sort of get lost into another window. Now there are some rather pleasant highlights with the the generally dark colored windows and widgets.

No More Flicker

On annoying aspect to using Wayland with Plasma 5.27 was that the context menus would often flicker as the mouse pointer would move across the options. Many times, I thought the menu closed but it was just playing a game of “hide and go seek”. Moving the mouse around the menus would show the options again. Plasma 6 doesn’t seem to have this encumberment. The menus all seem to appear where they should and stay appearing.

Default Applications

There are more options for the default applications. I remember a day when you had but a few options on this page. It has steadily grown and this is fantastic. Of course, for other file associations, you can customize that as needed but the default applications, the ones that generally mean the most to you, day in and day out, are right here and ready to go.

Advanced Power Settings

A really awesome new feature in the Advanced Power Settings is the ability to set a charge limit on your battery. If you are on AC power most of the time, it isn’t good for the log term life of the machine. Individual situations are different from user to user but holding a battery at full charge or nearly drained isn’t good for the life of the battery. This is a great new feature to have available to you, the user to better tune your laptop for your work habits. Truly, a fantastic feature.

Related Settings

If you look below at the Other Settings, on the Advanced Power Settings menu, there are related pages that can be directly accessed. This is super handy and such a great new addition because this allows the user to jump into those pages as necessary. Making more routes to get to the correct place is what makes the Plasma System Settings so splendidly useful. Such a well thought out decision.

Discover Application Explorer

Discover has had sort of a bad reputation for many years. I thought it to be pretty decent but comparing it to some of the more boutique distributions, it has been considerably slower and more cumbersome. Now, wherever the tuning has taken place has made for a much, much faster experience. When I started up Discover, I didn’t have to wait for 3 to 5 minutes for PackageKit and whatever else was going on to do a thing for me to just browse the store of applications. Updates are still being fetched but not at the snails pace as before. Also, the reorganization of the menu is a welcome change as well. The menu feels much more logically arranged.

I also want to note that the “Home” page of Discover feels a lot more polished. The fact it shows what is Most Popular and what the “Editor’s Choice” is makes this feel a bit more curated and less like the wild west. I have no idea where it is pulling this information but I am okay with the selection, even if it isn’t all that helpful for me.

Installing applications from the openSUSE repositories or Flathub seem to work as well as using the terminal. I have not yet tested to see if I can keep the system updated with Discover but my guess is not. Flatpak updates can easily be run through Discover.

As a thought here, it would be nice if there was some sort of patch done to Discover to either allow software updates though it or just block it entirely with a message to use the terminal or perhaps use Zypper to manage the updates within Discover. Something like that would be very handy.

Wayland to X11 Video Bridge

This is a really cool, handy little tool to have running a service on Plasma 6. The Wayland display server, by design will not permit X11 applications to access the contents of Wayland windows or screens. As a consequence, it does break screen sharing for tools like Discord which haven’t quite made the switch over to Wayland.

This tool allows the user to share specific windows to X11 clients, but within the control of the user at all times. It also, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to work with Xeyes quite yet. I have tried it and the thing just won’t track me like I had hoped.

Virtual Desktop Cube

This is the best implementation of the Virtual Desktop Cube switcher that I have experienced. Previously, when there was a “Desktop Cube” it was an either/or in the kind of virtual desktop switching. I prefer the slide because it makes sense logically, especially with the touchpad gestures where a three finger swipe will switch to the adjacent desktop, depending on the direction of swipe, of course.

Meta+C will launch the cube switcher where left and right arrows will change to the next virtual desktop. This is also handy now, especially when operating in a mouse keyboard mode, without a touchpad. Bravo on this feature enhancement!

Nothing Jarring

Perhaps the most important part of this rather significant improvement is that there isn’t anything jarring, gnawing or nagging about the change. In over 20 years of Linux, I have endured a number of changes that chaffed me for weeks or even months at a time until I either found a fix or the community fixed it the issue. The fact of the matter is, we are in the early days of Plasma 6 and more work is being done for this new chapter in the KDE Plasma book. Some areas that still need work is the touch screen / on screen keyboard tablet / Plasma Mobile interface. It’s getting better but not great. Maybe, “I’m holding it wrong” but it’s just not quite right yet. I expect to see this improve over time.

Final Thoughts

I have only had a few days on Plasma 6. More updates are coming down, fast and furious through the Open Build Service. Just now, version 6.0.2 is available and one of the issues I was going to write about with application menus appearing in the center of the screen as opposed to the mouse pointer location has seemingly gone away.

There are some other great things about Plasma 6 too. The Kontact PIM suite is also much improved in its operation. More testing is required here but it does appear that work has been done on the Akonadi database and the overall look and presentation of various bits within, but that should be an article unto itself.

Plamsa 6, I was really quite worried about it when it was announced some time ago but rest assured, those worries greatly misplaced and completely unnecessary. In fact, I do believe it underscores the notion, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own software bugs.

References

https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed
https://invent.kde.org/system/xwaylandvideobridge
Framework 13
Fujitsu Lifebook T725 with openSUSE