I'm loving Plasma 6 so far. Wayland support is much better!
I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
I'm using KDE on Debian / Wayland because I was forced to [0]. I moved to it from from Gnome, which I was forced to use for similar reasons.
I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo) button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than Gnome, of course.
Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per se.
[0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11 the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well. With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's, then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other combinations all fail in their own unique ways.
i'm in a similar boat -- i miss being able to tap the super key. i don't mind that the defaults are different, but i'm sad that (since it's considered a modifier key) KDE doesn't allow it to be bound on tap. this prevents me from replicating Gnome's behavior.
> I'm loving Plasma 6 so far. Wayland support is much better!
I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11 it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour. Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD ecosystem.
I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you on?
I'd imagine XWayland Xorg emulation is far from perfect so I wouldn't be surprised if games that depend on that would crash.
That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.
If a game doesn't work in Wayland, you could always launch it in gamescope[1], which AFAIR doesn't expose WAYLAND_DISPLAY by default, so games should treat it the same as an X11 desktop.
There's a large amount of robustness improvements, particularly around multi-monitor and docking scenarios with dynamic and fractional DPI. We've also introduced technology to allow client apps to stay running should the compositor crash and restart.
We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.
We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).
More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.
Performance work.
Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.
Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.
Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.
It's safer as every program is isolated but it crashes more often because programs are isolated and expect not to be isolated. I often switch back to x11 whenever I try it I think nice it's fast and has bells and whistles but there basics aren't there. It took x11 a LONG time to be usable so I expect the same with Wayland.
Faster, better support for multiple screens with different geometry, safer, and ultimately maintained. Also, at this point, it works really well, and honestly is not a drag on the user. I moved to Wayland last December and have really enjoyed it. I'm using the KDE Neon distribution, and it's really really really nice.
I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)
I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most distros just dump the basic default setup on users.
It's great to see, though my main gripe with KDE right now is Dolphin, the file manager. It tries to do everything but is just ever so slightly buggy in every way, it can't run as root, and asks to confirm saving twice every single time when editing a networked file. As much as it is less featured and ugly, Nautilus was less annoying to use.
Dolphin is legitimately my favorite KDE program. My experience is that it's a phenomenal productivity tool. Being able to quickly open or close a terminal. How customizable the ordering and appearance and columns are. Easy to manipulate tabs.
I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?
I wonder, why are more people not using Krusader? I understand it is a nuclear bomb for killing mosquitos, but with a bit of tweaking it can be fast and easy to use; plus, when you really need the big guns, you have them right there.
Well open source project leaders don't tend to be CEO likes that are far removed from the actual work. They are usually just regular contributors (well often the most active one) that have taken on the leadership role because someone has to.
Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers) - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")
I use Debian Testing which trails release by a couple of versions. I search the bug in the Bugzilla, and if it's not filed, I file the bug. Sometimes it's marked as a duplicate (but additional feedback is useful), sometimes new, but very rarely a duplicate of a closed bug.
So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.
I don't know how much it affects priority, but they certainly accept bugs filed against older versions. Specifying versions is a big part of the form for a new bug, and they let you select versions going way back.
I don't know how long it will take KDE 6 to arrive on Ubuntu LTS, but there have been several networking improvements to KDE Connect in this release (including supporting mDNS and bluetooth for more reliable operation), so possibly it may be better for your use case now?
> anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time.
And "resolved" like [0] which is a 9 year old regression is marked "resolved upstream" becase KDE devs refuse to implement a workable solution FOR KDE like there used to be in 3.x and 4.x and instead require a perfect solution that will never happen as can be seen by the bug report's age. Not worth my time to report bugs if they will be treated like this.
I'm sure you can find a similar example for any significant FOSS project, including GNOME, but that doesn't mean it is a general stance adopted by developers when a new bug report comes in.
> KDE should probably invest in better defaults if these need tweaking.
We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed many defaults to values that reflect better what the users actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies, and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes in this regard.
Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can’t. Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP. Somehow KDE could accomplish much more and feels more mature and robust too.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole
project and how users reacted to
the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
Never heard of Krita, just downloaded it. It starts up way slower than Gimp and the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system. Bleh. It's probably busy spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops, and other bloat. Qt/KDE ecosystem apps are slow and memory-hogging compared to their GTK counterparts.
The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget)
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving).
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
> I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
I think you have this backwards. KDE has been ahead of windows since the Windows Vista era. KDE4 and Plasma (KDE5) are extremely good and have been borrowed from liberally by the commercial desktops for quite some time.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
Saying gnome is following MacOS just says you haven't used gnome since ages, give gnome 45 a spin and tell me how it's following macOS, it's better than macOS will ever be.
If GNOME would be following Mac trends, we would get more Vala and less JavaScript, and proper developer tools instead of writing XML based layouts by hand.
KDE’s underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why Krita feels more right than GIMP.
Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly competent in their niches in recent years.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped taskbar windows with titles.
Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
Can you explain that? How is the workflow like Windows?
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
> except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
I honestly love the variety of options, everyone can find something suitable for themselves!
Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and KDE.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues.
Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user.
I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
why wipe out the hard drive, tho? You can usually just switch DEs just fine, this isn't windows :) long gone are the days where we would have 10 different DEs/WMs installed
I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and for staying out of my way.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.
Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App".
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around.
granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).
Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love.
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.
Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
> if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about... It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray icons/app indicators...
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI.
Yet it's horrible to use and really wasteful. Huge window handles that make no sense on a desktop without touch, unnecessary extra clicks by hiding things in hamburger menus. Again something handy on a mobile, not a desktop. Almost no customisation.
them being professionals does not imply they're doing a good job. Lots of dumpster fires, across a broad range of industries, were designed by professionals.
Users who prefer the old behavior can toggle it back on in the "Mouse Actions" settings under "Desktop Folder Settings", so it's not going away entirely.
This is really important to me, the fact that it's configurable. The trend in other desktop environments has been to just take away features to lead everybody down "the golden path", but everybody has different preferences. I prefer a set of sensible defaults and a maze of settings to adjust every little thing, than just a blanket "here's how it works, deal with it".
I'm a bit worried that it's now off by default, because this is one behavior I really like about KDE. Just leave the background visible somewhere and you can switch virtual desktops with ease. I know you can just click on the graphical virtual desktop display in the toolbar, but once I became used to it then it became muscle memory and now it's harder to do without it. The reason not making it a default worries me is that sometimes that makes it a nice candidate for "something we can remove that will only affect a minority of users". And it will be a minority of users, because most users won't even know it's an option.
(Author here): Users new to KDE don't know what's up with the feature. They miss a window and suddenly they're on a different virtual desktop. If they connect the behavior they may feel like "ooh, I've discovered a new trick" -- or they may feel like the desktop is unpredictable.
It would be a good candidate for one of those first-use "did you know you can" type things.
If you have specific workflow where the golden path is suboptimal, sure. But I would not think that average user has any preferences and for many users Gnome is very reasonable.
Id second this. I used to lose a lot of productivity via desktop tweaking, and have now converted to sticking with gnome defaults (as people have said, gnome really does "stay out of your way").
hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives hobbyist something to experiment with.
I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-layer).
I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven by open source development)
> Now, KDE upstream has relented on using a single-click to open files and defaults to double-click instead. Distributions like Fedora, Kubuntu, and Manjaro had been changing the upstream default anyway, so KDE developer Nate Graham suggested disabling the feature. ""Distros are closer to users and clearly the feedback they've been getting is that double-click is a better default...Let's admit it and switch to double-click by default ourselves"".
This is great news.
The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11. I don't think this has been a problem lately. There is iirc an icon up top on gnome at least which I don't want in my video but I guess I'm not supposed to be recording my whole display?
I currently don't use my fedora machine much (just ssh into it when I need to) and wsl2 is good enough.
If you haven't tried single click to open before, I would highly recommend it. I used to hate it as well, but going through folders and files is so much faster now that I'm used to it. And if you think about it, a single click to open something is much more consistent UI wise.
Single click to open is great if what you want is to open the folder or file, but what do you use then when you want to select the folder or file without opening it? I've resorted to "vaguely dragging a square around the icon" (to select a group of icons containing just that single icon) on systems with single-click-to-open.
Historically, what you had was single click to select, then something else (usually the Enter key or similar) to open the selected item; this is consistent with for instance drop-down lists (where Enter activates the default button of the dialog box containing the drop-down). Double-click was just a shortcut to "select and then do the default action".
A sibling comment compared to smartphones, which use long-press to select; in my experience, both double-click and long-press can be hard for some people (for instance, I've seen people release the long-press a millisecond too early, causing it to do the single-press action instead of the long-click action).
Same here. This is one change that they made that really does not make any sense to me. Also with smartphones being so used these days and they all have this single click mode of doing things, well it would also make more sense to me to keep single click for opening in KDE Plasma.
> The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11.
We invested a lot of effort in Plasma6 to make screen recording on Wayland as smooth as possible. With OBS (and our native screenshot/recording tool Spectacle) it just "works".
We also developed a mechanism to make screen recording/sharing work for old XWayland clients (to have things like screen sharing work from i.e. the Electron Discord app)
I record lots of dev guides for my dev team using obs. Works great for me on Debian 12 with KDE and Wayland. Full screen too. Webcam working. External usb mic working.
I had to do a double take regarding the single click "issue" because later in the article it is mentioned that scroll bar behavior was changed to accommodate users with RSI.
So what is it KDE? Do you care about RSI or not? I'm no longer a young person anymore, and appreciate any features to prevent RSI. I think its silly to relent on the single click due to "new user pressure".
At least there is still an option for it, I suppose.
Been tinkering with Plasma on my Framework 13 with NixOS and I upgraded to Plasma 6 last night. So far things seem pretty great!
The combined overview (four-finger swipe up) is one of the main things I felt was missing from Gnome and macOS and is really nice! I wish it was a three-finger swipe, but it's KDE, so you know there's probably an option somewhere.
I'm also excited about being able to consume HDR content on my workstation where I have a much nicer monitor, so will have to report back on that.
I really dislike the new default lock screen wallpaper. Not entirely sure why.
Plasma 6 fixes the panel configuration mess, which was pretty buggy. It works flawlessly now while being more intuitive.
The new Breeze theme fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies that irked me here and there. It looks much better now.
Fingerprint unlock had some weird bugs as well, which all seem to be ironed out. Very clean and consistent now.
Even the new default sound theme is _super_ nice. I'm a huge fan of the new sound effects across the desktop environment. Seriously, they're so good.
New screen recording stuff just works (Super+R) and the PipeWire setup plays perfectly with OBS. Can record individual windows and it all seems to work as expected.
Still not entirely sure this will replace Sway for the serious workstation multitasking sessions and the advantages that a tiling window manager brings, but it's really a joy on my laptop.
I know a lot of people (rightfully) have their gripes with Wayland, but this feels pretty feature complete to me. The last missing piece I'm personally feeling is remote desktop access, but I admittedly have not done anything there yet. Since screen capture is working perfectly and KDE Connect to control machines remotely from my phone works, I'm guessing the pipes are all in place and I simply need to set things up.
If you're feeling curious, give it a shot! I think it's a fantastic starting point.
How good is wayland support on Nixos currently? Did you have to make a lot of tweaks to your nix configuration?
Last time I tried it a few months ago, albeit with plasma5, it kind of worked, but I had to do many tweaks in my configuration and couldn't figure out settings for coherent scaling for hidpi.
I just installed plasma6 on nixos (using Wayland) and it automatically picked an appropriate fractional scaling for my resolution (150%), and everything works and feels great. No configuration needed.
I can only talk about Gnome wayland with NixOS, but they generally don’t do anything too wild with the configs, and since they have quite bleeding edge packages, it usually works quite well, once it packaged.
KDE has reinvigorated my love for the desktop after years on Mac. I use it on my PC, laptop, and steam deck! I’m a big fan of their apps including Konsole, Kate, and KDEConnect. It’s an all around impressive project and surpasses MacOS and Windows in my opinion, which is remarkable. Really grateful to everyone that works on it.
The other day one of my colleagues was trying to sell me the Apple ecosystem by giving a specific example. He has airpod connected to his mac. As soon as he gets a call, they switch to his iPhone.
He was quite surprised when I told him that the same thing happens with my Asus laptop running Kubuntu, Motorola phone and Oneplus ear buds.
With default settings KDE is very familiar for people coming from Windows (well Windows 10 at least), and runs well for me without any serious errors. The biggest issue for Linux desktop use seems to be outside of the control of KDE/Gnome/Other DE now, which is rock solid support for all the flavours of consumer hardware out there.
MacOS has a fixed hardware target obviously, Microsoft has all the hardware manufactures testing their drivers. The Linux ecosystem simply can't provide the same level of quality. I'm still waiting for hibernate to work on my laptop (using Fedora so I'm getting new kernel versions).
I completely agree with this. As someone who recently switched to Linux from too many years of Windows, the lack of hardware support is frustrating. As I've delved into this world for a few months now, I can clearly see the cases where Windows gets a hardware feature or related through a driver update, but this doesn't happen in Linux for a while because it needs to be integrated into the kernel.
> Breeze is Plasma's default theme and it has been updated for Plasma 6, but it's a subtle change — sort of like repainting a room and changing the color from "flat white" to "eggshell white". It has some changes to spacing that make it feel a little less crowded, and it has >>fewer lines separating UI elements<<.
Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements. This makes the UI so much harder to parse. This trend where everything is flat and visually indistinguishable except for inperceptible differences in shade of grey can't go away soon enough. It's ruined a decade of user interfaces already. Yeah they look pretty, but they're awful to use.
> Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements.
Did you actually look at the screenshots? KDE did not remove separation between elements. However it is now achieved by drawing a single line between two elements, instead of framing every single thing which is extremely ugly.
I also find Kate '6' to be much more pleasant to use, because this separator is still clear enough, but actually uses marginally fewer pixels which is nice on my low-resolution laptop.
I wish they'd at least made it thinner. Some of those screenshots on the release page [1] (Kate, Kdenlive) look awful, the actually useful content (code, clip problem list) is squeezed into a corner by UI elements that are mostly empty. That thing is ridiculous, the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines, and the Clip Problems window is clipped at an 8-item view.
I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit and extra scrolling.
This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a trackpad or a mouse.
> the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines
No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall, including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger (esp taller) than it is on my machine.
Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I use keyboard shortcuts for.
I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it. The only real problem is that the window should probably be larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like you can freely resize it.
Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
It's very easy to remove toolbars (in Settings menu) and menu bars (Ctrl+M) on Plasma. I managed to remove all of them in certain apps, like Konsole and KWrite, which makes things look way better, indeed.
Readit News
I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
[1]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3871 [2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481985 [3]: https://invent.kde.org/vladz/switch-to-previous-desktop
I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo) button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than Gnome, of course.
Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per se.
[0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11 the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well. With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's, then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other combinations all fail in their own unique ways.
I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11 it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour. Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD ecosystem.
I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you on?
That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.
[1]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
I have it and works fine on plasma6/wayland.
We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.
We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).
More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.
Performance work.
Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.
Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.
Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.
I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)
I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most distros just dump the basic default setup on users.
I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?
Try https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt as an alternative.
It feels native in Plasma/Breeze and is more traditional. I like it.
Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers) - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")
So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.
And "resolved" like [0] which is a 9 year old regression is marked "resolved upstream" becase KDE devs refuse to implement a workable solution FOR KDE like there used to be in 3.x and 4.x and instead require a perfect solution that will never happen as can be seen by the bug report's age. Not worth my time to report bugs if they will be treated like this.
[0] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340982
People don't usually dig in the settings menu unless something is bothering them. If there are great opt-in features they're going to stay off.
We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed many defaults to values that reflect better what the users actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies, and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes in this regard.
And you're not wrong, it does help a lot.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
What is missing, compared to gimp?
Oh well, back to GIMP.
But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf to do so.
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..
I say this as someone who has used the latest versions of KDE and Windows until around the release of Windows 11 (but I have seen that too).
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
Are they profitable these days?
That used to be their main problem, business wise. Always losing money, so making weird choices trying to stop that.
Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
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Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around.
granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
[1]: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups
It might satisfy hipster designers but not users.
Windows 8 and later were all designed by professional UI designers.
Also, every single company website or app that has absolutely atrocious UI was designed by a professional UI designer.
It would be a good candidate for one of those first-use "did you know you can" type things.
hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives hobbyist something to experiment with.
I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-layer).
I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven by open source development)
This is great news.
The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11. I don't think this has been a problem lately. There is iirc an icon up top on gnome at least which I don't want in my video but I guess I'm not supposed to be recording my whole display?
I currently don't use my fedora machine much (just ssh into it when I need to) and wsl2 is good enough.
Historically, what you had was single click to select, then something else (usually the Enter key or similar) to open the selected item; this is consistent with for instance drop-down lists (where Enter activates the default button of the dialog box containing the drop-down). Double-click was just a shortcut to "select and then do the default action".
A sibling comment compared to smartphones, which use long-press to select; in my experience, both double-click and long-press can be hard for some people (for instance, I've seen people release the long-press a millisecond too early, causing it to do the single-press action instead of the long-click action).
We invested a lot of effort in Plasma6 to make screen recording on Wayland as smooth as possible. With OBS (and our native screenshot/recording tool Spectacle) it just "works".
We also developed a mechanism to make screen recording/sharing work for old XWayland clients (to have things like screen sharing work from i.e. the Electron Discord app)
So what is it KDE? Do you care about RSI or not? I'm no longer a young person anymore, and appreciate any features to prevent RSI. I think its silly to relent on the single click due to "new user pressure".
At least there is still an option for it, I suppose.
The combined overview (four-finger swipe up) is one of the main things I felt was missing from Gnome and macOS and is really nice! I wish it was a three-finger swipe, but it's KDE, so you know there's probably an option somewhere.
I'm also excited about being able to consume HDR content on my workstation where I have a much nicer monitor, so will have to report back on that.
I really dislike the new default lock screen wallpaper. Not entirely sure why.
Plasma 6 fixes the panel configuration mess, which was pretty buggy. It works flawlessly now while being more intuitive.
The new Breeze theme fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies that irked me here and there. It looks much better now.
Fingerprint unlock had some weird bugs as well, which all seem to be ironed out. Very clean and consistent now.
Even the new default sound theme is _super_ nice. I'm a huge fan of the new sound effects across the desktop environment. Seriously, they're so good.
New screen recording stuff just works (Super+R) and the PipeWire setup plays perfectly with OBS. Can record individual windows and it all seems to work as expected.
Still not entirely sure this will replace Sway for the serious workstation multitasking sessions and the advantages that a tiling window manager brings, but it's really a joy on my laptop.
I know a lot of people (rightfully) have their gripes with Wayland, but this feels pretty feature complete to me. The last missing piece I'm personally feeling is remote desktop access, but I admittedly have not done anything there yet. Since screen capture is working perfectly and KDE Connect to control machines remotely from my phone works, I'm guessing the pipes are all in place and I simply need to set things up.
If you're feeling curious, give it a shot! I think it's a fantastic starting point.
Last time I tried it a few months ago, albeit with plasma5, it kind of worked, but I had to do many tweaks in my configuration and couldn't figure out settings for coherent scaling for hidpi.
The issue with making it 3-finger is that 3-finger swipes are reserved for desktop switching, and desktops can be arranged in a 2D grid
I do wish it was configurable in the settings and that any combination of 3 or 4-finger swipes could be bound to anything
I didn't read far enough, don't mind me.
It's not configurable yet in 6.0, but we do plan to add configurability for touchpad gestures
Dead Comment
MacOS has a fixed hardware target obviously, Microsoft has all the hardware manufactures testing their drivers. The Linux ecosystem simply can't provide the same level of quality. I'm still waiting for hibernate to work on my laptop (using Fedora so I'm getting new kernel versions).
Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements. This makes the UI so much harder to parse. This trend where everything is flat and visually indistinguishable except for inperceptible differences in shade of grey can't go away soon enough. It's ruined a decade of user interfaces already. Yeah they look pretty, but they're awful to use.
Did you actually look at the screenshots? KDE did not remove separation between elements. However it is now achieved by drawing a single line between two elements, instead of framing every single thing which is extremely ugly.
I also find Kate '6' to be much more pleasant to use, because this separator is still clear enough, but actually uses marginally fewer pixels which is nice on my low-resolution laptop.
And there is also some before and after comparison on the announcement https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/
I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit and extra scrolling.
This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a trackpad or a mouse.
1: https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/
No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall, including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger (esp taller) than it is on my machine.
Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I use keyboard shortcuts for.
I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it. The only real problem is that the window should probably be larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like you can freely resize it.
Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.