Let me preface this with I was reinstalling my Arch system when Linux 6.6.1 killed the computer’s boot cycle. (Dell Optiplex 990 i7) system. Anyway, I needed to get this back up and running and since I couldn’t even get it to boot, I did a reinstall relying on my backups and on the Linux LTS for now. I am an early adopter with software and wanted to modify my repo to use the KDE-Unstable branch. To my surprise, upon rebooting after running an update, I was looking at the shiny new KDE 6 desktop! I was thinking maybe just a newer point release.
The Good
It looks surprisingly nice! You can certainly tell that a lot of work has been put into this version.
The new Dolphin interface is looking quite awesome! Nate Graham on his site details the changes, but it looks and feels more cohesive and unified across the board.
I had a crash while browsing SDDM screens in their system settings, by canceling it and it killed it, but the reporting system for the failure seemed to be extra fluid and submitted it without much input from my end. Nice Touch!
Interestingly enough
They have done some major work on the system settings and I think this will take some training of muscle learning from KDE Plasma 5. It seems a bit more logical if you will. And the change from single click to double click by default is a huge bonus for me. The KDE version number indicated something around 5.27.11 (If I remember correctly), so it isn’t quite 6 , but I expect that to change once the desktop is finalized in Feb 2024.
The Bad
It’s feature incomplete, If you need to change your desktop wallpaper, the option to right click in discover on the picture to set it is no longer there.
The sound settings, and other functions listed in Nate’s blog just don’t exist in the build I tried, but I respect that with it being Alpha.
The Ugly
This will probably apply to Arch only, but if you update it through KDE-UNSTABLE’s repo in Arch, there is no way that I could find to fully remove it and reinstall it easily even by using the sudo pacman -Syuu command. So, be forewarned.
Disclaimer
Yes, I know, this is Alpha and not meant for daily use. I never intended for it to be installed through their unstable repo, but lesson learned. :) I’m glad I was able to take a glimpse at it and I now feel confident in knowing that on my 12 yr old machine, it ran nice and fluid and smoothly. It can only get better from there!
For now, I’ll for sure stick with deploying it in a VM for further testing. :)
If you look at the KDE-Unstable Arch Repo you’ll notice that only 4 packages are compiled to Plasma 6 Alpha-1. If you want to test Alpha 1, you’re better off using the kde neon unstable ISO in a Live Environment or VM.
I’ve tried it in a VM. Installed kde neon unstable. I did NOT like how they changed the settings. Ooofff, I was clicking instinctly on the wrong places. I kept repeating the same mistakes I was getting mad. lol. It IS more sane if makes more sense, thought, but we do need a lot of muscle memory to get used it. It does look a little different, but I removed it pretty quick, as I didn’t want to ruin the excitement of the official release.
