Just to get it out of the way: I’m a bit older than of most you. I’m an old school FOSS contributor: Slackware, couple kernel merges, and some weak device driver contributions.
I’m just not WOW’d by this Plasma release that is spoken as a Herculean effort. I’m seeing the news everywhere, and it seems everyone is clamoring to get it, but it mostly seems like 90% cosmetic changes, no? I must be missing something.
Here are the things I’ve gathered are non-cosmetic:
- Update to QT6
- Better Wayland interactions (HDR notable)
- Compositor improvements for gaming
Everything else seems like eye candy. I feel like Gnome and forks, or Xfce have been faster to the fight on these things, and this KDE release took many years. So what do I have wrong here?
In my personal and very subjective experience though, KDE is generally 90% cosmetic. I even cringe when a package requires QT as a dependency because I always associate it with the extraneous bling of KDE.
I half agree. The QT library is incredibly easy to use, cross-platform, and powerful though.