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?

  • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    Faster to the fight for what? Wayland? Xfce doesn’t even have a working Wayland session yet, so surely not. The new Plasma update is indeed being hyped for stability and Wayland. Wayland is finally ready to be used by default and that’s a big deal. Many of the biggest issues with 5.27 have been fixed, which has improved usability a lot. HDR is also a big deal, people have been waiting for years for it to work on desktop Linux. Yes, there is also a lot of “eyecandy”. People constantly complain Plasma looks ancient compared to GNOME, so they’re doing something about it.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      HDR is also a big deal, people have been waiting for years for it to work on desktop Linux.

      Unless I’m missing something they’re going to wait a bit more, no? Plasma 6 only has experimental support. Neither X nor Wayland support it. Cosmic says they’ll support it but Cosmic is not here yet.

      Some Steam games can use HDR if you have a patched kernel and the latest Nvidia/AMD drivers but they do so without help from the desktop environment. That’s pretty much the only use case I can think of, not sure I’d call it a “big deal”.