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?
Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. I guess DEs have to constantly change or they become stale to some people. I’m an older guy than the normal demographic here too and stale is exactly what I want. I run i3 with a bunch of terminals, a browser, and sublime text when vi in a terminal isn’t enough (yes, it’s really vim, but it’ll always be vi to me), and I xsetroot the classic weave pattern for my background. That’s it. I don’t need or want menus, widgets, themes, file managers or anything else. I guess someday Wayland will win, and I’ll be forced to do something different, but until then, not changing this extremely productive and efficient environment.
Friend, thank you. This is this informed explanation I wanted, and turns me to appreciating the work. I’d give you a token if I could.