Wednesday, June 19th 2024
KDE Plasma 6.1 Released with New Features and Improved Usability
Plasma 6 hits its stride with version 6.1. While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level.
In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer.
These features and more are being built directly into Plasma's Wayland version natively, avoiding the need for third party software and hacky extensions required by similar solutions implemented in X. Things will only get more interesting from here. But meanwhile enjoy what will land on your desktop with your next update.
Access Remote Plasma Desktops
One of the more spectacular (and useful) features added in Plasma 6.1 is that you can now start up a remote desktop directly from the System Settings app. This means that if you are sysadmin who needs to troubleshoot users' machines, or simply need to work on a Plasma-enabled computer that is out of reach, setting up a connection is just a few clicks away.
Once enabled, you can connect to the remote desktop using a client such as KRDC. You will see the remote machine's Plasma desktop in a window and be able to interact with it from your own computer.
Customization made (more) Visual
We all love customizing our Plasma desktops, don't we? One of the quickest ways to do this is by entering Plasma's Edit Mode (right-click anywhere on the desktop background and select Enter Edit Mode from the menu).
In version 6.1, the visual aspect of Edit Mode has been overhauled and you will now see a slick animation when you activate it. The entire desktop zooms out smoothly, giving you a better overview of what is going on and allowing you to make your changes with ease.
Persistent Apps
Plasma 6.1 on Wayland now has a feature that "remembers" what you were doing in your last session like it did under X11. Although this is still work in progress, If you log off and shut down your computer with a dozen open windows, Plasma will now open them for you the next time you power up your desktop, making it faster and easier to get back to what you were doing.
Sync your Keyboard's Colored LEDs
It wouldn't be a new Plasma release without at least one fancy aesthetic customization features. This time, however, we give you the power to reach beyond the screen, all the way onto your keyboard, as you can now synchronize the LED colours of your keys to match the accent colour on your desktop.
To see the full list of changes, check out the changelog for Plasma 6.1.
Source:
KDE
In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer.
Access Remote Plasma Desktops
One of the more spectacular (and useful) features added in Plasma 6.1 is that you can now start up a remote desktop directly from the System Settings app. This means that if you are sysadmin who needs to troubleshoot users' machines, or simply need to work on a Plasma-enabled computer that is out of reach, setting up a connection is just a few clicks away.
Once enabled, you can connect to the remote desktop using a client such as KRDC. You will see the remote machine's Plasma desktop in a window and be able to interact with it from your own computer.
Customization made (more) Visual
We all love customizing our Plasma desktops, don't we? One of the quickest ways to do this is by entering Plasma's Edit Mode (right-click anywhere on the desktop background and select Enter Edit Mode from the menu).
In version 6.1, the visual aspect of Edit Mode has been overhauled and you will now see a slick animation when you activate it. The entire desktop zooms out smoothly, giving you a better overview of what is going on and allowing you to make your changes with ease.
Persistent Apps
Plasma 6.1 on Wayland now has a feature that "remembers" what you were doing in your last session like it did under X11. Although this is still work in progress, If you log off and shut down your computer with a dozen open windows, Plasma will now open them for you the next time you power up your desktop, making it faster and easier to get back to what you were doing.
Sync your Keyboard's Colored LEDs
It wouldn't be a new Plasma release without at least one fancy aesthetic customization features. This time, however, we give you the power to reach beyond the screen, all the way onto your keyboard, as you can now synchronize the LED colours of your keys to match the accent colour on your desktop.
To see the full list of changes, check out the changelog for Plasma 6.1.
13 Comments on KDE Plasma 6.1 Released with New Features and Improved Usability
non stop black screen crashes "Plasmashell has crashed" even while installing the Distro. (Nobara for example)
for me with three clean installs (Tumbleweed, Nobara and then Tumbleweed again) everything is basically unuseable, constantly crashing and locking up within seconds to minutes. with the 555 beta driver on KDE 6.05
I mean, it worked for me on a really old install, I broke that (not KDE-related), installed clean and it still worked. Not suing beta drivers and still on Pascal, fwiw.
6.0 was already solid, sorry you're missing out.
everything Wayland related is 100% unuseable on every existing distro :/
They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
@bug I see you use the same CPU monitoring widgets as I do. Great minds think alike :)
Would this run on a HP-Elitedesk G3 with Steam? As mine is not the AMD-variant but the Intel version I had massive issues trying to get ArchLin/SteamOS3 to run as I had issues with the GFX-Driver and while Ubuntu (so weird coming back to this one so many years after I payed around with the very first release :D ) runs quite well on the system I just for the love of god can't get the steam-controller to work (Steam-Dongle won't work even with the steamdevices package installed, with a BT-Dongle it works partially but it just recognizes it as mouse and steam then states there is no controller connected).
I generally use this as replacement of my steam-box as this is quite old and had lots of issues with streaming the content (network-error icon popping up all the time) which did work well enough with win11 in a way but also had some issues with streaming games from my PC which stemmed from W11 (this is why I thought of going Linux for pure game streaming instead of setting up W10)