KDE Plasma 6 is the sixth generation of the
KDE Plasma desktop environment. It is the successor of
KDE Plasma 5 and was first released on 28 February 2024.[1]
Overview
KDE Plasma 6 was designed to not be a very large departure from KDE Plasma 5, instead being a series of improvements.[4] KDE Plasma 6 is built using
Qt 6,
KDE Frameworks 6 and
KDE Gear 24.02.[1][5] In addition, support for the
Wayland protocol was mainstreamed as the default graphical session, with
X11 support made secondary.[6] It introduces a new sound theme, Ocean, replacing
Oxygen's sound theme as the default.[1][5][7] Plasma 6 on Wayland has partial support for
High Dynamic Range (HDR) and color blindness correction filters.[1][5][8] The Discover app and settings were also improved and the 3D cube desktop effect was brought back.[9]
New features
Compared to the latest Plasma 5 release, the sixth generation brings the following new features:
The panel floats by default. Panels can be configured using auto-hide mode and be resized, including being turned into a dock.[9][5]
Plasma Search allows customizing the ordering of search results, supports timezones conversion and matches the text in both the current system language and English.[4][5]