I tried using my Nvidia GPU with Wayland on Plasma 6. For most normal applications it seems fine, however, HDR doesn’t work properly and some games like Minecraft have a flickering image. At least they fixed the blur and flickering in Firefox.
@Botzo
I upgraded also, had trouble with custom service menus I use, found out by myself now they must be in ~/.local/share/kio/servicemenus/ instead of ~/.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/, nowhere online anybody says anything about that. Weird.
SDDM crashed with some error about the theme: I haven’t looked into it yet though. For the time being I disabled SDDM and reverted to console login and startx.
All my kwin window rules stopped working. Apparently, the window title matching string now should include the window class (i.e. “urxvt URxvt” instead of just “urxvt”), so I had to redo all my window rules.
ksysguard is gone, together with all my customized monitoring pages and its replacement plasma-systemmonitor is broken. It’s complaining about missing sensors, and core dumps on some screens.
Some of my custom keyboard shortcuts were not working anymore. Had to reconfigure them.
Desktop overview is gone, replaced with something that has less functionality: I can move windows from the currently selected desktop to another one, but I can’t drag windows between desktops.
The Breeze theme now shows a very thick (and IMO ugly) outline by default. Thankfully you can tune or disable it in the settings.
Floating taskbar by default is also not my thing, but easy enough to disable. New “edit mode” feels a bit janky though.
When navigating between panes in System settings, it often shows the “apply settings” dialog even when no settings have been changed. Stop gaslighting me ksystemsettings, I know what I clicked.
Resizing the window of some (but not all) applications now produces a kind of rubber banding effect: like the contents of the window get stretched and then snap back into place multiple times during the resize. It looks and feels really janky. It doesn’t appear to affect QT and GTK applications, and Firefox isn’t affected either. Applications that are affected: chrome/chromium, vscode, freetube, tigervnc, urxvt, xterm and all the x* utilties. Turning off compositing “fixes” it, but who wants to run a desktop without compositing nowadays?
Screen locking is completely broken. When I press Meta+L, instead of simply showing me the lockscreen, the display turns off and starts to flicker on and off multiple times while showing just a black screen and a mouse cursor. After a while the lockscreen does appear, and I can type my password to unlock but instead of showing me my desktop it dumps me back to a black screen with a mouse cursor. After a while, if I’m lucky, the desktop reappears. One time my entire system froze and rebooted (!) before I got my desktop back, and I lost my unsaved work. I disabled automatic desktop locking for the time being, and am fighting against my muscle memory to press Meta+L whenever I leave my desk.
Oof yeah, definitely noticed some of those. I also totally lost screen share for both Wayland apps via portals and X11 apps in Xwayland, which really sucks.
Mouse cursor does not always obey the selected cursor theme, so depending on which window I hover over I get the white Breeze Light cursor or the black Adwaita cursor… Oddly enough, it’s the new QT6 applications that get the Adwaita cursor. I couldn’t replicate this on a “fresh” desktop with a clean user account, so it must be something in my existing settings that caused b0rkage in the 5 to 6 transition.
Can’t toggle mpv to fullscreen. The F key does nothing, neither does the –fullscreen switch.
There is still a desktop overview that allows dragging windows between virtual desktops (Meta+G) unfortunately when they removed the old overview, they forgot to fully integrate the new overview, so it can’t be activated by screen edges (which is how I used to access the old desktop overview).
Really wish I had waited. Post-update screen share is totally dead on my system. Apps that request access via a portal don’t work and never are given access to whatever I select and X11 apps that try to share X11 apps just have a black screen. It’s sucked because of how often I screen share on discord, and I’ve now totally lost that in both the client and on web. OBS virtual camera can’t even help me now because it can’t get access to anything.
Also on my girlfriend’s computer it totally broke graphical acceleration in the shell. Anything that uses it causes the whole shell to lag, and it makes any playing audio choppy.
There’s also lots of little annoyances around like the entire shell crashing when I change themes that have made me wildly unimpressed so far.
I also switched to Wayland for a surprise challenge. And for the extra spice, I also have a Kwin script called Polonium, which supports Plasma 6 only in the current dev version directly from git. Some widgets do not work, but all in all, it’s relatively stable so far and I will get through it.
I think Arch really makes sure stuff are compatible before rolling, my 32bit Void laptop has had Python 3.12 for months, and I get all kind of weird warnings when installing Python packages, while Arch is still on 3.11 (maybe testing is on 3.12 idk)
There’s that, and there’s also the fact that there’s only so many maintainer volunteer manhours. It happens to every distro, it just so hapenned that NixOS was faster this time. Though OpenSuse and NixOS suffer from this a bit less, as they’ve gone out of their way to automate large parts of their update and testing infrastructure(OpenSuse automates everything, I think?).
Part of that is that NixOS had a flake for Plasma 6 throughout the RC phases. So when it hit release, it was mostly just a case of merging it into nixpkgs proper.
You know, I am fine with it. One of the reasons I am using Tumbleweed is for the additional testing they do, so if they aren’t cool with shipping it yet I can wait.
I’m absolutely new to Linux (thanks to steam deck, which I think is arch Linux), what is KDE 6? Is that like a new OS update? Are there any implications for steam deck users?
Thank you for making such a thoughtful response! Out of curiosity, does this mean KDE actually runs on other distros of Linux as well? Until now, I had been under the impression that KDE was just arch Linux itself.
Would you happen to know a good way for me to learn more about Linux, and how to put it to good use from a beginner’s perspective?
Followup on the other person’s response - I don’t actually know of any modern desktop distro that doesn’t support KDE. That’s not because distros go out of their way to package KDE, but simply because at the end of the day, KDE is simply a fullscreen app (with a heck of a lot of functionality), and if you can compile code, you can compile and run KDE.
If you like youtube, the linux cast is a great option. For news though, the linux experiment can’t be beat. You’ll learn more as you go along and always know you can ask questions if you have them
Thanks! I just watched a video the Linux cast posted about KDE, and found a KDE 6 video posted by the Linux experiment. I’ll watch that one later. There’s still a lot of terminology that is lost on me, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up in time.
The new terminology will be never ending. The unix philosophy is to make small tools that do one thing really well (vs a single large monolithic OS that does a ton of things half decently), so every single component in and around Linux has a name, its own set of maintainers, and pages of documentation you could spend hours to months learning (depending on the tool).
On top of that, the open source ecosystem isn’t centralized, there’s no CEO telling everyone the one way to do things. Instead, everyone is free to build whatever they want according to whatever design patterns they choose. This is a blessing and a curse. There are packages that work nicely with other packages, and there are many you probably shouldn’t waste your time with.
All this is to say, I recommend always having a goal in mind when digging into Linux, and get good at skimming new terminology that you think is relevant to your goal. Be able to quickly understand what something does and how it’s used, but avoid going down the rabbit hole for every little thing.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t satisfy your curiosity, just know that you can be overwhelmed quickly if you don’t know how to tune out the noise. Being goal oriented helps me stay on task as I learn.
If you’re interested in KDE in particular, you should also check out Nicco Loves Linux. He’s one of the KDE developers and makes a lot of videos about it.
to answer your question KDE is not arch. Linux has a bunch of distros, you can think of one as a collection of packages. some distros want to do things one way some want to do it others.
the biggest difference between distros for most users are mostly desktop environments and package managers. KDE is the desktop enrollment, there are many others that you could also use, like gnome, or use none at all and only use the terminal. the package manager is how you get new packages and update the ones you already have. examples are apt and pacman.
you can make any distro work like another by installing the same packages, although this may not always be the easiest to do. an easy way to change your experience with Linux is to try a different desktop environment, you can run multiple on the same distro and switch between them, see what you like.
Until now, I had been under the impression that KDE was just arch Linux itself.
Like others have already noted, KDE Plasma^[1]^ is widely available and thus not only limited to Arch Linux. Heck, the same applies to 99% of the available software on Linux; universal package managers^[2]^ have been vital to this.
Would you happen to know a good way for me to learn more about Linux, and how to put it to good use from a beginner’s perspective?
As you already own a Steam Deck, I assume you want to look into how you may improve your mileage out of it. Others have already noted how you may do so for more traditional systems. But the way Linux is utilized on the Steam Deck is rather unique. It utilizes immutability^[3]^ (i.e. the inability to make certain (permanent) changes) which makes it rather harsh to change certain parts of the system; SteamOS’ implementation might even require you to redo some of these changes every so often… which is probably not what you were expecting. To circumvent this, perhaps it’s worth exploring other SteamOS-like distributions that are more friendly towards tinkerers. There are many to choose from; perhaps this breakdown may help you with making an informed decision (even if it’s found on a page dedicated to the Legion Go).
That is, the desktop environment (i.e. the piece of software responsible for how you visually interact with your system) that team KDE works on. They’re also responsible for many other projects; like Kate, Kdenlive and Krita etc (these are often easily recognized by their names that start with a “K”).
We may refer to package managers as the original App/Play Stores; a piece of software used to find, install and upgrade software. For a long time, every major distribution (like Arch, Debian and Fedora) had its own repository (i.e. set of installable software through the package manager). This meant that, it was very conceivable that software may be packaged (i.e. distributed and maintained through the repository) on some distros (abbreviation for distributions) but not on others. In the last couple of years, so-called universal package managers (like AppImage, Distrobox (technically this doesn’t belong here, but it does allow access to packages found on (other) distros), Flatpak, Guix, Nix and Snap) have become alternative package managers that are distro-agnostic. And have slowly, but surely, ridden Linux distros from concerns related to package availability.
There’s a lot to say about immutability. But for now, it’s most important to note that not all systems that are (sometimes falsely) referred to as immutable are created equally. For example, the respective implementations for Bazzite, Jovian NixOS and SteamOS differ immensely from one another. Arguably, referring to Bazzite and Jovian NixOS as immutable with ‘unchanging’ being what’s implied, would be a major disservice to both projects.
One really annoying problem, in firefox the mouse cursor position is wrong. Clicking in firefox clicks on the thing 30-ish pixels above my mouse. I noticed that it only happens when firefox is snapped to the left or right half of the screen (of course that’s how I almost always use it). I can fix it if I maximize firefox then snap it left or right. 100% scaling on the monitor, nothing funky, reset theme/appearance, reset my firefox profile, etc…
Don’t ask me to justify it but the modern view among evangelicals is that he is the one doing all the anthropomorphic stuff in Genesis. Also according to the Gospel of John he would have as a celestial being.
I almost feel bad for apologetics types sometimes. Having to square the circle.
The entire thing is pretty convoluted. I think even theologians don’t quite understand it, which is why they had to make up the doctrine of the Trinity to explain why this allegedly monotheistic religion had more than one diety entity.
Judaism had a solution to this. God just really likes making the Angels feel included in the process also likes to pretend to be weaker since it makes him more approachable. So every time God is talking to someone else up there it is just an Angel and every time he seems to be just Superman having an off day he is just pulling his punches.
Apparently God attended a seminar on middle management located in an Airport Hilton at some point and did some trust falls. Which makes you wonder what he wrote on his name badge. Someone get a Rabbi and ask.
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