Updated: March 7, 2025
As you well know, and if you don't, let's establish this once more: I love the Plasma desktop environment, I use it extensively, and it's simply the best desktop out there. But I am not blind to its flaws and problems, and there were quite a few the first three times I tested the brand new Plasma 6. While KDE should be commended on being able to retain the look and feel and functionality without ruining the user experience, and just building on it with a new tech stack, there are still a lot of hurdles and obstacles in making Plasma 6 rock.
Well, there's a new version out there, Plasma 6.3. In October yesteryear, Plasma 6.2 turned out to be fine. Now, I must test the latest release, and see if and how the KDE team has improved on the proven formula. I was thinking about being adventurous, and doing a test on a system with Nvidia drivers, but I decided to be consistent, and continue with my IdeaPad 3 machine and its AMD processor and graphics. So we begin.
Setup
I had downloaded the KDE neon User Edition ISO on February 26. The ISO image file said 20250202, whereas the KDE's announcement on Plasma 6.3 came out on February 11. Well, it turns out, my hunch was correct. This wasn't Plasma 6.3, but 6.2.5. I had to do a full system install and then a big update. I really wonder why the images had not been respun?
Visuals, customization
Plasma looks great, but it can look ever better. For example, Dolphin's default styling is meh. In KDE neon, you don't even get the nice shortcuts for desktop folders, no Home button, no Refresh button, it's a bit nude. This is a very nice program, so why not pimp it up. Also, the menu is hidden, which is meh. A lot of KDE programs hide the menu by default, and that's a silly trend on the desktop. And the behavior is inconsistent.
Here's Dolphin with tiny changes:
I also wasn't happy with the task manager - the floating idea is silly. You cannot quickly "slam" your mouse cursor into the corners, as you may "miss" the widgets positioned there, or even the icons themselves. The whole idea of a task manager or a panel like this is that they are the "final frontier", and you waste as little time possible using them. Having to home in your mouse cursor like a guided missile is a waste of effort. Why do you need to see 5 px of wallpaper around it, it's unusable space anyway.
Speaking of wallpapers, once again, the default choice is a bit too harsh. Now, if you want to change your login splash screen and screen lock to match your desktop, you will struggle some. Notably, you can make SDDM use your desktop settings, all apart from the wallpaper. You can load a custom image, but there's no quick link to the existing, preinstalled Plasma backgrounds. On the other hand, with the screen lock, they are shown by default. This is inconsistent. And it means if you want one image for all three, the easiest thing is to use your own wallpaper, as you won't be able to easily find the system ones to decorate SDDM.
There are problems with window borders, too. Notice Firefox, when dragged to the left corner of the screen, you see the left border, but the right one ain't shown. And if you do the right corner, then you'll see the opposite. Quite weird. It's as if you can only see three lines, not four, at any given moment. Fully maximized windows, as well, mind.
The default Breeze theme color set is not the best, you can't see any difference between foreground and background windows. Breeze Classic, all the way. The modern fascination with soulless gray is pointless. And I guess the fonts won't ever be black, as I like, but at least, Plasma gives you an easy way to change this.
Bugs, my precious
I mentioned the Firefox snap problem in my recent Lenovo G50 & SSD article. But KDE neon ships with a Firefox deb package, and yet, still, it somehow "undid" its own icon. It was gone from the task manager, and from the Favorites. Must be an update or something, but that's really crude.
Why does Firefox ask to be set as a default browser, when it IS the default browser? Notice the ugly window commands, too. You need to enable the title bar and all that, to get proper Plasma buttons.
Firefox icon gone after an update. Or whatever.
I re-added the task manager icon (pinned it), but the Favorites are still nyet.
The battery indicator tells you how power profiles aren't available, and how I should install a package called power-profiles-daemon, but it's already there, installed.
Kate never saves sessions. Never. No matter what option I ticked, nope. The only way around it is to manually set a session during the program's startup as I wrote in my tutorial. But whatever's in the options didn't work, nor were any empty buffers preserved. I've been ranting about this issue for years now.
Plasma system monitor
Before the update, I checked the monitor's about page. It said 2020, last update. Figures. But now, finally, it's had some love. The version in Plasma 6.3 reads 2024, and it feels that it's been improved. Most notably, it's more lightweight than before. But it still shows CPU values as stacked, which is nonsense. If a person does not know how many cores and/or threads they have, a value of 800 or 2,000% is meaningless. On the other hand, the simple scale of 0-100% is always meaningful. It says what it says, right there.
You can highlight specific cores, and they will pop to the front of the graph, which is cool. However, you will also get a tooltip popup, which is sort of redundant. Then, you can export graphs as desktop widgets. Very nice. But here, too, you get the double-info tooltips. One way around it when taking screenshots so things look pretty is to jiggle the mouse cursor around. But yeah.
Help pages
Another nice refresh - help. This section features more prominently in the menu now. The problem is, the linked handbook and manuals are largely outdated, with some having been updated 3-4 years ago, while many guides are over a decade old. This ain't a problem if the information hasn't changed, but the look & feel is decidedly KDE 3.5 and Plasma 4 rather than anything more recent. So, good on one hand, tricky on the other.
Wayland? Nope, X11 all the way
Sure, KDE has done tons of work on making Wayland better. But it's still not good, even for basic stuff. The icon rearrange on the task manager, for instance. You MUST click away after dragging an icon to defocus the cursor, otherwise it will re-drag the same icon when you try to move the next one. No such problem in X11.
There's no gamma, and with the mediocre display on my test laptop, it's a must. X11 provides, of course, and as I mentioned in my recent Pharaoh game & HD screens in Linux, there's tons of missing functionality in Wayland. Also, the clarity is ever so much better in X11. Don't ask me why, simply test for yourself.
The X11 session is so much better, smoother. Don't believe me? Test it.
And, as an aside, both Wayland and X11 no longer allow tooltips to be screenshot. They always disappear, no matter what timer you use, and how you set Spectacle to work. A tiny observation, but still.
Performance, responsiveness
The desktop is fast. Very much so. Samba speed was also great. Instantaneous. But overall, the system's performance wasn't mind-boggling. For example, the boot sequence takes 17 seconds to login, 7 seconds to the working session. Quite slow. This is a 2020 laptop, with NVMe. My 2015 Lenovo G50, into which I added an ordinary SSD just a few days ago, takes 14 and 8 seconds to login, running Kubuntu 24.04. That five-year-older machine has a meager i3 processor, so I guess, the operating system seems to be the bottleneck, rather than hardware. But to be fair, this IdeaPad 3 never impressed with its behavior.
The battery estimate is also so-so. With 80% juice capacity left, the projected longevity wildly seesawed from the about 4 hours you can see above (the whole power daemon thingie), with brightness set to 80%, down to about 2:50 hours after some light activity. Not stellar numbers by any means. But this isn't something we can blame Plasma for, although the power profile thingie can be done more elegantly.
After some tweaking, 'tis beautiful, stylish. Works great. Throw in the KDE browser integration, and Bob's your uncle. Or whatever your uncle's name is. Yeah.
A bit on KDE neon ...
Over the years, I've seen people complain how I never separate KDE neon from Plasma when doing reviews. Well, the thing is, the KDE team has chosen neon to be the official demonstrator for the desktop environment. And, it's not really a good demonstrator. It's too buggy, and it doesn't let Plasma shine.
In this particular instance, there were tons of problems:
- The Calamares installer remains as annoying as ever. It insisted on being connected to power, and told me how certain options would be limited. At the point, I had 94% battery charge, and the entire installation took less than 10 minutes. I was nowhere near any risk of running out of juice. Besides, the installation should never differ based on something as arbitrary as battery. Either it runs or not.
- When I plugged the charger in, Calamares did not detect this. I had to restart the installer. See below:
- There's always that annoying "waiting for 1 module" nonsense. About 30 seconds waiting for something, no idea what, and it always happens. Always. Close the installer, start fresh, repeat. Why? And what "module" are we waiting for, exactly? The actual wait tally is 44 seconds, no less.
- There's the EFI partition warning that it needs to be 300 MB. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. The laptop has a 256MB one, and it's NEVER had any problems with any installation. I've set up dozens of distros on this box, there are tons of leftover images there, and it's not even 40% full.
- The system got updated to Plasma 6.3, but GRUB still reads 6.2.
- System Settings crashed on a fully up-to-date system.
Package management in KDE neon is utterly broken
I decided to make this into a separate heading, because it's big and important. There were TONS of issues related to package management. Tons. TL;DR: KDE neon is simply not usable as a day-to-day system because it breaks so many dependencies.
First, when you run apt update, it will tell you about missing services:
sudo apt update
Failed to start apt-news.service: Unit apt-news.service not found.
Failed to start esm-cache.service: Unit esm-cache.service not found.
Discover couldn't really update. It got stuck - has to be the PackageKit bug I mentioned so many times already. This is why I resorted to the command line, and saw the errors above.
Then, I tried to install Steam and got the following error:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
steam-installer : Depends: steam-libs-i386 (= 1:1.0.0.79~ds-2) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
I have not held anything. It simply means there's no i386 architecture added to apt. Now, Steam is the biggest gaming platform in the world. Most of its titles are 32-bit, and if you sum all their installations, they most likely eclipse all other software, anywhere, by orders of magnitude. Not having support for 32-bit apps is horrendous.
It can be fixed by adding i386 - I couldn't find a way to do this through Discover:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Then, I tried to install a bunch of other programs, including Thunderbird. Here, Ubuntu's annoying deb-to-snap mechanism kicked in. The worst part is, I have disabled both Flatpak and snap through Discover on this box, so why would I get Thunderbird installed then? Then, it looked as if the installation was stuck at 2%, but this is because snapd was downloading its prerequisite packages, the bases and such, which take a few GB worth of my space. As I was connected to a slow connection, this took a good 15 minutes. A waste of my time.
Selecting previously unselected package thunderbird.
Preparing to unpack .../04-thunderbird_2%3a1snap1-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb ...
=> Installing the thunderbird snap
==> Checking connectivity with the snap store
==> Installing the thunderbird snap
2025-03-01T22:01:43+01:00 INFO Waiting for automatic snapd restart...
Next, I tried to install Calibre. This cannot be done, because KDE neon comes with all sorts of packages of its own, unique to the Plasma team development and such, and they breaks everything else. You simply cannot install Calibre:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
calibre-bin : Depends: qt6-base-abi (= 6.4.2)
python3-pyqt6 : Depends: qt6-base-abi (= 6.4.2)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
Considering libpodofo0.9.8t64:amd64 0 as a solution to calibre-bin:amd64 -1
Re-Instated libpodofo0.9.8t64:amd64
Broken calibre-bin:amd64 Depends on qt6-base-abi:amd64 < none @un H > (= 6.4.2)
Considering libqt6core6t64:amd64 17 as a solution to calibre-bin:amd64 -1
Conclusion
Plasma 6 is shaping up nicely. It's been a year now since the new major version of the desktop environment has been released, and it's come a long way since the early incarnation. It still looks and behaves like Plasma 5, so you won't get any system shock moving over to it. Plasma also retains its magical power of customization, and you can actually do proper desktop stuff with it. Even things like, gasp, minimize windows or show desktop or save desktop icons, golly. Pretty, elegant, and the bugs are going away, gradually.
All that said, there are still problems and issues, some seemingly unnecessary so. The "noise" of KDE neon sure doesn't help. The KDE team must maintain a distro that is essentially Ubuntu, only 100x buggier, and that just creates overhead. And if one wishes to sample Plasma, they may come away disappointed, and not because there's something wrong with the desktop, but because KDE neon is simply not stable enough. It's like opening a fancy new restaurant in a building with a leaky roof. Even if you enjoy the cuisine a lot, the general ambiance will be a bit meh. Wayland is another drag. Well, there we are. Plasma remains nice, and it's slowly getting better. A bit too slowly, but hey. Anyway, see you around.
Cheers.