Well, the release of KDE Plasma 6 came a few weeks ago, and I started using it on my Arch distro. I have to say I'm mildly disappointed. That's nothing against the devs, who worked very hard to deliver something great, but I'm honestly not impressed for how much this was all amped up. Firstly, it looks a lot like Plasma 5 in almost every respect. No new theme, and while there are new sounds, they're not that different from the default Breeze sounds that were in Plasma 5. Still, no harm there. So it looks like Plasma 5, which premiered a decade ago on the surface. Under the hood there are a few changes. The menus have been a little more consolidated, though they kind of shuffled them around in a way that makes finding things harder if you've been used to Plasma 5 for any length of time. While I'm not a GNOME user, the GNOME devs have simplified menus to the point where they're almost intuitive, and I wish the KDE folks would have done the same here. As a result, you have nested menu items within nested menu items, and anyone who knows about UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) know that nesting multiple menus is usually a very bad idea. Speaking of UI and UX, if you want to add a panel, move a panel, or adjust panels, it feels like a step back. They put the new edit menu right over top the old one. I mean it's literally sitting on top of it, you can't get to it even though not all the features are available in the new edit menu. The widgets are still out, save for a handful, though I expect that will change over the coming months. Still, if you use widgets in Plasma 5, most of them aren't available yet. Same goes for themes. Plasma 6 will not load Plasma 5 themes, as the new Plasma 6 is based on Qt 6 and all that entails. So you get about a dozen themes, and a dozen widgets at the moment, and it's likely yours aren't ready yet. The performance of Plasma 6 is solid, so that's good, with some improvement over Plasma 5's performance, and it's noticeable in some games. I had good experience in Lutris on Plasma 6. Still, there are still a boat load of bugs, especially graphical bugs where windows get stuck, or do the solitaire effect, and you have to restart, and for me it has been unstable, though other users report their experiences aren't as bad. Honestly, it all feels underwhelming, though. I guess I expected something more. I remember when KDE Plasma 5 was released, and it was a huge change, they even made a tutorial video and a software reveal video, but KDE Plasma 6 barely gets a quick introduction. In my opinion, if you're using Linux and KDE, and you're curious, I suggest waiting, or perhaps downloading KDE Neon in a virtual machine and trying it out there. You may have better luck. As for me, I'm regressing and waiting until a few months have passed before trying again.
