The future has arrived - KDE Plasma 6 desktop released

The KDE team announced "MegaRelease 6", a big upgrade that includes Plasma 6, Frameworks 6 and Gear 24.02 with tons of improvements to this popular desktop environment that's used on the Steam Deck for Desktop Mode. Hopefully we will see Valve give it an update in the next major SteamOS release.

Bringing the future to a desktop near you, the tech under the hood has gone through some major upgrades with updates to Qt and Wayland support (with Wayland also now the default). The developers say "We have done our best to ensure that these changes are as smooth and unnoticeable to the users as possible, so when you install this update, you will see the same familiar desktop environment that you know and love" and that the upgrades "benefit Plasma's security, efficiency, and performance, and improve support for modern hardware".

There's a lot of big stuff on top of Qt and Wayland upgrades including:

• New Desktop Overview effect that combines the Overview and Desktop Grid.
• Partial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR).
• Refreshed Breeze theme.
• Improved system settings app to make it more user friendly.
• Improved fingerprint unlock from lockscreen.
• Plasma Search now lets you customize the ordering of search results. Plus it's faster and performs better.
• Lots of improvements to various apps like the popular video editor Kdenlive.

Oh and my favourite, the Cube has returned! All hail hypnocube!

Lots of smaller but still useful changes have made it in too, like the controversial single-click to open files and folders has been moved to a double-click which better matches Windows and other desktop environments.

Probably one of the most exciting Plasma updates I've ever seen, and I can't wait to get my Kubuntu install on my desktop upgraded. I'm really keen to see how much Wayland support has improved, and should hopefully properly make it my own default now too.

See the full release page for all the info. There's simply far too many goodies to list here.