Plasma 6 lands in Arch Linux, KDE neon teething issues and Plasma 6.1 heating up

Nice to see it start getting pushed. Once it hits openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've got some distrohopping to do.

Meanwhile in Debian

*crickets chirping*.

More seriously, I wish Neon would provide repositories for Debian unstable and testing.

Broke Steam Remote Play completely for me on Arch + Wayland. I'm unsure if it was all remote play, or just to the Steam Link. Inputs were transmitted back to my PC but no visuals (And I believe no audio) were streamed from my PC to the TV. When alt tabbed to a window that wasn't steam, the TV would flicker with a green square. No idea what that was about, but gave a couple of us a headache from the flashing lol.

Worked again when switching to X11, though X11 has its own problems with remote play and certain games. Plus, I just much prefer Wayland ever since I switched to an AMD card.

That aside, excited to try out some of the improvements this brings along.

installed today. KWin tiling scripts are broken... (exquisite for me)

I'm not a fan of the changes to System Settings, and having my panels suddenly be 'floating' when I logged in was very off-putting, and it sucks that I now have to wait until the window manager scripts I rely on are ported to Plasma 6, and when I tried the X11 session using Awesome as window manager plasma shell kept crashing when I tried to log out (which is pretty funny, but having to switch to a TTY and doing a full reboot did fix the Breeze SDDM theme, so that's nice),...

But at least it doesn't crash constantly like Plasma 5 did on release, so that's a positive I guess.

EDIT: And I now need to go and configure single-click to open... I'm halfway tempted to ask a refund for the money I donated.


Last edited by tmtvl on 8 March 2024 at 3:10 pm UTC

The biggest issue for me is finding stuff in the rearranged system settings 😄

I was surprised how smooth it as. Sadly had to switch back to X11 because Eclipse IDE crashes and CS2 was very choppy. :(

EDIT: And I now need to go and configure single-click to open... I'm halfway tempted to ask a refund for the money I donated.

This is sarcastic, right? You don't get anything from a donation. It's not a trade.

KDE has said in multiple places that they were changing the click defaults.

I haven't upgraded my main system yet, but testing the upgrade in a VM went fairly well. I've been kind of excited for Plasma 6.

This is sarcastic, right? You don't get anything from a donation. It's not a trade.

Yes, it was a joke. I'm not actually gonna ask a refund on my donations just because Plasma 6 is the worst 'upgrade' since GNOME 3. And hey, I get it: they want new users so if they feel like they have to tell the old users to go fuck themselves so be it. It's fine, I just get irked when that happens.

I made the change this weekend, ditched Gnome and installed Plasma 6 instead on my Framework laptop. The Gnome group seems to have a more sane selection of packages, but that's of course a Arch Linux thing. Also, Plasma 6 takes up quite some noticeable amount of RAM at times, even though the system is idling. Other than that I quite like it. There are a couple features that I really like, for example the Flatpak integration into the system settings. It's snappy, it runs smooth and I haven't encountered any problems so far. But then again, I don't use the laptop for heavy lifting.

Oh yeah, and I really like the floating panel(s) and how they can be configures to automatically hide when a window goes full screen.

I'll stick with Plasma 6 for the time being. I may check Gnome again when they implement fractional scaling. But for now, I'm happy with this new Plasma release.

Also, Plasma 6 takes up quite some noticeable amount of RAM at times, even though the system is idling.

If you aren't using KDE PIM (Kmail and etc.) try to disable Akonadi server - it eats a ton of RAM for something you might not use.

PSA FOR ENDEAVOR OS USERS: I’ve broken two different installations due to issues with plasma 6. Only update if you must

Has anyone been able to get tearing to work for fullscreen games/general applications? Not having much success, even with Adaptive Sync turned off too, but even on my two other displays without Freesync I'm not seeing any tearing with the option enabled in System Settings.

As far as I understand Xwayland and KWin now fully implement the tearing protocol, and Mesa 24 should have support for the protocol as well. Tried out `MESA_VK_WSI_PRESENT_MODE=immediate` as well for some DXVK games, but not having any luck. Same story with Gamescope using `--immediate-flips`.

Videos in the Steam Overlay when fullscreen have tearing but that's regardless of this setting and always in the same spot.

I'm not really interested in having in on practically, I'm just morbidly curious to see tearing on Wayland, either in games, fullscreen YouTube videos from a browser, or anywhere. Maybe there's a step I'm missing or something isn't quite ready to be enabled at the flick of a switch yet.

Although for what it's worth, I did try the "Enable Tearing" option on my Steam Deck with the same games to see if I could introduce some tearing, and still couldn't see it. Maybe my eyes just aren't too sharp

I can't imagine it's easy to indues tearing on such weak hardware as the Steam Deck. It really depends on the game, the hardware and the player. Some people a sensitive others are not. For me it's like looking at one of those 3D illusion images. Once I see it I cannot un-see it :)

Again it depends on the game but if it's a multiplayer game I think the vast majority would take screen tearing over input lag. But if you are playing a turn-based single player game than you probably wont care :) But allowing screen tearing is a very important feature for a very large portion of gamers. At least for those of us coming from Windows were this has been an option for ages. Many would even call it basic. I do see there is some drama surrounding screen tearing in the Linux community, which I don't understand at all. Giving users options apparently does not include screen tearing :)

I narrowly escaped the Neon upgrade disaster by checking the forums before doing the update. The Neon maintainers really messed up pushing an unfinished and untested version of Plasma 6 through to their basic User distro. I am thinking of moving back to Kubuntu since I don't need bleeding edge anymore.

That's why they keep saying that KDE Neon is not a distro. If you are not a KDE developer, a happy tester or really need the bleeding edge Plasma features, I would pick a real distro. Whatever you fancy I'm not here to sell you anything, but this is not the first time KDE Neon has had problems with upgrades.

This is sarcastic, right? You don't get anything from a donation. It's not a trade.

Yes, it was a joke. I'm not actually gonna ask a refund on my donations just because Plasma 6 is the worst 'upgrade' since GNOME 3. And hey, I get it: they want new users so if they feel like they have to tell the old users to go fuck themselves so be it. It's fine, I just get irked when that happens.

Hey if that's how you feel then that's how you feel. I'm a long time user of Plasma 5 and I'm, so far at least, pretty happy with most of the changes in Plasma 6. I don't have it on my main PC yet but I threw KDE Neon on my laptop and I got very few issues. I don't do a lot of customization though, only move the panel to the left side and some small things. Single-click or double-click as default don't matter to me as long as I can set double-click - like it should be *wink wink*. All in all I think Plasma 6.3, or whatever it will be, will be very solid by the time Kubuntu 24.10 is released.


Last edited by Brokatt on 12 March 2024 at 3:13 pm UTC

Also, Plasma 6 takes up quite some noticeable amount of RAM at times, even though the system is idling.

If you aren't using KDE PIM (Kmail and etc.) try to disable Akonadi server - it eats a ton of RAM for something you might not use.

Thanks Shmerl, but the service isn't running on my system. It's no big deal, really. I was just astonished that the system at times uses ~ 2GB of RAM when there's not much going on.

well, it's out for Tumbleweed, but ... it did NOT go well for me. In the middle of a zypper dup it just crashes the entire DE to a login screen. every time. repeatedly. Even after reboot. Had to snapper back to an old snapshot to fix it. It left my system with half installed Plasma 5.x and half 6.0.

edit:
I got it to work! Currently running plasma6
I received some awesome support from the official forums, and they suggested I dump the DE and go down into system terminal by hitting ctrl-alt-f4 and doing the zypper dup there. It worked. Love that community!


Last edited by Jarmer on 14 March 2024 at 12:55 am UTC

Also, Plasma 6 takes up quite some noticeable amount of RAM at times, even though the system is idling.

If you aren't using KDE PIM (Kmail and etc.) try to disable Akonadi server - it eats a ton of RAM for something you might not use.

Thanks Shmerl, but the service isn't running on my system. It's no big deal, really. I was just astonished that the system at times uses ~ 2GB of RAM when there's not much going on.

2GB out of?

In my case it does, but only when Discover is looking for updates, when said task ends, it returns to 1.2-1.5 GB out of 8GB.

I think it could be optimized a bit more, but even in the current state, uses a lot less than Windows 10/11 (with the former using almost 2.5GB while idle and the latter skyrocketing to 3.6 GB)

I've never been concerned much about ram system usage, just as long as something doesn't go off the rails and start consuming all of it ... Like for instance right now I'm on Plamsa6 and I've got all my normal work-day apps open:

spotify
standard notes
signal
slack
firefox
librewolf
chromium
kate
steam (in background idling)

and I'm using 6 gigs of ram out of 32. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I narrowly escaped the Neon upgrade disaster by checking the forums before doing the update. The Neon maintainers really messed up pushing an unfinished and untested version of Plasma 6 through to their basic User distro. I am thinking of moving back to Kubuntu since I don't need bleeding edge anymore.

That's why they keep saying that KDE Neon is not a distro. If you are not a KDE developer, a happy tester or really need the bleeding edge Plasma features, I would pick a real distro. Whatever you fancy I'm not here to sell you anything, but this is not the first time KDE Neon has had problems with upgrades.

Yeah. I have been running linux for over two decades. I do know what I am doing. Neon has made revisions to its goals several times and the "user" edition gets less and less stable with each step. Yes, it is a distribution, regardless of what they try to say, but they have gotten to the point now where no-one should use it for anything requiring stability. Like work.

It is their right to change course, just as it is entirely correct to call them out.

I narrowly escaped the Neon upgrade disaster by checking the forums before doing the update. The Neon maintainers really messed up pushing an unfinished and untested version of Plasma 6 through to their basic User distro. I am thinking of moving back to Kubuntu since I don't need bleeding edge anymore.

That's why they keep saying that KDE Neon is not a distro. If you are not a KDE developer, a happy tester or really need the bleeding edge Plasma features, I would pick a real distro. Whatever you fancy I'm not here to sell you anything, but this is not the first time KDE Neon has had problems with upgrades.

Yeah. I have been running linux for over two decades. I do know what I am doing. Neon has made revisions to its goals several times and the "user" edition gets less and less stable with each step. Yes, it is a distribution, regardless of what they try to say, but they have gotten to the point now where no-one should use it for anything requiring stability. Like work.

It is their right to change course, just as it is entirely correct to call them out.

Good for you. I was agreeing with you that KDE Neon is too unstable and especially their upgrade process has always been shaky. I don't think KDE Neon should be used by anyone other than KDE devs, but that is my opinion. I'm sure anyone with decades of Linux experience have no problem making it work, but personally I don't need the hassle.

I'm on Plasma 6 now, working just fine on openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Still using X11, though. That's still the default for this particular distro.