KDE Plasma 6

KDE Plasma 6 is the sixth generation of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It is the successor of KDE Plasma 5 and was first released on 28 February 2024.

Overview
KDE Plasma 6 was designed to not be a very large departure from KDE Plasma 5, instead being a series of improvements. KDE Plasma 6 is built using Qt 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear 24.02. In addition, support for the Wayland protocol was mainstreamed as the default graphical session, with X11 support made secondary. It introduces a new sound theme, Ocean, replacing Oxygen's sound theme as the default. Plasma 6 on Wayland has partial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) and color blindness correction filters. The Discover app and settings were also improved and the 3D cube desktop effect was brought back.

New features
Compared to the latest Plasma 5 release, the sixth generation brings the following new features:
 * The panel floats by default. Panels can be configured using auto-hide mode and be resized, including being turned into a dock.
 * Plasma Search allows customizing the ordering of search results, supports timezones conversion and matches the text in both the current system language and English.
 * Support for the Astronomical and Umm al-Qura Calendars in the calendar applet.
 * Support for use of both password and fingerprint authentication at the same time.
 * Support for sound themes.

History
The first Technology Preview of Plasma 6 was released on 28 February 2024.

Releases
Releases of new versions are planned every 4 months (3 times a year) initially. Though it may move to 2 releases a year in the future.

Normal releases will stop receiving bugfixes as soon as the following release is available. The exception to this rule are LTS releases.