Review: KaOS With Plasma 6 Preview
I made a few other observations about Plasma 6 while I was exploring its new features. One was the desktop does not appear to have changed in terms of performance and resource consumption. Plasma 6 used about 900MB of RAM on KaOS, which is about the same amount Plasma 5 uses on the same distribution running the same services. This makes Plasma a little heavier than average (when compared against other desktops), but still lighter than GNOME on most distributions.
In terms of responsiveness, Plasma is still in the middle of the pack. It performs well, but isn't as snappy as lighter desktops such as LXQt.
A concern I had was the System Settings panel crashed frequently. About half of the time, when I opened a specific configuration page, System Settings would crash. This was also a problem with later versions of the Plasma 5.x series and it has become worse in the preview of Plasma 6.
On the whole, Plasma 6 looks like it will be a minor evolution forward. There are some nice little touches, some more predictable and consistent defaults, and some streamlining of the experience. Nothing big or surprising, just nice little improvements and a few visual tweaks that I think most people will enjoy.