Plasma 6 desktop - Me early impressions be solid but ...
There are several layers to this review. One, the KDE team made the right choice not to push ahead with Plasma 6 for the Kubuntu LTS, because it's not stable or robust enough for that. Two, this ISO seems somewhat broken, and it won't even install on physical hardware. This could be KDE neon only, but I don't know. Three, there were various issues in Plasma 6, but they seem related to hardware, virtual or physical, rather than any inherent behavior in the actual desktop environment. Four, finally, I found some of the default options dubious, like the wallpaper or the floating panel. Some of the choices do not seem to make sense to me, and create a cheaper impression than what Plasma deserves.
From a purely UI perspective, this is a promising start, though. Plasma 6 does not take away from the solid foundation that's Plasma 5, and in fact, you can't really tell the two apart. That's very important, and I'm happy the KDE team didn't try to deconstruct their proven, efficient desktop formula. But that's no excuse for the slew of problems surrounding the test bed, the distro itself, which kind of ruined the initial impressions. I'm doing my best to separate the two, but it's hard. I mean the physical hardware test, that's a big fail. Thus, I'd say there's good stuff coming, but for now, it feels fragile and experimental and buggy. You should test Plasma 6, but we're still months off from where it ought to be. I am also keenly interested to see whether Wayland makes sense in day-to-day scenarios, but for that, I'll need an image that actually installs on real hardware. We shall revisit Plasma on physical machines pretty soon. As soon as it works, that is. Take care, folkses. Dedoimedo out.