brent PS--other distros (arch) are having hellish nightmarish problems with what I consider way-too-early releases of P6. Thread after thread of endless grievances.

Bit rough on upgrade for me, post-install screen goes black and I had to switch to a TTY to reboot. Outside of that it has been fine for me.

Difficulty is sorting the bad user practices, general user ignorance, Wayland specific issues that are not new and nothing to do with Plasma and distro packaging mistakes from actual Plasma 6 regressions.

  • If you are using some non default themes for sddm / plasma or have installed some plasmoids (extensions) you may run into breakages after upgrading because they have not been updated to support Plasma 6 / Qt6.

  • Plasma 6 defaults to Wayland (We currently force it to default to X11) so for many this will be their first time using Wayland where sadly nvidia is a bit of a shit show. It varies from card to card, user to user. Nothing to do with Plasma 6 itself, nvidia just suck.

  • Influx of users wanting to try the new shiny but....

  • KDE Neon screwed up their Plasma 6 launch, briefly mentioned here: https://pointieststick.com/2024/03/02/this-week-in-kde-a-smooth-release/

I am not trying to suggest all problems reported by users are not actual problems just that it can be deceiving. I have been using Plasma 6 since 2nd February for RC1 without issue. We will be on Plasma 6.0.3 by the time it hits stable.

As for XFCE I will remind people that our Plasma edition was in beta for literally years. Updating to a new version is not the same as adding support for a new DE for which no one has experience maintaining or configuring.

      brent why is XFCE taking it's time, comparatively, do you think?

      Well, XFCE is a completely new DE (for Solus), while Plasma 6 is "just" a major version update for an already existing, mature Solus edition.

          @TraceyC , thanks for the suggestion to run vivaldi-stable in a terminal and check the stderr output. That provided the clue that I needed to resolve the issue. I don't expect that to be a problem anymore - if I install something in order to test it, it won't need to deal with a profile from the clone parent. Ready to do what I can to help out now.

          Harvey Trying it in a VM and experiencing VM issues such as

          I typically don't enable 3D acceleration for my VMs, as I don't use them for anything that would require that level of video performance. But after reading this article, I enabled that feature on my "unstable" VM, and the result was that it wouldn't launch at all. I believe I saw the briefest flash of the UI one time, but it was over in milliseconds, and I didn't notice it during subsequent attempts.

          This is, of course, the VM that I've been using all day without the 3D acceleration turned on, so I'm going to turn it back off now. By the way, I did check the BIOS/UEFI virtualization setting, just confirm that Intel virtualization support is turned on at that level, and it is, and has always been.

          I just turned the 3D acceleration back off in the VBox manager, and the VM launched normally.

            I haven't used VirtualBox in years as I always had problems eventually switching virt-manager. So hopefully someone who uses virtualbox will have a look at what may be wrong here.

            The best way for me to migrate to plasma 6 was to delete all the KDE and plasma 5 folders and configuration files from my /home, /.config, /.cache, /.local etc. The reboot was magical, with a brand-new Plasma 6 desktop, and since then everything has worked perfectly, apart from a few minor details. We'll have to get used to the new plasma 6 control panel, where everything has been reorganized.

            Congratulations and many thanks to the Solus team and also to kde team!
            Solus Plasma 6 has a bright future ahead of it!

              sangheeta We'll have to get used to the new plasma 6 control panel, where everything has been reorganized.

              That's gonna take a while for me. I've always appreciated the thoughtful way that system settings were arranged in Plasma, compared to lesser DEs. I always knew exactly where to look to find what I wanted to change. Today it took me quite a whiile to figure out how to add another workspace to the switcher.

              To be honest, though, it took me years to get so familiar with the old settings. I'm willing to believe that the Plasma designers have done a good job yet again, and it's an improvement that I'll appreciate once I've learned it bettter. (And it was trivial to get rid of that horrible wallpaper.)

              Really, the biggest challenge for me will be getting used to having no dock. I use Latte on all the Plasma machines here, and I've learned to really appreciate it. In the KDE forum, I found out that there's a potential replacement for Latte called Crystal Dock. The pictures of it look really good, but for now it's only available for X11. The description stressed the "for now" part, so I expect it to be available for Wayland sometime soon. It's also DE agnostic, so plasmoids won't work with it, but I'm reserving judgement until I see what it uses instead.

                  sangheeta You can have a second panel as a dock.

                  Yes, thanks, that was another suggestion in the KDE forum. But I didn't expect that it would have typical dock behavior, so I haven't tried that yet. Maybe today.

                    Trying to use a panel as a dock works, in the sense that an icon-only task manager fulfulls one function of the dock, and the panel can be resized and relocated to make it look more like a dock.

                    But I have found no way to impart dock-like behavior to the bottom panel.

                    When the application's window is maximized, the panel behaves as a panel always has. It limits the available room in the screen's client area instead of moving out of the way. It doesn't hide when it's not needed, and reappear in front of the application when it is needed.

                    If anyone has found out how to make a panel work like a dock, I'd love to hear from you.

                      sangheeta right click your panel, choose "edit mode"

                      Excellent! Thanks. That should add the missing functionality.

                      Indeed, it does. There's still trivial behavior that a dock has. and it would be nice to see it with rounded corners, but I'm not concerned about trivialities at this point. The "dock" is now quite functional, and it's something I can live with. Maybe some day KDE will add a real dock, so we don't need to build it ourselves. That should be easy for them, given that they're already this close.

                        Hey, @TraceyC, I wrote up a bug report from the Plasma 6 unstable VM. I was properly signed in via 2FA. The report included two screenshots, but when I clicked to save the bug report, those images were not displayed. And the bug report was not saved, because I couldn't find it afterward.

                        Has anyone else mentioned that this has happened to them? I can repeat the bug report from my laptop, if necessary. As well as the bug about the bug report not being accepted.

                          WetGeek all the time, every time.

                          pictures NEVER upload in the original ticket.
                          Publish your ticket. then send a followup post with pics. After publishing I edit and I use the paper clip icon to search the HDD and add pics, this may take 2-3 times, with edits, but eventually I am always successful uploading pics. a massive github shortcoming I've learned to live with.
                          2 cents

                              brent pictures NEVER upload in the original ticket.

                              Our experiences are different. This is the first time it's happened to me, and it's the first time I've tried entering a bug report from this particular VM. (It's worked from other VMs in the past.)

                              I'm seriously considering replacing Xfce on my other laptop with Plasma 6. I want to eliminate the possibility of different behavior on this VM. (And Xfce seems to be going nowhere, anyway.)

                                  WetGeek Our experiences are different. This is the first time it's happened to me, and it's the first time I've tried entering a bug report from this particular VM. (It's worked from other VMs in the past.)

                                  I don't have a VM so that's not the factor...except maybe the VM behaves like my LibreWolf browser to the page somehow i.e. blocked element etc?

                                  WetGeek I'm seriously considering replacing Xfce on my other laptop with Plasma 6. I want to eliminate the possibility of different behavior on this VM. (And Xfce seems to be going nowhere, anyway.)

                                  I was saying this yesterday that I may do the same thing. I really need to see what Wayland (and KDE) is all about at this stage of my linux journey.
                                  love the xfce but feel I'm at the ceiling. It was a smart decision to court the Mate users as XFCE is 10X better but not enough to steal my time away from Budgie (and the endeavour arch on occasion).