Transform your desktop with hot KDE Plasma and a little Jonni Bidwell.

CREDIT: Magictorch

Of you’ve never heard of KDE, you’re missing out on a fantastic desktop experience. Or maybe you have heard of it, but recall it bringing your system I to a crawl in the 2010s. Rest assured those days are gone and despite looking beautiful, KDE Plasma (to give the desktop its proper title) is quite light on resource usage.

Trying out the latest KDE Plasma offerings used to be tricky. You’d generally have to wait until the release cadence allowed for it to be included in a major distribution. Even then you’d run into packaging or compatibility issues. But thanks to KDE Neon, this is no longer the case. KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu, but includes the latest KDE workings, so you get all the newest desktop offerings on a rock-solid foundation. We show you how to install Neon and get the most out of it.

We’ve also got tips on how to install KDE Plasma alongside your current desktop, so you can switch between what you know and what you want to know. We cover everything the tweakiest of desktop tweakers will want to (er) tweak, too, and explain how to use the KDE Connect app on any distro, so you can get your PC and your mobile devices working in harmony.

Enter the K desktop environment and apps

Introducing KDE Plasma 6.0 and the surrounding terminology.

Anyone who can name two Linux desktop environments off the top of their heads (admittedly a small sample of the general population) will very likely say “Gnome and KDE”. This duality was even brought up in Mr Robot. But, at least for the last decade or so, it seems as though KDE Plasma (to give it its correct title) has always played second fiddle to Gnome. This is perhaps unfair. Lots of other desktop environments exist, and most of these are based on GTK (the toolkit that underlies Gnome). Over the last decade, GTK has become inextricably linked [that is not a good pun – ed] to certain Gnome libraries. So, by journalistic oversimplification, we might get away with saying that lots of these other desktops (MATE, Budgie, Xfce, Cinnamon and even the reboot of Unity) incorporate a significant portion of Gnome plumbing, even if they don’t look like it.

KDE Plasma uses the Qt (often pronounced “cute”) toolkit, which has vastly different origins (we’ll get into the ins and outs of the two toolkits and related nomenclature later; do bear with us). As far as desktop use goes, Qt is only used in KDE Plasma and LXQt (the lightweight desktop used in Lubuntu). In contrast to GTK, Qt has become much very much decoupled from the rest of the KDE ecosystem. This (specifically the strict delineation of Qt, KDE Frameworks and the KDE Applications themselves) was one of the major achievements of KDE Plasma 5, which we wrote about back in LXF206. There we noted the desktop was slicker, less bloated and much more welcoming to newcomers than its predecessor (which by the end of its tenure was called KDE SC4).

In February, KDE Plasma 6.0 was released, and we have been itching to write about it ever since. But we figured it diplomatic to wait until the bugs were ironed out first. So here we are, writing just after KDE 6.0.4 has been released, scratching that itch. Those who remember the (lengthy and arduous) transition from KDE 4 to KDE Plasma 5 will surely recall that the two releases were cosmetically (and also constitutionally) very different. We’ll clear one thing up right now to avoid disappointment: KDE Plasma 6 does not look hugely different from its predecessor. There aren’t really any new flashy user-facing features. Indeed, a lot of the changes are incremental continuations of the structure introduced in KDE Plasma 5. That notwithstanding, there are some major under-the-hood changes and an all-round great desktop. Over the page we show you KDE Neon, the easiest way to sample this latest effort.