KDE Plasma 6 is the next version of KDE expected in Fall 2023
Recently nate graham, QA developer for the KDE project, made it known by posting, an overview of the features that are planned to be removed in the version of KDE Plasma 6.
The publication explains that basically, the deprecated functions interfering with KDE development and do not work correctly are subject to elimination, in addition to the fact that the elimination of said components will free resources to promote innovation in the environment.
I think these removals will really improve the Plasma experience and open up room for further improvements in the future.
Plasma has had a long history, many histories and somewhat messy, with porting to this toolkit and then to that toolkit, with complexity and flexibility that went unused and caused bugs, with potentially cool features that didn't work. By removing some of the old junk from Plasma 6, we have an opportunity to take the best of what we already had and make it even better…
That being said, in the post it is mentioned that The following characteristics will be eliminated and the reason for the decision:
- The first of the features mentioned in the article is the KHotKeys system of global keyboard shortcuts, which is said to have been unmaintained for over 7 years, uses non-standard formats, does not work with Wayland. Instead to manage hotkeys in KDE 6, the KGlobalAccel subsystem will be used, which implements the necessary functionality and will add support for mouse control gestures in the future.
- The next functionality that will no longer be present from KDE Plasma 6, are the window widgets for KRunner (the widgets that appear in search results and are placed on the desktop as windows), it is mentioned that this have limited functionality and they give a false impression of KDE to users who mistake them for whole programs.
- Also task switchers (Alt+Tab handles) “Grid”, “Informative”, “Small Icons”, “Text Only”, and “Thumbnails” will be removed due to poor quality implementation and the availability of better alternatives.
- Another feature that will be out of Plasma 6 is the setting to force font DPI for Wayland and also the global icon size setting. It is mentioned that removing support for these settings will make scaling easier to manage and eliminate issues that arise from changing the global size of elements.
- On the other hand, it is also mentioned that the air theme is another item that will no longer be present in KDE Plasma 6, as this is an old set of styles that has been left unmaintained and has long-standing issues. I decided that there is no point in keeping an additional theme in the composition when the store.kde.org directory is better for alternative themes.
- The ability to set power consumption settings regarding virtual desktops (Activity): Few people use this, the implementation is too complicated, and there are issues that need to be fixed. It was decided that it is not worth wasting resources to tidy up this complicated code.
- The presentation of available settings in the form of a set of icons has been abandoned for many years and does not support some necessary features, such as highlighting changed settings. This mode has been replaced by a sidebar.
- Ability to use style set icons- There is confusion and inconsistency in design, when icons can be selected not only from icon themes, but also from style themes.
- Support for using the Unsplash Image of the Day– Feature stopped working after Unsplash stopped providing a public API and changed usage rules due to abuse related to automated training of machine learning models.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link