As the KDE development team prepares for the exciting release of the highly anticipated Plasma 6 desktop environment, they have announced the removal of certain features to refine the user experience and streamline performance. Unlike GNOME’s approach to what is now known as the GNOME 3 Shell, which went through a metamorphosis in 2011 with an array of still-controversial decisions in terms of functionality and design, KDE’s approach to the new Plasma 6 desktop is far more measured and, above all, grounded.
One of the features announced for removal that may be missed by users is the System Settings Icons View. KDE developers have for years relied on the more popular Sidebar view, widely adopted by most users, which will remain the only one available in the upcoming Plasma 6 release. This change may affect users coming from non-Linux operating systems who are more accustomed to the Icons View.
Another feature that users might miss is the "timer" windowed widget. Some users who didn't use it frequently enough to warrant adding it as a widget relied on the windowed widget instead. Also, the force font DPI option will be missed as it allowed users to have fonts appear at the right size on their laptop’s display which requires fractional scaling. The default of 96 doesn’t cut it, and 144 makes fonts appear at the right size. However, this option may be moved to be per-display in the future.
The Air Plasma theme, even though not widely used, will also be missed due to its aesthetic appeal. However, these changes and deprecations have been done to focus on the maintenance of more important features and to simplify code paths.
With the transition to Plasma 6, themes are effectively limited to providing alternate panel backgrounds with a set text color but with mandatory Breeze icons because nothing else is practical. This is due to the difficulties experienced with the Plasma 5 system in achieving the goal of Plasma using 100% different icons from the rest of the system. This goal was only achieved if the theme developer followed Plasma development very closely and added needed icons to their Plasma theme any time any new icons were referenced upstream. In most cases, Plasma themes didn't achieve this, leading to a jumble of mismatching icons--some being from the Plasma theme, and some being from the system theme.
The removals have been carefully chosen because they don't showcase the best of Plasma, and instead act as hidden minefields or make the system feel buggier. They represent common pain points for new users, sources of confusion, and user support questions. The removals will improve the Plasma experience and open up some space for making it even better in the future. By removing some of the old cruft from Plasma 6, there is an opportunity to build on the best of what was already had and make it even better.
For KDE Plasma 6, the KDE team intends to remove a number of old features and bits of code that haven’t been touched in ages or simply don’t make sense to keep around. Most of it is truly stuff few will use, but there are some interesting ones that might make some users a little sad.
For instance, Unsplash integration is being removed. This decision was made not because the developers wanted to, but because Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma’s usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models.
Finally, the weird issue where the selected Plasma style would overwrite some of the icons from the system-wide icon theme is being fixed. This feature originally served the purpose of allowing monochrome icons to be set in Plasma, but this is simply no longer needed and only leads to confusion.
In conclusion, while the removal of certain features from Plasma 6 may initially seem like a step back, it is in fact a strategic move to improve the user experience, streamline performance, and make room for new and improved features. As development continues, we can expect Plasma 6 to be more user-friendly, efficient, and secure.