KDE Plasma 6 is the sixth and most recent generation of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It is the successor of KDE Plasma 5 and was first released on 28 February 2024.
KDE Plasma 6 was designed not to be a major departure from KDE Plasma 5, but rather a series of improvements. KDE Plasma 6 is built using Qt 6, KDE Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear 24.02. In addition, support for the Wayland protocol was mainstreamed as the default graphical session, with X11 support made secondary. It introduces a new sound theme, Ocean, replacing Oxygen's as the default. Plasma 6 on Wayland has partial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) and color blindness correction filters. The Discover app and settings were also improved, and the 3D cube desktop effect was brought back.
Compared to the latest Plasma 5 release, the sixth generation brings the following new features:
The first stable version of Plasma 6 was released on 28 February 2024.
, major versions with new features are released every four months, with three updates per year. However, since 2023, the KDE community has expressed a preference to transition to a semi-annual schedule, with updates occurring every six months, if it can be timed to align with the release cycles of the major Linux distributions that package Plasma (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE Leap, and Fedora).
Each release receives up to six patch releases containing bug fixes. Releases will stop receiving bug fixes as soon as the next major release is available. There are no plans to offer a long-term support version of Plasma 6.