Developer calls KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment ready for testing use

KDE Plasma 6 is ready for testing. That’s what one of the lead developers of the desktop environment says. It is not yet known when the long-awaited successor to Plasma 5 will be released, but according to Nate Graham, testers can already get started with a relatively stable build.

Graham, one of the developers of KDE’s standard desktop environment Plasma, mentions Plasma 6 in a newsletter ‘fairly livable’. He says he spent some time traveling with the latest build of the UI on his laptop and experienced “no resistance,” but doesn’t say what that means in practice. In any case, Graham recommends that other developers and Linux fans run Plasma 6 and give it a try, not specifically as a daily driver, but as a test build. He says that the desktop environment has now reached a state where this is possible.

Graham and other Plasma developers are now mainly busy refactoring code. This happens, among other things, in the API used for widgets. “That applies to virtually everything,” says Graham. According to him, it will then be easier to create widgets for Plasma 6. Furthermore, a lot of duplicate code needs to be merged. The developers can then continue with quality assurances.

Graham does not yet dare to say when KDE Plasma 6 will finally be released. He says he can make an estimate for somewhere between December and March, but that is mainly speculation, he admits. Adding new features and UX adjustments would take about two months and bug fixes another two months.

The previous version of KDE Plasma, version 5, was released in 2014. The new version has been a long time coming and its exact status was unclear for a long time.