KDE Plasma 6.4 review – A worrying trend

Plasma 6.4 review - A worrying trend

Updated: June 26, 2025

My favorite desktop environment has just received an update. Arguably the best desktop out there, Plasma can do anything and everything. I did wait a couple of days for the KDE team to update their ISOs, and then downloaded and etched one KDE neon User Edition onto a USB stick. Henceforth, a test ensued. The previous version, Plasma 6.3 was fast and elegant, but it had lots of bugs and problems.

Furthermore, I decided to try using Wayland. As I said in my Xlibre article, I have no emotional investment in software. I don't care. I want things to work. Since the Plasma team spends a lot of work and energy in making their desktop pretty and shiny, including Wayland support, I decided to give it a go. And that's the very first thing I will cover in this review. Then, we shall expand more on the finer points of the sweet Plasma desktop. Let us begin, shall we.

Wayland, still not good, let me show you why

I'm not going to do any big philosophizing. I've already done that (see above). No. Simple usage. Examples. Let me show you. Wayland fails BASIC functionality tests on my 2019-2020 IdeaPad machine. AMD integrated graphics. No excuses.

Raw performance and font clarity/blurriness. To wit:

• I did a clean boot, with a saved session, which only has the System Monitor running. I waited about 30 seconds for things to settle post boot and examined what the program was telling me. I did that once with Wayland and once with X11.
• Wayland - 21-second boot. Memory usage 1.4 GB, with background services taking 648 MB. CPU continuously ticks at about 8%, but the GPU jumps to 100% every 2-3 seconds. Nonstop. Constant 100% GPU usage. Why? No idea.

• X11 - 20-second boot. Memory usage 1.4 GB, with background services taking 622 MB. The CPU was ticking around 0%, except when I took this screenshot, jumping to about 12%. Now, more importantly, the GPU needle never moved from 0%.

Font wise, the fonts were simply hard to read in Wayland. It felt like they were constantly being re-rendered, and there was a blurred edge to them. I hope I can show you this in the following sequence of screenshots. Best, test for yourself. Very simple.

Wayland:

And with X11:

Crispier fonts, well done. Get it?

If you don't see it above, I believe I managed to capture it here, early on, before I did any tweaking in the session. This is with the default weird 105% scaling that the system launched with - I didn't choose this value. Click to enlarge:

The dark black border that doesn't go all the way up is another artifact, not mine. Raw images.

Zoomed-in blurriness - this is what it actually looks like, this font edge fuzziness:

And yet, Kubuntu 25.10 is going to come with Wayland as a default session and REMOVE the X11 session. This is a pure 100% anti-user move. Wayland is still beta, horrible messy beta, even on integrated graphics on a laptop from five years back.

Whenever someone tells you Wayland is improving, please, show them these screenshots. Hate me all you want, but look at those images.

Now, some other observations, Wayland wise:

• The system booted - both live session and the installed session - at 105%. Why this value? No idea.
• My IdeaPad has a sucky display, and it's impossible to use for long periods of time with a default gamma. In Plasma X11, you can set this easily, and I always do, from 1.0 to about 0.85. Wayland has no such option, but the KDE team are doing their best to try to accommodate with color profiles, although this is a workaround, not a solution. But at least they are trying. Changing color accuracy from power efficiency to color accuracy helped a lot, but still worse than the X11 session with gamma adjusted.
• In the live session, I wanted to take screenshots of Spectacle to show you what gives. I need a second tool to do this. In the past, Scrot would do the job. Except, Scrot screenshots come out as empty black canvas in the Wayland session. So, another basic, simple program that Wayland messes up, despite the so-called XWayland bridge. Yup. 15 years of "quality". Right.

And that, my friends and nerds, is all I have to say on this topic.

The look and feel

Plasma is a handsome beast. You can hardly tell the difference between Plasma 5 and 6, and that's a very good thing. Moreover, if you don't like some of the defaults, you can easily change them. Now, there are problems, but we will discuss them soon.

In version 6.4, you also get a new, darker dark theme. Yes, darker than the old one, but still not good enough. The fonts are too gray, the UI element separation is almost nil. Shouldn't the dark theme auto-adopt some sort of bright, contrastful accent color to tell different areas apart? So far, the only really good implementation remains the crusty old Windows Phone. Everything else is a pale shadow of this fine setup.

To wit:

Now, Plasma 6.4:

No contrast between UI and panel. Nope. This would be so much nicer with even brighter fonts and some nice yellow, blue or Plasma-purple accent color and borders. Well, dark themes are for techies only anyway. Normies don't do them.

Ergonomic problems in Plasma 6.4

Alas, there were too many. It seems this latest releases comes with a lot of bad stuff straight out of the Windows 11 and Gnome 3 school of anti-ergonomics. Rather than make things better and more efficient, some new changes in the UI actually introduce more work to the user. More mouse clicks! Yup. Believe it or not. Now, the beauty of Plasma is that you can change these. But the defaults are still wrong.

Dolphin, for instance. First, no menu, which is stupid, and this is true of 99% of modern software out there. Hamburger menus are anti-accessibility. Second, the view mode icons are now bundled. Instead of one click to change from say thumbnails to detailed to compact and whatnot, you need an extra click to expand this button, and then choose the view. Why? Why! Why ADD work when there's no need for any? What's the point? And yes, YOU can manually add three separate icons to the toolbar, if you like, just like before. So what's the point of this extra-click minimalism? This is neither pretty, nor functional, nor intuitive.

At the same time, Dolphin, in its default form, looks ugly and dejected. Why not add some buttons there? Like Home, Refresh, perhaps cut, copy and paste? Why not make it nicer, the way I did it in about three minutes of customization?

Default looks. Meh.

And with tiny modifications.

The new Spectacle is also bad. First, it launches Windows 11/Gnome style without a UI. Awful. Second, even if you switch into a window mode, you need more mouse clicks to get stuff done. Even the basic mode selection is now "hidden" under a generic button. So if you want to switch from active window to rectangle to full screen, you need an extra mouse click. The same goes for time delay. EXTRA MOUSE CLICKS!

This is a huge, huge productivity step back ...

Why do this? Why make the UI less efficient? What's the point? Visual minimalism? Why? To try to lure idiots from Windowsland over? That's not a sound business model, not this way. And if this is just random developer gimmicks, then it's even sadder.

In fact, the default theme is also somewhat annoying. Why not use Breeze Classic so foreground and background windows actually have different hues? Color contrast, accessibility once again. Why this depressing, pointless gray on gray? What's the logic? Windows 11 and Gnome 3 do this horrible thing, so let's do it, too? No need to copy stupid regressions. That makes the world a worse place.

Funnily, tragically, I recently did test Spectacle and told you about its hidden gems. Functionality wise, no problem. 'Tis an amazing tool. It really is! But ergonomics wise, it's been ruined. And I took these two pictures with a bloody phone, like some boomer, because scrot couldn't do screenshots under Wayland. It's fair to say that Wayland made me a boomer. There. Boom.

And the floating panel. Nonsense. If I want to slam my mouse cursor into screen corners, I ought to do that without any major finesse. A floating panel means you need to aim like an idiot and waste your time trying to hit a "floating" target. Pointless. Luckily, you can change this. The KDE team has moved the dedicated button to a category called Floating, and you need to choose either "Disabled" or "Applets only" for the panel to become normal. Again, why? Because there's a Qt6 widget that can do this? Meaningless.

Discover "hides" updates. You only see a generic a-la Gnome BS line that says system upgrade. Nonsense. First, this looks stupid with 95% empty space there. Second, don't hide details, I don't want to have to do extra clicking to figure out what my system will get. Is this Windows 11? What's up? Third, again, this is bad nod toward "simple" atomic distros, the Flatpaks and all that, whereby system and applications are separate. Nope. Wrong implementation.

More and more and more pointless mouse clicks to see the obvious instead of just showing it.

• One, I don't want a Chromebook, and aping Google ain't gonna bring magical desktop success. Copying the "story" of Chromebooks with atomic builds, pseudo-shiny stores, infinite-bandwidth downloads of buggily containerized apps, limited system functionality, plus "simple" interfaces is NOT going to win the hearts and minds of the common people. That's not how it works.
• Two, developers don't understand product. They also miss this crucial element in Google's "Linux" success. Billions upon billions of sweet dollars! Dr. Evil pinkie-to-the-lip gesture level of money.
• Three, as I told you in the openSUSE Tumbleweed story, the Fedora Kinoite story and the Zorin review, the way the community resources work, I'm not interested in seeing any unverified programs from third-party sources outside the remit of the distro's archives. That's the easy way to pwning your system. Please carefully read these three articles before you form an opinion on what I'm trying to say here. But if you have no time, here's a wee screenshot:

A search for "Steam" on Zorin - the VERIFIED OFFICIAL package isn't shown as a first entry. The third entry ALSO isn't a verified official package. The Valve's Debian package is shown as the fifth entry in the results. If you installed the Flatpak listed as the third result, you would get something that is most likely Steam but isn't officially verified by the Flathub team, nor endorsed by Valve. It is quite possible that the unofficial Flatpak is totally fine. Mostly likely is. But there's no absolute guarantee. Personally, I don't want this kind of software model on my systems. I want only official, sanctioned stuff through software or package managers.

Another screenshot, from openSUSE Tumbleweed. Hint: this is NOT an official Google Chrome package.

• Four, the system is configured to do updates after reboot for added reliability. Please. Stop with this Windows 11 nonsense. Either you do updates reliably or you do not. None of this pointless wasting of time.

And more Wayland blur for you.

KDE neon problems

The distro, the testbed, remains problematic. I know the KDE team needs something to show their desktop, but it's buggy and it actually deters users. A good overall experience is key to the whole thing. As it happens, I encountered a lot of problems, including some rather super-annoying ones.

The Calamares installer remains pointless with its inconsistent behavior with/without Internet, with/without power plugged in, the arbitrary 300MB EFI partition limit, and a totally empty "slide" area. Why show this to begin with then?

Fully repeatable Samba connectivity crash, if you omit the "final" trailing slash in the path. Horrible. This happens also on a fully up-to-date system.

Firefox icons kept disappearing:

Firefox also asks to be set as the default browser, when it's the only one:

KDE Wallet did not pop for the first two access points I tried (ported from the live session), but it did for the third. I dismissed the prompt, and thereon, I couldn't connect to this particular router anymore. I had to manually set the password, and allow it for all users. Messy.

If you run updates on the command line, one you will see service errors, as the KDE team didn't clean up Ubuntu repo thingie, and two, it won't use regional mirrors, which is a waste.

sudo apt update
Failed to start apt-news.service: Unit apt-news.service not found.
Failed to start esm-cache.service: Unit esm-cache.service not found.
Hit:1 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security InRelease
Hit:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble InRelease
Hit:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates InRelease
Get:4 http://archive.neon.kde.org/user noble InRelease [193 kB]
Hit:5 https://packages.mozilla.org/apt mozilla InRelease
...

Conclusion

Wayland aside, which is going to be a disaster and neuter the Linux desktop, the testing made me sad. Mostly because Plasma 6.4 brings in several Windows-like and Gnome-like features that have no place on a reasonably designed DESKTOP. Touchesque stuff that requires more mouse clicks. Very sad. Now, I love KDE, I love Plasma, and I think the KDE team is doing a lot of great, sensible things, and their desktop environment is lightyears ahead of everything else out there. So why ruin it by mimicking cheap competition? This is like what Mozilla did with Firefox by aping Chrome. That does not translate into market share. On the contrary, it makes your product worse.

I hope there will be a reversal of decisions, and more focus on pure desktopness of the desktop. But the arbitrary focus on Wayland, for me, feels like an indicator of things to come. Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic, but hey, Plasma 6 is being "marketed" with Wayland as one entity. This worries and annoys me. And since Wayland makes desktop usage "simple" and flawed and less optimal, it's quite possible that the bundling of this inferior technology will infect Plasma and make it into a less good desktop. Almost definitely so. Just imagine all the energy the KDE team wasted in Wayland being redirected to improving other, meaningful things.

The same goes for the pseudo-atomicity thingie. That can only work if there's a super-100% reliable upstream store, which neither the Snap Store not Flathub are, nor can ever be if they ever allow any sort of community contribution, which they have to, otherwise, they may as well become commercial-only stores. And I know I definitely don't want randomly packaged almost-real but-not-real results showing in my desktop, bypassing all security safeguards that exist in the distro world. I don't have infinite bandwidth either, and I have no desire to run a crippled Chromebook. If I wanted that, I could buy one. I don't want to.

Overall, Plasma is nice and fast. Version 6.4 ain't no exception. But this version brings numerous ergonomic regressions, forcing you to waste time that you previously didn't need to, it hides important things in the name of who knows what, and on top of that, KDE neon is buggy and Wayland is still horribly inadequate even for BASIC things like fonts rendering and desktop performance on integrated graphics, no "evil" Nvidia. So there you go. I'm terribly sad. See ya.

Cheers.