Yesterday February 28th was launch day of what KDE called Mega-Release 6. It was also a day that brought certain itches, since there are many users who are wondering when they will see it in their favorite Linux distribution. It is said that it is already in the unstable branch of Arch, that Manjaro Unstable will follow it, that Kubuntu will not release it until October... And then there is KDE neon 6.0 which came out the same day with everything included.
neon, the system over which KDE has the most control, is a distribution with Ubuntu LTS base, But it is not the same. To mention some differences, although it is compatible with APT, it uses Pkcon for package management and has the Mozilla repository added by default to install Firefox in its DEB version. It receives the numbering of the version of Plasma it uses, and since the new release is Plasma 6.0, the latest version of neon is KDE neon 6.0.
KDE neon 6.0 can now be downloaded
What new features does KDE neon 6.0 bring? Well, everything about the Mega-Launch:
- Plasma 6.0, with new features such as the new overview, more similar to that of GNOME, the return of the cube, a new task switcher view and a floating panel by default. There are many default changes, such as Wayland.
- Frameworks 6.0, for which they have not published any notes. They have included it in the Maga-Launch, but without giving details. They are expected to publish something in the KDE announcement page when they see fit.
- KDE Gear 24.02, February 2024 applications with new features.
- Qt6, the new version of the library used by KDE and other desktops for, among other things, the interface of their applications. This jump should not worry us, since It first came out almost four years ago..
Interested users you can now download the new image from the next button. It is something that I recommend to any KDE user, since you can see even in a virtual machine everything that is to come. That could calm certain itches... or intensify them.