KDE

We don't have a spy that's for sure!

inb4 floating taskbar in Windows 12

In fact there are already quite a few Wayland-only features. You can read about them on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/X11_Known_Significant_Issues.

on the side of our apps (or anything written with Qt) all of that (and most important seamless compositor restart/crash recovery with the application surviving) everyhting should be there for 6.0. with other toolkits the mileage might vary (depending when they include the required changes, when a given distribution packages them and so on)

Plasma Vaults! It's the best implementation of having a little encrypted bucket to put your important files in that I've ever used, on any platform. It's very well integrated into Plasma as a 1st-party supported feature, and it works wonderfully.

It has not been developed in the last few years but always krunner! A recent-ish feature that was already in Plasma 5 is to bind key presses to your extra mouse buttons or tablet tool buttons

For me it's definively the new overview effect, I already use it all the time on my Plasma dev session.

Josh says: "Yes, we are always interested in making our applications mobile-ready and almost every new KDE application uses Kirigami our convergent framework. Some of our older applications such as Okular, Dolphin, etc need more work on mobile but this is something that's being worked on."

We sure do plan of moving more and more of our app to the new convergent ui toolkit made with QML and Kirigami, in the future more and more of our apps should become mobile ready

In addition to that Josh said, we have a list of mobile friendly first party applications here: https://plasma-mobile.org/ It's not completely up to date and is missing some newer additions.

It may be not user visible and technically not a Plasma but Qt change but I find the work so that apps survive the compositor restarting amazing. See http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

For me personally, it's the updated breeze theme. But I might not be completely objective here, since I drove this effort quite a lot :)

Some screenshots to see the difference: https://invent.kde.org/websites/product-screenshots/-/merge_requests/51/diffs

One of the most visible ones for me is that most common multimonitor workflows Just Work™ in the Wayland session now. There are still edge cases, but we've put a huge amount of effort into this.

To just test out without any risk and not touching any running system i would suggest a live image such as KDE Neon Unstable which has dailiy updated snapshots of our software stack

as moving to Qt6 from a developer POV, It has been remarkably uneventful. there are api changes for sure (Especially on the QML side of things) but the changes are not as great as say, Qt4 to Qt5.

Also, is there plans to have KDE connect support making your phone a webcam?

That's an amazing idea! Currently I am using my laptop next to my desktop screens as a sudo webcam :D

Actually Plasma is generally more popular than GNOME every time surveys are conducted. However we have to keep in mind that the direct consumers of a DE are actually not the end users, but rather the distributors who package and distribute it. There are a number of historical reasons why many distributors ended up picking GNOME over Plasma including accessibility, corporate sponsorship, an easier packaging experience, and the rocky KDE 4 rollout burning a lot of trust. So what you end up with today is many distros shipping GNOME despite pent-up desire for Plasma. It's a great illustration of how you need to keep your direct users happy.

And I think that pent-up desire is being unleashed these days due to various changes in our ecosystem. Plasma is better than ever and version 5 had a much less painful release compared to 4, with us aiming to do even better in Plasma 6. We also see an increasing number of hardware vendors shipping devices with Plasma on it (https://kde.org/hardware/), who had a strong financial incentive to listen to their customers by picking Plasma over GNOME. In addition, KDE's accessibility game is ramping up hugely, and we have more robust corporate sponsorship than we used to with Valve and Blue Systems putting tons of resources into KDE. Finally, GNOME seems to be becoming more hostile to their downstreams, causing them to need to do more of their own development or else migrate to be a fork or skin of Plasma. Interesting developments.

We do aim to improve our design and usability further as much as possible, however, one of the nice things of free software is really this big choice. There are different projects and one size never fits all, if some people find the software written by our friends over GNOME more suited with their needs, that's totally fine.

It would also be interesting hearing on the motivations for this choice tough, as it always help us improving

I have some very, very, very, very WIP KDE widgets for Dart/Flutter in a project running. Currently it has almost nothing but it already automatically switches color theme when you switch color schemes in KDE for example 😄

Don't expect too much of that though, it's very unofficial and something I'm doing whenever I feel like it.

Something that's often not mentioned is that C++ with Qt is often a very different beast to use compared to C++ with the stdlib and other GUI frameworks. IMO Qt takes a lot of the pain out of C++, such that the criticism becomes blunted and mostly articulated by people looking in from outside who haven't tried it yet.