KDE Plasma 6 Will Not Support Older Desktop Widgets

KDE Plasma 6 is a highly anticipated upgrade among desktop environment releases.

Recently, its release schedule was revealed with the first Alpha version going live on 8th November 2023, final Beta on 31st January 2024, and the stable planned for February 28, 2024.

Considering KDE Plasma 5.x series included several refinements and feature additions, many users are excited about what KDE Plasma 6 brings to the table.

If you are curious, we already covered the major changes coming to KDE Plasma 6. Hence, it is not a surprise that it will come baked in big changes.

However, with significant overhauls, there can be some experience breaking changes, such as not having any older widgets run on Plasma 6.

In a recent blog post by Nate Graham from KDE, a formal heads-up was given to Plasma 5 widget authors.

The highlighted information being:

You will need to port your widgets to newer APIs to make them compatible with Plasma 6!

The Plasma widget API has been modified with the upcoming release. And, to adapt to this change and keep things running, the widget developers have to port their creations to newer APIs.

If a developer does not port the widget to use newer APIs, it will not run with KDE Plasma 6.

Of course, popular widget developers would most likely do the port. But, if you were using a widget that does the job—but not actively maintained, you will have to let go of it with KDE Plasma 6.

A porting guide has been made available for the developers to follow.

You can find the Plasma 6 compatible widgets under "Plasma 6 Extensions" category. At the time of writing this, only two third-party widgets can be seen listed.

So, you will find all your favorite widgets when they are ported and uploaded by the respective developers for KDE Plasma 6.

💬 What KDE widget do you look forward to being ported? Do you think you will be missing out on certain widgets that are no longer maintained? Share your thoughts in the comments below.