Writing in his bog, developer/QA manager Nate Graham said that Plasma 6 will default to opening files and folders with a double-click, not a single click.

“Even though almost everyone in the room for the discussion uses and prefers opening with a single-click, it's probably not the ideal default setting for people who are migrating from other platforms, which is most of them. They can still learn the benefits of single-click later,” he said.

Developers used the "Thumbnail Grid" Task Switcher by default and made some UI changes.

“We're going to make a firm push for Wayland to be the default session type for Plasma 6. The X11 session will still be there, and distros will be free to override this and continue defaulting to X11 if they feel like it suits them better. But we want Wayland to be our official recommendation,” Graham said.

He added that Plasma 6 would have a slower bi-annual release schedule once it's stabilised enough.

“We're going to be reaching out to distros with twice-yearly release schedules themselves to see if we can find release dates that will allow all of them to ship the latest version of Plasma soon after it's released rather than skipping it in favor of something older. Making use of these lengthened release periods, we're also going to lengthen our Beta releases and update them every week, so there's more time to find and fix bugs,” he said.

Graham said the move to a floating panel by default was bought about because Microsoft had copied it in Windows 11 and people were seeing Plasma as a cheap clone of Windows again.

“Making the panel float by default provides an immediate visual differentiation from Windows 11 and we hope this will help jolt users' brains out of "ew, it's slightly different from Windows 11" mode and into "wow, this is new and cool and I wonder what's in it" mode,” he said.