Update 2026-09-10

Updated to Plasma 6.8 and the banner is back; went to plasma-workspace to find out what the new setting was named, and discovered the new banner is actually interactive and gives you the option of permanently hiding it. Can’t wait until someone unceremoniously stuffs it in my face for 6.9, despite my “hide for all time for the love of god” pleas

Update 2024-09-13

Just updated to Plasma 6.2 and the banner is back. Turns out they inverted the boolean and did not migrate over existing settings opting out of the banner

└─[0] <> cat /home/sirspudd/.config/kdedefaults/kdeglobals
[General]
ColorScheme=BreezeDark
ShowDesktopPreviewBanner=false

KDE 6 installation/adoption

After hearing about the KDE 6 beta, I went sniffing around in Arch and sure enough kde-unstable has something readily consumable. KDE is already my daily driver; it is a thing of glory and should be a point of pride for everyone who contributed to it, and to anyone Qt affiliated. What a groovy techincal showcase/shell.

In any case; KDE 6 is gorgeous, I git one issue switching to it, caused by me explicitly overriding sddm to run under wayland. This configuration snippet

[0] <git:(master 0dad43a✱) > cat /etc/10-wayland.conf
[General]
DisplayServer=wayland
GreeterEnvironment=QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=layer-shell

[Wayland]
CompositorCommand=kwin_wayland --drm --no-lockscreen --no-global-shortcuts --locale1

did not prevent sddm from launching, but it did prevent key strokes from being received and my attempts to input my password were moot until I pulled this from play.

All in all, pretty bloody smooth.

OLED hostile prerelease banner ahoy

I run KDE with 3x3 virtual desktops on a 55inch LG CX; when I leave my desktop, I tend to park my screen on a purely black background to avoid any chance of burn in and since it nicely parks my screen in a state which is visually indistinguishable from turned off (the backlight after all is at zero).

Unfortunately, the peeps who hack on this stuff have seen fit to include a fixed offset snipped of text in the bottom right hand side of the plasma workspace UI, utter ripe for burning in:

KDE Preview Release Banner

I went spelunking to find the source code responsible for this atrocity, and to find out if there was a trivial way to toggle it.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace.git
shell/desktopview.cpp

#if PROJECT_VERSION_PATCH >= 80 || PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR >= 80
bool DesktopView::showPreviewBanner() const
{
    static const bool shouldShowPreviewBanner =
        !KConfigGroup(KSharedConfig::openConfig("kdeglobals"), u"General"_s).readEntry("HideDesktopPreviewBanner", false);
    return shouldShowPreviewBanner;
}

QString DesktopView::previewBannerTitle() const
{
    // Plasma 6 pre-release versions
    if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_MAJOR == 5 && PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR >= 80) {
        if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_PATCH == 80) {
            // Development
            return i18nc("@label %1 is the Plasma version", "KDE Plasma 6.0 Dev");
        } else if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR == 80) {
            // Alpha, 5.80.0
            return i18nc("@label %1 is the Plasma version", "KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha");
        } else if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR == 90) {
            // Beta 1, 5.90.0
            return i18nc("@label %1 is the Plasma version", "KDE Plasma 6.0 Beta 1");
        } else if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR == 91) {
            // Beta 2, 5.91.0
            return i18nc("@label %1 is the Plasma version", "KDE Plasma 6.0 Beta 2");
        } else if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR == 92) {
            // RC1, 5.92.0
            return i18nc("@label %1 is the Plasma version, RC meaning Release Candidate", "KDE Plasma 6.0 RC1");
        } else if constexpr (PROJECT_VERSION_MINOR == 93) {
            // RC2, 5.93.0
            return i18nc("@label %1 is the Plasma version, RC meaning Release Candidate", "KDE Plasma 6.0 RC2");
        }
    }

so we can gloriously removed this crud (pre-6.2) with

[0] <git:(master cf62a04f78) > cat /home/sirspudd/.config/kdedefaults/kdeglobals
[General]
ColorScheme=BreezeDark
HideDesktopPreviewBanner=true

Leaving nothing but joy