One of the most frustrating things about KDE Plasma is that the desktop behaves so differently from Dolphin. Various things work slightly differently (or not at all) when done from the desktop, which is obviously the main “workspace” as it’s a metaphor for a physical office desktop.
For example, the extremely useful context menu item “Copy Location” simply doesn’t exist when right-clicking a file on the desktop, but it does exist if you open Dolphin and go to the desktop and right-click the file from there.
Another example is that dragging and dropping videos into an already running mpv instance from the desktop doesn’t play the new file if done from the desktop, but does do it if you do it from Dolphin. (There is a possible workaround for this, but it took a lot of energy from me to figure out, and it depends on mpv being updated to the latest version, which is not yet available in Debian’s APT.)
It’s as if they are separately maintained when they should be sharing the same code. I don’t understand why. It’s as if the most important and prominent “virtual workspace” has been neglected even though the internal work has already been done.
Will this change with Plasma 6? I have both great expectations and quite a few fears about this major new version of Plasma, having read various worrying comments about it on this forum.
I almost feel as if it’s pointless for me to spend so much time and effort trying to fix and figure out things in the current environment as it’s apparently going to change a lot “soon”. I have a huge gap between the years ~2001 and 2023 where I have no idea what shape KDE was in, but I get the perception that Plasma 5 is in a pretty “chaotic” state right now, and I’m wondering if 6 is likely to fix and “stabilize” a lot of these various issues?