Plasma, meaning KDE.

I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.

It's called plasma now :) KDE is the association, the desktop is plasma.

I still mostly use Xorg though, I only have wayland on a tablet.

It seems that KDE is fairly consistent in calling this “Plasma” and specifically, “Plasma Desktop”, but English Wikipedia insists on prefixing the names of their products with “KDE”. Especially Plasma 4, 5, and 6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma

https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/

Is this, like, a “GNU/Linux controversy” thing?

"KDE Plasma" can be interpreted as "The KDE organization's Plasma" and probably saves on some article title consistency while avoiding the need to disambiguate the main Plasma article title with (Desktop Environment) or the like. Likely more trouble to try to change than it helps anything as a result.

It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.

Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.

If you want an experience that's similar to GNOME-when-it-was-good, I'd suggest Cinnamon, the desktop environment of Linux Mint.

What's the state of Cinnamon maintenance? Keeping up with underlying platform changes being the perpetual challenge...

Cinnamon is an independent project, it's not based on GNOME. Or what else are you referring to?

Gtk-3