It’s high tension in Neon towers this week as the distro packagers have been given access to the source tars for Plasma 6 along with Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear 24.02. This means our cloud of build servers have been powered up to compile them into .deb packages which go into our Apt archive. In principle we already have the packaging working in Unstable and Testing edition so it should be a case of just doing a fresh build in User edition but it involves several hundred source builds all done for the three editions and for libraries and plugins (such as KIO Workers) many of them twice over, once for Qt 6 and once for Qt 5 builds. So lots of bits which need aligned. Frameworks completed yesterday morning and this morning it looks like all of Plasma is built. The KDE Gear apps are churning away now. We’ll then need to tests it all including many configurations of upgrade to make sure it doesn’t break your laptops. The releases are due on Wednesday and with any luck we will have Neon builds available very shortly after, but of course we’ll wait until it’s ready if that’s what we have to do. It’ll be just a normal upgrade available to Discover but of course with a large number of packages to download. Who’s excited?
Year: 2024
KDE’s 6th Megarelease with KDE neon Testing Edition
KDE’s 6th Megarelease is the is-it-tacky-is-it-awesome name we came up with for the combined release of KDE Frameworks 6, Plasma 6 and KDE Gear’s bundle of apps and libraries. It’s out in a month’s time and it’s the porting of all our libraries and many of our apps to Qt 6. In principle this makes no difference to end users but we still like to make a song and dance about it and there will be new features and old cruft removed which allows for accelarated new features to come shortly. But first it needs testing. So download KDE neon Testing Edition which is build with the Git branches of the soon to be released products and install it either on hardware if you can or on something like Virtualbox (mind on Virtualbox you need to turn on “Enable 3D Accelaration” in Display settings because it uses Wayland, you should also turn on “EFI Special OSes only” if only to feel special).
Many thanks to Carlos and the others who have worked hard to get everything here.