KDE Gear is our release service for many apps such as mail and calendaring supremo Kontact, geographers dream Marble, social media influencing Kdenlive and dozens of others. KDE needs you to test that your favourite feature has been added and your worst bug has been squished.
You can do this with KDE neon Testing edition, built from the Git branches which get used to make releases from. You can download the ISO and try it on spare hardware or on a virtual machine to test them out.
But maybe you don’t want the faff of installing a distro. Containers give an easier way to test thanks to Distrobox.
Install Distrobox on your normal computer. Make sure Docker or podman are working.
Download the container with
distrobox create -i invent-registry.kde.org/neon/docker-images/plasma:testing-all
Then start it withdistrobox enter all-testing
And voila it will mount the necessary bits to get Wayland connections working and keep your home directory available and you can run say
kontact
and test the beta for the mail app.
