Author: Jonathan Esk-Riddell

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.

https://kde.org/info/releases-23.07.80/

KDE Gear is our bundle of apps which we release three times a year. Next month’s release just got a beta for testing so there’s now dozens of apps needing tested. You can download the KDE neon testing ISO or try the KDE neon container with Distrobox to give them a try.

Try out the new KTuberling. Do not try out KFloppy, it has finally ended its long and happy life.

KDE neon unstable edition is running Plasma 6 and is your ideal way to test the next version of our lightweight but powerful Linux desktop.

Currently it looks near identical to the Plasma 5 builds (hopefully a banner will be added shortly).

One obvious bug is visible in the panel above where items which should be aligned to the right are not, that’s easy to work around until it gets fixed. There’s many more bugs but considering this is an early port using unreleased frameworks it’s mostly useable, especially now the worst of the overlapping kf5/kf6 packages are sorted.

The Plasma bits such as System Settings are all Qt 6 and pre-KF6, so are Konsole and Dolphin but the rest is Qt 5 and there’s still some integration issues to be worked out.

So take care, don’t give it to your friends or family, but do give it a test and let us know what breaks.

KDE neon unstable edition is built from git master. For the last few weeks we have frozen the published repo because we knew the move to Qt 6 based builds of KDE Frameworks and Plasma would break install. They will still break install but now is the time to give it a try. It is vitally important to update your neon-settings-2 package first because the Qt 5 and 6 builds have overlapping files and this will allow that.

pkcon refresh
pkcon install neon-settings-2
pkcon update

or if you prefer apt

apt update
apt install neon-settings-2
apt full-upgrade

This is very early stage development. Almost everything is super broken from a user perspective, and it may not be useful to get 500 bug reports about every little thing so tread carefully. For any bug reports you do report add `qt6` tag.

Best of luck!

KDE neon has long had Docker images so you can run the latest KDE software without the faff of an operating system install. We’ve just moved the host for these into the KDE Invent server.

https://invent.kde.org/neon/docker-images/container_registry

You can get the neondocker script to run them

https://invent.kde.org/neon/docker-images/-/raw/master/neondocker/neondocker.rb?inline=false

or manually you can get it with

docker pull invent-registry.kde.org/neon/docker-images/plasma:unstable
xhost +
docker run -ti -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -v ~/src:/home/neon/src -e DISPLAY=:0 invent-registry.kde.org/neon/docker-images/plasma:unstable konsole

KDE neon builds packages of KDE software using latest Ubuntu LTS as a base. Every couple of years there’s a new Ubuntu LTS and so we build all our package and infrastructure onto that. We’ve just finished the move onto Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) and installable ISO images are now based on that.

We’ll enable to upgrade for existing installs on Monday.

We are just about ready to launch the rebase of KDE neon on Ubuntu 22.04 Firefox is the browser again now as a Snap package. This breaks plasma-browser-integration but is otherwise working fine. Release now with Snaps or spend a couple more weeks working on other package formats?

We are just about ready to launch the rebase of KDE neon on Ubuntu 22.04 Firefox is the browser again now as a Snap package. This breaks plasma-browser-integration but is otherwise working fine. Release now with Snaps or spend a couple more weeks working on other package formats?

— KDE neon (@KdeNeon) September 26, 2022

Plasma 5.26 Beta was released yesterday

https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.90/

And now we need your help testing it. Download KDE neon Testing edition and install it on a machine (do backups etc or use a spare computer if you can).

https://neon.kde.org/download

Please help with reporting but also reviewing bugs that others have reported.

One big addition in this release is Plasma Bigscreen, a plasma workspace for your television. Install it along with auro-browser and plank-player and plasma-remotecontrollers and log into the Bigscreen session. We plan to make a KDE neon edition with a dedicated Bigscreen install soon.

KDE neon has Docker images which are great for easily testing out KDE software built from Git master, Git testing or releases without touching your host system.

The images have just been updating to use KDE neon on the new Ubuntu LTS base 22.04 (jammy).

Documentation on the wiki.

Run neondocker to get started or

Xephyr -screen 1024x768 :1 &
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix kdeneon/plasma:unstable

or single app

xhost +
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=:0 --security-opt seccomp=unconfined kdeneon/plasma:unstable dolphin

Jammy porting is happening at full pace. Almost all the packages are now compiled and that leaves ISOs to be built and upgrade to be tested.

As with any software or engineering project there’s not much point in putting a deadline on it, it’ll be ready when it’s ready. As a moving target the builds are often two steps forward and one step back cos suddenly there’s a new KDE Gear that needs built.

But we’ll be with you soon 🙂