Category: Uncategorized

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?

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.

With Neon unstable’s Plasma 6 packages bubbling along nicely, it was decided that all new KF6 based apps should be based in the freshly repurposed Experimental archive. Experimental builds on Unstable but nicely segregates the pre-alpha KF6 apps from the more stable Plasma 6 desktop.

A new package, neon-settings-experimental has been made which installs neon-experimental.list to point to the experimental archive and 99-jammy-overrides-experimental which adds a pin to make the experimental archive package always be installed. All packages in experimental are versioned the same as in unstable, which means it’s a competition of who has the highest packaging suffix. However the aforementioned pin ensures that the KF6 based experimental package always wins even if it means a downgrade (in timestamp version numbers). So don’t be scared if apt tells you it will be downgrading packages because really you are upgrading! ;]

So:
sudo apt install neon-settings-experimental
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
will install the required new package, update your apt package list and then upgrade to kf6 any packages you have installed from this list.

As it is pre-alpha software, certain apps may try to kill your kittens. However you can always install a snap or a flatpack for many applications. If you do want to return to a pure Neon Unstable environment:
sudo apt remove --purge neon-settings-experimental
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
will downgrade all packages that have a lower suffix in experimental to their kf5 based unstable counterparts.

We will continue to add more KF6 based apps as we work our way through the extensive KDE apps catalog. Despite some rough edges, on the whole it is a very usable experience.

Of course we need to end this post with the obligatory gratuitous screenshot.

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.