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KDE Applications 19.04 Available for all Distros Through the Snap Store

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KDE’s bundle of apps KDE Applications 19.04 has been released. Here at KDE neon the build servers have built all the .debs and the QA servers are now checking over them before publishing shortly.

That’s great if you run KDE neon but what about every other distro? Well for the first time ever you can install 50-odd apps from the bundle from one of the new cross-distro Linux App Stores, the Snap Store.

Our software store app Discover also supports Snaps so they should be available through that if you have snapd installed.

Get it from the Snap Store

Snaps is a new container based format from Canonical and they can be installed on any Linux distro. The spec and software is all open source managed from a centralised Store in much the same way as Google Play or Steam or F-Droid. Here at KDE neon we have been experimenting for some time with this format and waiting for the needed features to be added so we could give a great exprience. There’s still a couple of rough edges such as printer support or which directory the File Open dialog uses by default, which is mostly down to Qt and how it supports the xdg-portals spec. The store does not yet pick up all the meta-data such as icons and screenshots from Appstream metadata files.

Of the 50 apps we have ready today most are simple ones, games and edu features a lot. Hopefully we can get some of the more flagship apps up before long.

This is an exciting change in the way we deliver our software to you the user. Hopefully other App Stores will be supported in the near future too such as Flatpak/Flathub and Appstream/Appstreamhub.

The new format puts app authors and maintainers incharge of their software. Currently it’s done through KDE neon but there’s no reason why that needs to be the case, it can and should be done through the same KDE repos the apps are in with continuous integration and deployment done from our new GitLab setup invent.kde.org. Watch out for blogs on details of how it works shortly.

KDE neon New Edition Names

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KDE neon offers a few different editions depending on what you’re interested in.

We’ve renamed our editions a bit as the current names were causing confusion. This affects the URLs used for repos and filenames used for installable ISOs and Docker images.

The editions are now:

User Edition: the main event, built from released tars of KDE software, continuously updated as soon as releases are made assuming all the QA tests pass (which sometimes they don’t and so it gets held back until we fix them). Use this if unsure.

Testing Edition: built from the beta Git branches of KDE apps (often the same as unstable), no automated QA, will contain bugs and breakage, useful for testing beta software. (Formerly Dev Stable Edition.)

Unstable Edition: built from unstable master Git branches of KDE apps, no automated QA, will contain bugs and muchos breakage, useful for testing features in development software. (Formerly Dev Unstable Edition.)

Developer Edition: An ISO with the unstable edition plus development headers pre-installed. Useful to not have to install all of Qt and KDE dev headers.

And some more obscure editions:

Pinebook Remix: an ARM64 build with a couple of non-free drivers for the Pinebook ARM laptop.

Plasma LTS Edition: formerly User LTS this is only useful for testing the Plasma LTS releases, everything else is still moving and updating so it’s no more stable or long supported than anything else.

Korean Edition: testing edition plus the Korean locale pre-configured for our friends in the far East.

Many people will want the User edition for the extra QA and then to use Docker images for testing. Or use the Docker images on any distro of course.

Happy KDE!

KDE neon on xenial/16.04 EOL

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KDE neon was rebased onto Ubuntu bionic/18.04 last year and upgrades have gone generally smooth. We have removed xenial/16.04 build from our machines (they only hang around for as long as they did because it took a while to move the Snap builds away from them) and the apt repo will remove soon. If you haven’t already upgrade now.

Month of KDE Applications Snaps

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Snaps is a fancy new package format for Linux which allows applications to be shipped which run on pretty much any Linux distro. This nicely solves one of the headaches with shipping software for Linux, that you have to package it a dozen times using a dozen different methods to get anyone to be able to install it.

The format and host for Snaps is made using Ubuntu and developed by KDE patron Canonical.

We have been working on building Snaps from the KDE neon builders for some time and they’re now at a quality where we can move them into the stable channel. (Snap software gets hosted in channels depending on the risk you want to take, others being candidate, beta and edge.)

If you’re a Plasma user you can use Discover to install the Snaps, but of course they work equally well on other desktops with other package managers or using the snap command.

This month the Snap team are highlighting KDE’s stable Snaps on their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:

There’s still plenty of KDE apps that need tweaks before they can go in the Snap stable channel. If you’re an app maintainer then come and talk to us (in #kde-neon probably) about how your app can be distributed. We plan on doing some automated QA so they don’t need manual review before publishing and before long hopefully we can move much of the build details into the app repo rather than the KDE neon repo.

Help Test KDE Plasma 5.15 Beta

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KDE’s flagship project Plasma has a new beta out. There’s now three weeks to sort out the bugs to make the release a work of perfection.  We need your help.

Plasma has a new testing release out with a final release due in three weeks. We need your help in testing it and reporting problems.

KDE neon Developer Git-Stable Edition now has Plasma 5.15 beta and can be used for testing.

You can either download an ISO and install it or run it on a virtual machine. https://neon.kde.org/download

Or you can run the Docker image which should work on any Linux distro. https://community.kde.org/Neon/Docker

Please have a look over the new features and give them a try https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.90.php

You can report success or failure on the forum thread for Plasma 5.15 beta here or directly on the bug tracker at https://bugs.kde.org

Plasma 5.15 Beta in Virtualbox

Plasma 5.15 beta in Docker

16.04 EOL on Monday

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Upgrades to 18.04 are working well but maintaining twice as many builds as normal is taking its toll on our time and team of guinea pig packagers. Neon on 16.04 (xenial) base will reach End of Life on Monday.  Please update to 18.04 base to continue receiving updates.

Almost Bionic

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Maybe it’s all the QA we added but issues kept cropping up with Bionic.  All those people who had encrypted home folders in xenial soon found they had no files in bionic because support had been dropped so we had to add a quirk to keep access to the files.  Even yesterday a badly applied patch to the installer broke installs on already partitioned disks which it turns out we didn’t do QA for so we had to rejig our tests as well as fix the problem. Things are turning pleasingly green now so we should be ready to launch our Bionic update early next week. Do give the ISO images one last test and help us out by upgrading any existing installs and reporting back.  Hasta pronto.

KDE neon on Ubuntu 18.04 “bionic” Upgrade Open for Testing

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We are continuing the work to rebase KDE neon on bionic and are now looking for people to test the upgrader.

KDE neon Bionic Upgrade instructions and report form

Our upgrader has been working for some time and many people have used it successfully, but as ever we wanted to prove it was correct and QA.  It uses the same upgrader as Ubuntu which was written over a decade ago and has seen not much attention since.  We wrote our own notifier and got translations for it.  Added to the upgrader is stopping Packagekit so you don’t get notified of updates while you are already updating.  We added translations to the upgrader. A test was added to make sure version numbers in bionic are greater than in xenial which turns out not to be the case for a few things so we had to add rules to deal with them and then make sure those rules got used by the upgrader. The release notes that get shown before an upgrade strangely have no translations but we edited them a bit so in English it is relevanto to neon. Stopping the screen locker during an upgrade is important too but surpringly faffy since the upgrader runs as root and the screen locker as user.

It’s ready for pre-release testing now, so let us know how it goes on the wiki or in the forums etc.

The KDE neon on Ubuntu 18.04 “bionic” ISOs are also still available as a preview for testing.

KDE neon on the $100 Pinebook

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The KDE neon team has been working with the Blue Systems hardware enablement team and the Pinebook developers to create the KDE neon Pinebook Remix. It uses our Bionic images built for arm64 to create a full featured slick desktop that runs on the best value hardware.  The Pinebook comes at a low price but it’s a full laptop useful for watching videos, browsing the web or coding on KDE software.  This could open up whole new markets to getting KDE software, a school which previously could only afford a couple of computers could now afford enough for a classroom, a family which previously had to share one computer could now afford a laptop for the children to learn how to code on.  It’s quite exciting.  And with the KDE Slimbook, neon now covers all ends of the market.

Pinebook running KDE neon Pinebook Remix, full laptop functionality for $100