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KDE neon Bionic Preview Images Available for Testing

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Our QA tests have turned green which means we have switched on the preview publishing for the KDE neon Installable Images based on Bionic.

 Download installable ISO images

A reminder of what the different editions mean:

  • User: Packages continuously built from latest releases.  Use this edition if you are uncertain.
  • Developer Edition Git Stable Branches: Built continuously from Git beta and stable branches.  Use this edition to test beta and forthcoming code which has not gone through QA.
  • Developer Edition Git Unstable Branches: Built continuously from Git unstable branches.  Use this edition to test forthcoming feature code which has not gone through QA.

Remember this is still a preview in testing.  Upgrade testing will be announced shortly and final expected sometime after. Read the release notes. Give us feedback on the KDE forums or by filing specific bugs and keep and eye on the todo board to track us.

Time to Test Plasma 5.13 Beta

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The forthcoming new release of Plasma 5.13 will have some lovely new features such as rewritten System Settings pages and Plasma Browser Integration.  But we need testers.

Incase you missed it the Plasma 5.13 release announce has a rundown of the main features.  If you are an auditory learner you can listen to the Late Night Linux Extra podcast where Jonathan “great communicator” Riddell talks about the recent sprint and the release.

You can test it out with the KDE neon Developer Edition Git-Stable ISO which you can download now.  Git-stable includes beta builds of KDE’s software.  Or you can try the latest KDE neon Docker image which runs the desktop inside Xephyr with a simple command of neondocker -e dev-stable.

What have the public been saying about Plasma 5.13 beta? Let’s pick some random comments from Reddit:

br_shadow – Plasma is by far the best linux DE

Thanks br_shadow!

aturfer 26 points  – I’m going to make another financial donation to the KDE project.

Good idea aturfer!

mleko69 

> KDE Plasma

> lightweight

What a time to be alive

Oh yes it is mleko69!

masteryod 17 points 

Holy shit that changelog is amazing!

We try to please mastyod!

tnsittpsif190 points I am so pleased with KDE and the development team. I love the workflow it offers. It is both, beautiful and professional at the same time.

We succeed in pleasing tnsittpsif!

So give it a try, report problems, 2.5 weeks until final is out.

Moving to Bionic

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KDE neon is a project to do continuous integration and deployment of KDE software for easy and quick use by the world.  We have three ways of doing that the main one being the archive of .deb packages based on the latest Ubuntu LTS (the other two are Docker images and Snap packages).

With the new Ubuntu LTS 18.04 out it’s time to rebase Neon’s packages on that.  This is still work in progress but demand seems to be strong looking at comments around the forums, chat rooms and social media, so we’re aware many people are waiting for this.  We have compiled all the essential packages of Git Unstable edition on Bionic and today I’m working on the installer.  Now we need to finish off compiling all the packages for the four editions of KDE neon and make sure the upgrade is working.  In the mean time of course we’ll keep updating the packages based on 16.04 LTS so you can keep getting the latest and greatest from KDE.

Hiding Neon LTS Edition

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With the new Plasma LTS came an update to KDE neon LTS Edition and lots of people asking which edition to use and what the difference is.  This caused us to review the purpose of LTS and as a result we’ve just hidden LTS from the download page.  The only difference with the LTS edition is that it stays on Plasma’s LTS release but apps and libraries still get updates.  This doesn’t fit well with the main use cases of an LTS which is that it only gets bug fixes and no new features.  Further we test Neon LTS edition less than any other edition so it’s more likely we’ll miss some problem, which is the opposite of what most people would expect. There are distros whose release model fits better with the needs of Plasma LTS but the constant updates of Neon don’t fit too well.  We’ll keep the edition around and don’t expect to make any changes to the repositories or builds, they’re useful for devs testing Plasma LTS, but we’re not advertising it for download since it gives a different expectation of what to expect than fits into the release method of Neon.