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Qt 5.10 Beta was released this week and the neon builder cloud elves have been compiling it away ready for testing.

There’s no QtWebEngine or Qt3D so stuff which needs those will be broken.

Other stuff likely broken too, don’t use it on a machine you’re not happy doing a reinstall on.

But the good news is the broken clock plasmoid works now 🙂


deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing xenial main


Plasma 5.11 was out this morning with many bugfixes, Plasma Vaults to keep your private files secure, System Settings redesign, a new wallpaper of course and many other nice features.

The KDE neon scalable cloud devops build farm has been working hard to compile it and the packages were available for KDE neon User Edition users to upgrade a few hours ago.

The installable ISO images are built but it takes a few hours for them to get mirrored around the world.  Please don’t download from the KDE server directly, it kills the server’s limited bandwidth.  Instead browse the mirror list and grab fro m a mirror near you.

Updated Docker images are also building away.

Qt 5.10 got an alpha release last week and rumours are there’s lots of interesting new stuff for Plasma developers and other parts of KDE.

Packages are available in KDE neon but hidden away in the testing repository because there is inevitably some breakage. Random bits of QML such as the clock above and Kirigami seem to be unhappy.  Please do test but expect breakage and fixes to be necessary.

deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing xenial main

This works along with an install of dev/unstable edition and will only work in addition to it.

Good luck

Today is a good day filled with possibility and potential.  The browser formerly known as QupZilla has gained a better name Falkon and a better home, KDE.  This bring quality web browsing back to native KDE software for the first time in some years.  It’s a pleasingly slick experience using QtWebEngine and integrating with all the parts of Plasma you’d expect.

At the same time we at KDE neon are moving to new packaging format Snaps, a container format which can be used on many Linux distros.  Falkon is now built by KDE neon CI and is in the edge channel of the Snap archive.

You’ll need to install the KDE Frameworks snap first if you haven’t already, this comes pre-installed on recent builds of KDE neon.  Then install Falkon from edge.

snap install kde-frameworks-5
snap install --edge falkon

Remember this works on any distro with Snap support, which is most of them.

Let us know how you get on.

New FAQ added to KDE neon FAQ.

Back in the day I started making a Plasma Wayland ISO to help people try out Plasma on Wayland.  Then we started Neon and the obvious way to create the ISOs became through the Neon infrastructure.  With Wayland becoming closer to be ready to use every day I’ve decided it’s time to scrap the dedicated Wayland ISOs and just install the Wayland session by default on the Dev Unstable ISOs. It’s not yet the default so to give it a try you need to log out, select Wayland session and log in again.  Or install the ISO and select it at login (you’ll need to switch back to X to install, Calamares doesn’t run in Wayland because it wants to run as root which is verboten).

Wayland is pretty much ready to use but the reason we can’t switch to it by default is mostly that some obscure graphics cards may not work with it and it’s hard to implement a detection and fallback for this.  The fonts may be a different size due to differences in the screen dots-per-inch detection and middle mouse button selection paste doesn’t yet work.

Grab the KDE neon Dev Unstable ISO now to try it out.

Jonathan

We held off on Qt 5.8 because of problems with the Wayland support between it and KWin.  Qt 5.9 seems a little more promising but we don’t want to change something so fundamental to KDE’s software without checking for issues so it’s still in the hidden testing repo for now. Try it out on KDE neon Developer Unstable edition to see what breaks.

deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing xenial main

If you’re brave check it out for problems. (The packages even seen to work on the other editions of KDE neon but you are on your own there because it upgrades KWin and other parts to non-stable builds.)

Please do test out a Wayland session with it too (log out and select from bottom left of screen).  And review the Plasma Wayland bugs list.

Let us know how you get on using this blog, or neon mailing list or bugs.kde.org or forums.kde.org as appropriate.

Plasma 5.10 is just out with many spangly new features to make your desktop run smoother.

Being able to group and ungroup windows in the task bar is a small but handy feature when you turn it on.

Having icons back on the desktop is on by default incase you want to mess up your desktop.

Future proofing is happening with improvements to Wayland (install plasma-workspace-wayland if you want to try it out) and experimental support for Snaps.

KDE neon User Edition 5.10 is out now with the latest packages.  Grab it and try out or just upgrade for existing users.