Year: 2020

Today at KDE neon tower we are feeling cute. And sixy. We have an early-prototype-preview-no-stability-guaranteed Qt 6 package.

This is in the KDE neon Unstable edition so if you run that you can just

sudo apt install qt6
/usr/examples/widgets/widgets/digitalclock/digitalclock

And you’ll have a digital clock.

Or if you run any other distro you can use the Docker image, which would be something like:

docker run -v `pwd`:/workspace -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=:0 --security-opt seccomp=unconfined -ti kdeneon/plasma:unstable bash
neon@68c3ba3fc955:~$ sudo apt update
...
neon@68c3ba3fc955:~$ sudo apt install qt6
...
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/plugins
/usr/examples/widgets/widgets/digitalclock/digitalclock

It’s installed into /usr and Qt isn’t too smart about where it goes under that so the paths don’t follow FHS or Debian policy yet, that might change.

Our beautiful desktop Plasma 5.20 has been released and with it the version bump in KDE neon User Edition to 5.20.

To get it you can

• Download the installable ISO and run it on a virtual machine like Virtualbox or install it on your computer
• Run neondocker to get the latest Docker image
• Upgrade your already installed system

A bad snapshot in KDE neon user edition today caused an incomplete build to get into user editions. If you are affected downgrade with

sudo apt-get install libkwaylandserver5=5.19.5-0xneon+20.04+focal+build10

Sorry about that, we’ll add additional QA checks to prevent similar issues from happening again.

KDE neon is our installable Linux with continuous integration and deployment. It’s based on Ubuntu who had a new Long Term Support Release recently so we’ve rebased it on Ubuntu 20.04 now.

You should see a popup on your install in the next day or so. It’ll ask you to make sure your system is up to date then it’ll upgrade the base to 20.04 which takes a while to download and then another while to install.

Afterwards it should look just the same because it’s the same wonderful Plasma desktop.

Upgrade Instructions

The installable ISOs are also updated and this time they all use the Calamares installer.

Testing and Unstable edition, these are built from the soon-to-be-released Git branches and the untested Git branches. Alas trying the installable ISOs today we found some bugs in the Git Calamares installer so they’re not published yet but the upgrader will still popup on existing installs. Update these are up now

We implemented OEM install mode in Calamares so the other way to get neon is to buy a KDE Slimbook III and it’ll use that.

We also implemented a full disk encryption tickbox in Calamares.

The Docker images are still to be updated and the Snap packages also need moved over.

Here at KDE neon base camp we have been working on moving the base of our system to Focal, Ubuntu 20.04. If you’re interested in the mechanics you can see the status, and indeed help out, on our 20.04 workboard.

But probably you’re more interested in giving it a try. This is in testing mode still and comes with a no money back warranty. Instrucitons are on the testing forum thread. You can either do an upgrade or a full install from the preview ISOs. Let us know how you get on!

KDE’s flagship project Plasma has released 5.18 LTS. That means we’ve crunched the code and ran the QA and slid out the packages and installable images.

Upgrade your KDE neon to get Plasma 5.18. Download the ISOs to install the live images. And to give it a try run the Docker images with neondocker.