Plasma 6

[vk5zsl]

Just asking if anyone has installed Plasma 6 in MX23.2 from plasma-desktop-6.0.1.tar.xz ? If so did it work?

[baldyeti]

This question was asked recently. MX being based on debian stable this shouldn't become available before roughly 2025H2 when debian 13 "Trixie" will be released, with a better tested and polished plasma 6.x

[baldyeti]

And if you are asking about Installing from source, that seems near impossible on MX23/bookworm as it bundles qt5 libraries (not qt6 which plasma6 requires)

[AK-47]

Qt 6.4.2 is available for Bookworm and MX Linux 23, and is in backports for Bullseye and MX Linux 21. Not available for Buster or MX Linux 19.
Plasma 6 requires Qt 6.6 so unlikely to compile for Debian 12 or MX 23.

Unless you really need something from Plasma 6 right away (which I would recommend a distro that actually has it) I would wait. If you found Plasma 5.27 usable before Plasma 6 was released, you should still find Plasma 5.27 usable.

[markol]

My suggestion would be to wait for at least 6.1 (if not 6.2)

[rambo919]

I just want an updated 5 but apparently that's too much to ask of the Debian "Gnome fanboys".....

[rambo919]

My suggestion would be to wait for at least 6.1 (if not 6.2)

^^^this

v6 is basically their first attempt at ditching X.org.... it's gonna be wonkey for a while.

[sunrat]

I just tried installs of KDE Neon and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to have a first glimpse of Plasma 6. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed most definitely seemed to be the better of the two - no crashes whereas Neon had several during a short session. Plasma 6 is not a profound change from Plasma 5, more an incremental one.
Absolutely no way I would use either for anything but testing yet. Will wait until the next Debian is released in 2025 before considering that.

[asqwerth]

Garuda linux forum has posts about a lot of Plasma 6 issues. I think that's because Garuda Plasma edition is very heavily customised. Essentially if you really love customising Plasma with 3rd party themes and plasmoids (including Latte Dock), you might have issues.

I have a Artix KDE install that updated to Plasma 6. Since my customisation is pretty vanilla, I've not have huge problems, though I didn't like and got rid of the new floating bottom panel. Even so, I switched back to Breeze dark theme from a custom Kvantum theme before I upgraded to Plasma 6, just to be safe. And my favourite Event Calendar plasmoid had not been upgraded to Plasma 6 compatibility so I disabled it before the upgrade. There was no problem with the window decoration themes.

Thankfully you can change accent/highlight colour in Breeze (and colour schemes), so at least I can still change up how Breeze dark looks.

I'll give Plasma some time to mature and for theme devs to come up to speed, then check KDE Store for updated themes, Event Calendar, etc.

I did have an issue with conky in Wayland though. I have experienced some conkies having their display permanently "seared" into the desktop, so even after you kill them they are still on your screen. And they appear to still work!

[Stevo]

I did have an issue with conky in Wayland though. I have experienced some conkies having their display permanently "seared" into the desktop, so even after you kill them they are still on your screen. And they appear to still work!

Woe, that's a new feature: a haunted desktop! Maybe you need a specialist from the older desktop to get rid of it: the Xorgcist.


Anyway...a newer Qt 6 could probably be backported for Bookworm, since we have 6.4.2 in the MX 21 test repo and bullseye-backports, but it's a load of packages, and Plasma 6 is no doubt at least twice as many.