KDE/Plasma 5.18 for Debian

Update 2020-04-03: Please see this post for updated location of the packages!!! Now for i586 and amd64 architectures!

I have been trying out the Plasma Desktop for one week now, and I am very positively surprised. Compared to the clumsy history of KDE3, the current desktop is extremely small-footprint and smooth, surprisingly. Integration is as expected great, and mixing programs from the “other world” (Gtk/Gnome) works also extremely smooth.

If there are a few things I would change, then mostly the chaos about kwallet and Gnome keyring. I would love to have one secret storage, and it seems that Gnome Keyring is preferrable, but this is in flux at the moment. Also, it is not that pressing, because I have moved all my passwords into pass and thus don’t need the secret storage that much anymore.

So, after a bit of working with Plasma, I realized that Debian still ships an old version, the most recent being 5.18.3 LTS. Thus, I embarked onto a journey of updating all the necessary packages, and there are a lot: in total 106 packages I did update (and one new one!) until I finally had a new plasma-desktop package available. If you are interested, there are binaries for amd64 and sources in my Debian repository (WARNING: These packages are for Debian/sid and maybe testing, and cannot be used with Buster!):

deb https://www.preining.info/debian unstable kde
deb-src https://www.preining.info/debian unstable kde

As usual, don’t forget to import my GPG key, and all packages are without warranty :-;

There are two packages that I didn’t manage to update: kde-gtk-config which has changed a lot and contains far less files, and breeze-icons which fails on its own symlink tests. If anyone has an idea, please let me know.

If other packages are missing, please also drop me a line and I’ll try to update them.

Enjoy.