Plasma 5.20 coming to Debian
The KDE Plasma desktop is soon getting an update to 5.20, and beta versions are out for testing.
Plasma 5.20 is going to be one absolutely massive release! More features, more fixes for longstanding bugs, more improvements to the user interface!
There are lots of new features mentioned in the release announcement, I like in particular the ability that settings changed from the default can now be highlighted.
I have been providing builds of KDE related packages since quite some time now, see everything posted under the KDE tag. In the last days I have prepared Debian packages for Plasma 5.19.90 on OBS, for now only targeting Debian/experimental and amd64 architecture.
These packages require Qt 5.15, which is only available in the experimental suite, and there is no way to simply update to Qt 5.15 since all Qt related packages need to be recompiled. So as long as Qt 5.15 doesn’t hit unstable, I cannot really run these packages on my main machine, but I tried a clean Debian virtual machine installing only Plasma 5.19.90 and depending packages, plus some more for a pleasant desktop experience. This worked out quite well, the VM runs Plasma 5.19.90.
Well, bottom line, as soon as we have Qt 5.15 in Debian/unstable, we are also ready for Plasma 5.20!
Really appreciate your effort.
Thanks a lot.
Fantastic! Can’t wait. This will probably be the release that will switch me over to wayland for good 🙂
Thanks for all the hard work!
Why not use a LTS version of KDE as default for Debian stable? The Kernel is a LTS variant, too.
lastest KDE-LTS: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.18.6
Once this happens buster will be history on my desktop 🙂
What about the official “Plasma Desktop” package? Will it be updated to the latest Plasma version before Bullseye freezes?
Or current situation is to get 5.19.5 into unstable. After that we will look at 5.20. Wether this is in time for bullseye I don’t know. Most problematic is always the NEW processing which takes ages.
Thank you for answering my question. I would appreciate it if at least 5.19 would be added to the next stable.
What about 5.18? This is an LTS version of Plasma. Doesn’t it make sense to use it as a basis for Stable?
You mean shipping bullseye with 5.18? I don’t think this is a good idea. And buster we cannot update (out of principle, and because of libqt dependencies). But 5.19 will be quite surely be in bullseye, and I hope for 5.20, too.
5.19 or even 5.20 in bullseye would be very nice. Thank you!
Good morning Mr. Preining,
Just wanted to let you know how much your work means to me, an average Debian user. I know how hard you have fought to update the kde builds.
What is the status on 5.19.5? I see that it is in experimental. What are the next steps?
FYI – I had abandoned Debian in favor of Arch derivatives given how old the plasma release is (i use testing). I finally migrated back given the promise of your efforts in large part.
Approximately when could we expect 5.19 in testing?
Upload of 5.19.5 to unstable is imminent, that is, I am reasonably sure that it will happen within the next few days. Then it depends whether serious bugs are found, but in the best case the packages would transit to testing within 5 days.