Andreas Sturmlechner <
asturm@gentoo.org> writes:
Title: KDE Plasma 6.1.4 and Gear 24.05.2 Upgrade
Author: Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2024-08-31
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: kde-plasma/plasma-workspace:5
Reasons
=======
KDE Plasma 5 has reached end of life and is no longer supported by Gentoo. Qt5 upstream OSS support ended on 2020-12-08, and LTS releases - even with considerable effort by KDE community's backports on top - only go so far.
It is therefore required for all users to upgrade to KDE Plasma 6[1].
At the same time, KDE Gear 24.05.2 is provided with most applications ported over to KDE Frameworks 6. As long as KF5-based applications are being shipped with the KDE Gear bundle, and other non-KDE Qt5-based applications still common in ::gentoo repository, it is advised *not* to disable USE="qt5".
Changes
=======
Not many - much like Qt6, this is mostly an evolution of the existing codebase, no disruptive feat.
Plasma Wayland support has come a long way and therefore KDE developers have decided to make it the default login session for Plasma 6, even if some
known papercuts[2] remain. For users affected too much by those, switching
to the still existing X11 session is as easy as selecting it in the display manager of choice. Disabling USE="wayland" is *not* changing this default,
it will yield no dependency savings, and we advise against doing so. It does not affect users' X11 sessions.
In Gentoo:
Let's rephrase this a bit.
- arm 32-bit support is discontinued
"The 32-bit ~arm/arm keyword was inconsistent across KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks, and KDE Gear, and has been dropped."
- x86 will not see stabilisation of Plasma 6 and KF6-based packages
"Like for arm, but to a lesser extent, the situation for x86 was
inconsistent and test failures often blocked stabliization."
This makes it sound less final and avoids the potential for
misunderstandings.
User Action Required
====================
For users of a plasma profile[3], no specific upgrade steps are necessary, although some precautionary measures are advised before and during upgrade:
- Switch to a standard (Breeze or Oxygen) theme
- Unmerge kde-misc/latte-dock, it is unfit for Plasma 6 (and masked already)
s/Unmerge/Depclean/, but weren't there others we should do as well? Or
maybe they're all handled?
Maybe we can recommend: emerge -pev @world --backtrack=0 and emerge --deselecting any KDE-adjacent software which says "no ebuilds
available".
- Cleanup sets and @world from any SLOT or version pinning of KDE packages
- If possible, perform the upgrade not inside a running Plasma session
Necessary USE flag changes were already made in plasma profile, therefore only users of other profiles should set USE="kf6compat qt6" globally[4].
Once the packages become available on your arch, it should be as simple as update @world:
emerge -aquvUD @world
-q and -v? (yes, this does work in Portage, but it looks odd...)
[1] https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
[2] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
[3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE#Profile
[4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.use
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