Plasma 5.25 released

[tlmiller]

More here.

This is already available if you're running KDE Neon. Haven't checked Arch yet. If you're using Norbert Preining's repos for Debian, he has said he probably won't package it as a full new version often has issues building, and since he no longer has any Debian machines...

[crosscourt]

I need to take a look at it on Neon. I havent been on Linux much lately.

[tlmiller]

If you have an Arch/EndeavourOS install, it is available in Arch at this point, as well.

[tlmiller]

So just to test how realistically it would be to do it going forward, installed 5.25 from experimental on my 7415. MASSIVE amounts of work to get it installed and working on a bullseye machine instead of sid. I was successful, but not sure if I'd bother doing it going forward.

[wove]

From what I have read, 5.25 has some very nice quality of life improvements for workspace and app switching. The weather has been exceptionally nice for the last few weeks, and my energies have been going into yard work. But summer is about here now with the next week expected to be in the mid 90s, so I will need to find things to tinker on inside where it is cooler. I will probably start by replacing Pop OS on the X230 with Endeavour and KDE.

So is 5.25 a blow you socks off stellar upgrade, a pleasant well working incramental update, or a total disaster?

[tlmiller]

So far kinfocenter is the biggest thing I've noticed...it's like actually WORTHWHILE now. It tells you the actual MODEL of your laptop now, has a button to get your serial number. Finally making it somewhat useful given they removed the ability to reduce the huge size of the window. I'll have to check as far as the switching, I haven't immediately noticed any improvements myself. It's a worthwhile upgrade so far, but not sure if it's worth the work for Debian now that Norbert isn't packaging it.

[tlmiller]

Further updates. I played around on the desktop to see if I could find a way to get pinning to work properly. It apparently isn't possibly anymore to set individual package pins if you're using a Package: * stanza to set repository level pinning. However, I did find a much easier way to upgrade. Go ahead and set priorities for sid & experimental to 500 (same as bullseye & for me bullseye-backports), and do a

Code: Select all

apt install -t sid plasma-desktop

, this will pull in all the primary stuff. Then change the pinning priority for sid to 420, experimental to 400.

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apt install -t experimental plasma-desktop <kde applications>

. Since all the libraries and such are in sid, not experimental, trying to go straight from bullseye to experimental will prove to test the patience of a saint, if not worse. That intermediate step of going to sid will allow it to upgrade properly. Changing the priorities to 420 & 400 will then keep anything from AUTOMATICALLY installing from those repos automatically unless it's already a newer version than bullseye/bullseye-backports has avaialble, in which case it upgrades to sid by default, not experimental. But they're still AVAILABLE if you decide you wanna install the sid/experimental version. While it will create a bit more work, I think this might just work for me, for now. I can see a future where I'm running a fully sid system though in order to keep plasma updated, unless someone out there in the world decides to replace npreining and package current plasma for Debian stable (which I wish I had the talent to do that, as I would in a heartbeat as long as I could get the storage for the repos relatively cheap).

And just because I was already there, I also upgraded to the sid kernel, so now running 5.18 on my desktop.

[crosscourt]

Except for Kinfocenter I dont see much different in average use. Neon is the only distro I use that uses 5.25 but I use Q4OS KDE as my work OS at least for now. I dont mind using the older KDE versions but my needs are very modest.

[tlmiller]

Yeah, I looked at the workspace switcher, and I see no changes in functionality myself from 5.24.5

[wove]

I have been playing with homebrew on the Mac. Homebrew is also available for Linux, and the Linux sub-system for Windows. In operation it is not too different from Arch's AUR. I think technically it brings the BSD ports tree to whatever system it is installed on. Source code is downloaded, using native compilers it creates applications that are running in containers not so different from flatpack.

I was reading comments from a fellow talking about creating and running a Linux DE on the Windows sub-system for Linux. I wondered if this might be a method that could be used to create an up to date Plasma DE on Debian. Start with a base install of Debian, install homebrew and then use tools in homebrew to compile and run the latest Plasma.

In the end this would not be different from using ports to install Plasma on BSD, however since Linux generally has broader and newer hardware support one would have access to newer wifi and other hardware that has not yet made it to BSD.