Well, there is a build of Plasma6 made by me for Slackware-current x86_64, shipping the latest
KDE Plasma 6.0.3 ,
KDE Frameworks 6.0.0 and
KDE Applications 24.02.1 , and it will work well on update
Sat Apr 6 17:19:58 UTC 2024, as today it being the last published by Mr. Volkerding.
From the beginning, please be kind to note that
I have no intention to challenge the Mr. Hameleers' KTown, but eventually to help him (if even a bit) on pushing forward his KTown for Plasma6.
Also, I hope this thread to become a place where to discuss and debug the building of this wonderful KDE software. That's right, I hope this thread to be dedicated to engineering Plasma6 packaging for Slackware and that the All Knowing Cave Ideologists will threat me with their gracious absence.
So, just like I have did (and I will do) with the packages and sources of my KDE4Town build, there I have uploaded 2 big tarballs, one named
plasma6-packages-20240407.tar and having the size of
932MB , containing all Plasma6 packages for x86_64, another named
plasma6-sources-20240407.tar and having the size of
1,92GB , containing all the scripts and tarballs necessary to build yourself this Plasma6 and its dependencies.
https://easyupload.io/m/s6c0qr
The SHA256 checksums of these 2 tarballs are:
Code:
8ae15841603cd152674f51d1cf373f50d53eab1c41eba90116961d5a869cde48 plasma6-packages-20240407.tar
c602a03f8f6edeafcffbae85733c8f5f7bfd7bdb10a4f498f52bc1649647630a plasma6-sources-20240407.tar
Please note also that these two files uploaded to this files hosting will be available for
30 days. Alternatively, you can download them from the Mega mirror kindly made by
@marav:
https://mega.nz/folder/dMkg1AJT#aGIfCsmBniF1MMwy3Efl2A
BUT, before someone downloading them, I hope that everybody is fully aware from
WHERE they are uploaded - you people already know where I live and what my mother tongue is, right?
So, considering also the highly experimental kind of this Plasma6 build, I encourage you to install my packages on blank (virtual) machines with no sensitive data, or even better, to carefully inspect the scripts and patches from build system, to grab the tarballs from the original places, put them on the proper places and build everything yourself.
That being said...
what we have here?
Following after the KDE's Plasma6 Mega Release, the 6th incarnation of the KDE Software is in a quite good shape, and quite usable from an user POV. In fact, on daily usage, Plasma6 does not look spectacularly different from Plasma5, and it's rather an evolution of previous major release, not a rewriting from scratch (and full of lacks, bugs and crashes) which happened in all its glory at transition to KDE4 and partially at transition to Plasma5.
Honestly, the greatest news are the porting on Qt6 and a considerable better support for Wayland.
BUT, they have fully ported to Qt6 the KDE Plasma (the desktop itself) and the KDE Frameworks. However, on the KDE Applications still are some applications which relies on Qt5 even today, and that's why many support packages have a dual build for both Qt6 and Qt5 , and even there is the need to ship the
KDE Frameworks 5.113.0 along with the
KDE Frameworks 6.0.0. So, in the end, this Plasma6 build is a mix of Qt6 and Qt5 software. I for one, I believe that most likely in several months also KDE Applications will become fully Qt6 but for general availability for those who uses independent applications, looks like the KDE Frameworks 5.113.0 are to stay.
How to install (or upgrade) it?
Because I have followed closely the latest (and packages-less) KTown published by Mr. Hameleers, it's possible to upgrade on place from his
Plasma6 Beta 2, or even, later to upgrade from my build to his official packages, when they will become available.
For those who want to migrate today to Plasma6, I suggest you to remove the
/kde series at all, then from
runlevel 3 to install all packages from the "packages" directory (shipped by the packages' tarball) using those commands:
Code:
upgradepkg --terse --install-new --reinstall deps/*.t?z
upgradepkg --terse --install-new --reinstall kde/*/*.t?z
Then, considering the huge number of packages installed, a system reboot is highly recommended.
Please note that if you use(d) Plasma5 is most likely that the configuration files from
~/.config and
~/.local to produce various conflicts, so I suggest to move them away or even to delete them. Or even better, to start with a new user account.
Also, please note that if you intend to play with
Wayland/Plasma6 the usage of PipeWire daemons is not optional. So you will need to enable them first with the command:
And finally some notes about Phonon infrastructure used by Plasma6 for audio and video playback.
The bad news is that with Plasma6 releases, they have stopped the development of
phonon-backend-gstreamer and focused exclusively on the VLC backend, which works quite well, but obviously requires VLC to be installed. This VLC is a fine software, but it's a nightmare to build and package it, so I hardly doubt that it will be added to Slackware anytime soon.
The somewhat good news is that I have found a patch for
phonon-backend-gstreamer on the Arch Linux repositories, so I have managed to ship this package by default on this build of mine. However, I wonder how long they will manage to patch it for Qt6, considering that today the patch have already around 10KB . That's why I believe that sooner or later this backend (used also by Slackware) may become unfeasible if it's not really adopted by a C/C++ programmer.
However, there's another Phonon backend for
MPV, which
is actively maintained, and to build MPV on Slackware-current is relatively simple - basically having to add 2 small packages: MuJS and LUAjit as dependencies. And of course, the MPV itself, which itself is a nice alternative to MPlayer. If you ask me, I believe that's the alternative to consider for the default Phonon backend.
So, for the sake of testing, in the directory
packages/deps/alternatives I have shipped 2 alternative backends for Phonon:
phonon-backend-mpv , which requires the MPV package (and its 2 dependencies) from the directory
packages/mpv
phonon-backend-vlc , which is officially the
only supported today by the KDE guys, but requires to install the current
VLC 3.x package from Mr. Hameleers' repository. Honestly, this one works the best, thought.
If you want to play with these Phonon backends, you can even install all 3 of them (and their dependencies as described), and switch which one is active from
phononsettings.
As bottom line, please be kind to note that loading these two huge Qt and two frameworks seems to take a huge tool on memory consumption - the blank desktop consumes around 1GB but is enough to open several applications and you may see 5-6GB of memory eaten and you can arrive easy at 11-12GB. So, strongly I do not recommend you to try this if your "workstation" has an motherboard with Intel Atom single core, integrated graphics with OpenGL 1.4 and 2 GB DDR2 memory. It will simply does not work.
These being said, I wish you to have fun with this Plasma6 build of mine and I hope to hear your comments and, why not? suggestions.
PS. You have attached the obligatory screenshot.
