Plasma/Plasma 6.0 Release notes

This page will be primarily of interest to packagers who want to package Plasma 6 for their distro. For user- and developer-facing information, see Plasma 6 info.

Required Qt Version

Plasma 6 requires Qt 6.6. The Plasma 6 alpha release does not yet enforce this.

New Tars

• kglobalacceld
• ocean-sound-theme
• plasma5support

Tars Moved From Frameworks

These will now follow the Plasma releases and version numbers

• plasma-activities (renamed from kactivities)
• plasma-activities-stats (renamed from kactivities-stats)
• libplasma (renamed from plasma-framework)
• kwayland

Tars Moved From KDE Gear

This needs to be re-versioned to the lower 6.0

• print-manager

Tars Moved From Independent Releases

• wacomtablet

Dropped Tars

• khotkeys
• plasma-bigscreen
• plank-player
• aura-browser
• plasma-remotecontrollers

We would welcome maintenance of Plasma Bigscreen to port it to Qt 6

Renamed Tars

kgamma5 is now kgamma

Qt 5 only

• kwayland-integration remains Qt 5 only as its features have been moved into kwindowsystem, this is still released and should still be packaged for compatibility with Qt 5 apps.

Dependencies which need new versions

KDE bits

• Phonon and Phonon-vlc - needs Phonon 4.12 and Phonon-vlc 0.1 which build for both Qt 5 and 6 at the same time
• libqaccessibilityclient - needs 0.5.0 for Qt 6 (Qt 5 builds can be dropped)
• kuserfeedback - needs 1.3.0 built for Qt 6 (and Qt 5 if you want it for Ruqola)
• kirigami-addons - needs 0.11.75 built for Qt 6
• polkit-qt-1 - needs new version built twice for Qt 5 and 6 - TODO release
• plasma-wayland-protocols - use latest release 1.11

External Bits

AppStream

AppStream 1.0 is required for Qt support. It has been officially released since November 11, 2023.

In addition, note that this release will no longer honor legacy metadata locations, including /usr/share/app-info/(xml|xmls) and /var/lib/app-info/(xml|xmls). If your distro is currently storing metadata in one of these locations, it needs to be moved to /usr/share/swcatalog/xml or /var/lib/swcatalog/xml. Icons also need to move. See https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-CatalogData.html#spec-asxml-filenaming for more information.

If this migration is not performed, Discover in Plasma 6 will not be able to see any of your distro's apps.

Everything else

• kdsoap Qt5/Qt6 is not fully coinstallable
• libaccounts-qt, signond, signon-plugin-oauth2, and signon-ui are need changes for Qt6 support. MRs are pending. Meanwhile a fork of libaccounts-qt, signond, signon-plugin-oauth2, signon-ui can be used
• Enabling libproxy in Qt: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/494754. This can/should already be enabled in the build options downstream. Without it KIO/KDE apps doesn't handle proxy config
• PackagekitQt - use an up to date release built for Qt 6
• SDDM - distros may want to consider packaging SDDM from Git for use with Plasma 6 alpha which has a Qt 6 port, this is not required but allows to use the latest theming
• xdg-utils needed a change to support KDE_SESSION_VERSION=6. A new release is needed

New Dependencies

• xwaylandvideobridge - while not a strict dependency this allows for Screensharing XWayland apps in a Wayland session

PAM configuration

To enable simultaneous password+fingerprint authentication on the lock screen, PAM configuration files need to be adjusted. The TL;DR version is to just copy the GNOME/GDM ones, which will now work for KDE's lock screen too. See https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kscreenlocker/-/merge_requests/163 for details.

Coinstallbility

Please review the Frameworks/6.0_Release_notes for coinstallability with KDE Frameworks 5. Distros can ship both KF5 and KF6 versions of Plasma Framework, the KF5 version should be built to not have clashing files.

• plasma-framework: -DBUILD_DESKTOPTHEMES=OFF

KSysGuard

KSysGuard has not seen a release for the last couple of years and has not been ported to Qt 6. Distros should remove its packages.