Hi all!
I have a laptop running Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and I want to switch to KDE Plasma 6.
How should I change over and why?
Option 1: Install KDE Plasma 6 alongside GNOME
Option 2: Backup and fresh install KDE Neon.
Installing 2 DEs alongside will double the amount of apps and can break theming. The choice is yours
Ya that was a concern of mine. Even switching from x11 to Wayland causes scaling and some other features to reset for me.
Have you tried Plasma 6?
Not yet. I’m a GNOME user and I also use Plasma 5 for customization (idk if 6 is compatible with old themes and stuff). Though I want to try it and see if there are any performance improvements
I’ve tried running KDE Neon in a VM and it seems that all Plasma 5 widgets and themes aren’t compatible so they don’t show up in search. Kind of a bummer.
Thats just how it is. There are tons of extensions that also dont work in Plasma5 but its not sorted. There are porting guides for extension developers in the KDE lemmy
I’m under the impression that you currently can’t install plasma 6 on Ubuntu, as the repos aren’t available yet. That would make option 2 the only possible option.
You’re right. Upon further research I found that Plasma 6 is only available on specific distros but apparently it’s still quite buggy.
It seems to be buggy on Neon, which is based on Ubuntu. I would give Fedora Kinoite a try, on a second disk install Fedora Kinoite prerelease and wait until Fedora 40 comes out.
I’ve managed to switch from GNOME to KDE, removing GNOME afterwards, and it was quite painless.
KDE 6 isn’t available yet, though. The first one to get the new KDE is the distro it’s made for, so Arch, I think. Everyone else gotta wait, and it could be a while.
Arch is not the latest. Opensuse tumbleweed has it, NixOS has it, Fedora will get it in a few months and has it in the prerelease builds.