KDE Plasma Development Branch Switches To Qt6-Only

[Berniyh]

Just out of curiosity: what are the most important features that Qt 6 brings to KDE that cannot be achieved without a great pain?
I like the progress but for work I have different priorities, stability, reliability..
last major kde release took 4 years to be reliable and the previous maybe the same.
I really want to say to kde team, great work, keep improve but don't let the 5 series behind because you finally got a good level of trust from the people that use kde desktop for everyday work not just from enthusiasts toying around

I don't think there is "the feature" that requires Qt 6 and I don't think it's really about that.
Qt 6 was released 2 years ago is now at the fourth version already.
The last Qt 5 version (5.15) was released almost 3 years ago and is only supported until May (unless you have a commercial subscription).
Of course they could keep maintaining that and they will, but many fixes for Qt land in version 6 and – if you want to have them fixed in the current release – need to be backported, which is effort that would be taken away from other things.
In addition, backporting creates the risk of introducing other bugs.

So, sooner or later they have to make that switch and they have already waited two years with this.

Edit: you might want to follow Nate's blog. There he also lists things that are fixed in Qt 6 and/or KF6/Plasma 6:

https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/

[Leinad]

Just out of curiosity: what are the most important features that Qt 6 brings to KDE that cannot be achieved without a great pain?
I like the progress but for work I have different priorities, stability, reliability..
last major kde release took 4 years to be reliable and the previous maybe the same.
I really want to say to kde team, great work, keep improve but don't let the 5 series behind because you finally got a good level of trust from the people that use kde desktop for everyday work not just from enthusiasts toying around

For me, it is wayland. Qt5 have increasing amount of unfixable wayland issues resolved in Qt6

[slalomsk8er]

I like my ~/.config neatly organized and as soon as I launch KDE I stop understanding what is what as dozens of KDE background services and apps create files in it (many even without the k- prefix). KDE used to have ~/.kde3 and it was great. You could back up and restore just KDE settings and nothing else.

The biggest issue is when some part of KDE breaks due to "bad" configuration options and you need to reset them. With the current messy approach you could end up wiping the entire ~/.config just to save time which sounds like madness.

Maybe I can interest you in konsave?

[qlum]

Maybe one of the stupidest reasons to look forward to kde6, it fixes the desktop theme integration with strawberry as they already upgraded to qt6 some time ago. Yes there is a qt5 version on aur but I'd rather not use a source package.

[cl333r]

Please vote for this bug - it's the primary reason why I don't want to use KDE.

Somewhat similar, I want all PID numbers from /proc to be moved to /proc/pid/, otherwise you have to try to parse each string filename from /proc to a number and hope it's a real PID not just some random name. I know it would break a lot of stuff, nonetheless, one has to get clean and tidy at some point.

[archkde]

Somewhat similar, I want all PID numbers from /proc to be moved to /proc/pid/, otherwise you have to try to parse each string filename from /proc to a number and hope it's a real PID not just some random name. I know it would break a lot of stuff, nonetheless, one has to get clean and tidy at some point.

If you want to break compatibility in /proc, the better idea would probably to move everything that's not a PID to /sys, where it fits better anyway.

[avis]

Somewhat similar, I want all PID numbers from /proc to be moved to /proc/pid/, otherwise you have to try to parse each string filename from /proc to a number and hope it's a real PID not just some random name. I know it would break a lot of stuff, nonetheless, one has to get clean and tidy at some point.

Torvalds: "Never break user space" ;-)

[mirmirmir]

At this point app devs should just use qt all the way, skipping the kde framework. Reducing point of failure and bloat.

[randomname]

Please vote for this bug - it's the primary reason why I don't want to use KDE.

I agree with you, but I don't see any way to vote.

[Estranged1906]

I really, really hope KDE 6 will not released for a long time. Not until all the bugs are gone and it's at least as good as 5.27.